Recently in Eating Disorders Category

In Blending, I talked about how I navigated through Halloween and a short hospital stay which led to increasing my level of acceptance. I almost never leave the hospital so quickly. And probably for good reason. I ended up back inpatient in exactly a week.

What I believed was acceptance was more a mirage. I asked to leave based on what was really only a minute amount of internal communication. It was not enough to leave here confidently. But I did anyway.

While I did well for several days, everything collapsed in a matter of hours. The memories that surfaced on Halloween, the ones I thought were attended to, came rushing back with a force greater than I could have ever imagined.

As I wrote in the earlier posts, I had been trying to do the work I knew I needed to as an outpatient, but just today I realized why that is so hard. Being a Dad, husband, and working has to be protected on the "outside." This means simply that I am not that willing to allow myself to be vulnerable as an outpatient. While normally this is a good boundary, it can get in the way when a step forward in healing work needs to be done.

This is why I have always used the hospital to help me with these big pieces of work. My time in the hospital has been hard. This is more normal for me here. Physical pain ramps up. I get memory flooding. I lose time. I have difficulty maintaining control. I get little to no night sleep (or sleep all the time).

Stopping eating and drinking, an old coping strategy, seemed like the only way out. The only way to control things. After several days, today I made the decision to begin eating and drinking again, for I was getting rather ill. The price was just too high. And, deep inside, I knew I was just postponing facing things.

Over the weekend, I did a good deal of art. I made 10 important pieces (one of them is shown above). Today with "My Healing Guide," I tried to make sense of them and put them into context. As I did, everything kind of started to fall into place. I saw the 10 art pieces as telling a story. A story I could never tell with words alone. And a story I could never tell outpatient.

We went through the images quickly because we were short on time. And she clearly tried to help me move towards a place of acceptance. This was truly hard for me. It has not been at all easy to accept that some of the abuse was at the hands of multiple abusers (or "organized torture" to use my doctor's words that sent me over the edge on Friday). While, I have always known bits and pieces of these memories since the early 90s, it was always much easier for me to think they were false memories. That I make them up. To deny.

But one of the biggest lessons I have learned over the past couple years of healing is that to deny sets up a conflict with specific parts, and leads to self-abuse that recreates it all. So, really the only path to healing is to accept the truths we hold inside. Today I was telling myself that I would not be going through so much internal struggle and pain and self-abuse if there was not truth to the memories which have haunted me for years.

This afternoon, I did not go to any groups. Instead, I stayed in a sort of sleep-awake state, processing. I was getting titrated memories and there was some kind of communication going on internally. Most of it was about acceptance. It was interesting that I was not flooded with memories. I cannot even say for sure what the images were. But I am certain I was trying to put everything in its place.

Normally, when I make this kind of progress like today, I say I have done enough in the hospital and start to advocate to leave. But I do not have the sense I am over any hump. As soon as I moved towards acceptance, and started taking in liquids again, the physical pain came back. I will give myself more time here. And I am not certain where this stay will take me. So much has happened already in such a short time.

What I will work on now is to be gentle with myself. To continue to try to eat and drink enough. To accept as much as I can. To not push the memories away, but to contain them safely. I will continue to express myself through art and writing in my journals.

I also know I need to find a way to talk about the overwhelming material outside of the hospital. I know how to do a lot of things. But this is one skill I have not quite mastered. The question for me is: How do I handle the responsibilities of life while at the same time make progress on what is held in parts of me and needs to be addressed and healed?