acknowledging trauma & experiencing hope

Hi friends! I hope you all had a beautiful holiday season. I haven’t talked to you all since last year! (Okay, my bad joke for this post is out of my system :p)

Weirdly enough, I think one of the best decisions I have made in a while was sleeping through the new year. New Year’s has the tendency to freak me out a little bit–it seems so big and like there’s a ton of pressure to make gigantic life changes over the course of 24 hours. I think by making it a fairly normal night, I eased some of that pressure for myself.

Anyway, my life since January 1st has been pretty decent, and I feel like I’m off to a good start. I saw Therapist Ryan on the 28th when I was at a bit of a low point–I wasn’t really eating, and when I was, I was purging. It felt like I wasn’t fully there when I was doing it, like it was just the natural order of things. I think, though, that my eating disorder has been changing a bit since I’ve stopped being suicidal these past few weeks.

Bulimia was always my backup plan–if I didn’t directly commit suicide, I figured that bulimia would eventually kill me anyway. But since I don’t want to die, it doesn’t serve that function anymore. With that, it became a nuisance and inconvenience–I was tired of it. Therapist Ryan pointed out my progress that even though I was engaging in the problem behaviors a lot, I sounded, for the first time in a while, like I really wanted to stop. Before he pointed that out I hadn’t quite connected those dots, and since then, I’ve been working more deliberately on recovery and on making the conscious choice to get better.

He said that it sounded like I did my best job eating when I did it fully in reasonable mind–taking the emotion totally out of the act of eating. I’ve been keeping that in mind a lot, as logically I know I need to eat and keep the food in my body to keep myself alive. The other thing that has been helpful is the idea that I only need to eat one meal at a time. It feels like a lot less pressure when I only have to focus on the one meal, rather than being worried about having to eat multiple times a day.

In stabilizing my eating a bit more over the past week, it’s been kind of strange. I find myself more anxious and less depressed, which I think has to do with the fact that since I’m not coping with problem behaviors, I am feeling more of my feelings. Feeling those feelings has been quite the learning curve and rather intense–a lot of my trauma has to do with my feelings being constantly invalidated, so suppressing them was a safety mechanism. Re-teaching myself to feel them without feeling unsafe has been a challenge.

I think I’m getting there, though. To work myself through the stress, I’ve been doing a ton of writing about my trauma, most especially in free verse poetry. It feels really good to acknowledge the trauma for what it is and face it rather than invalidating myself with claims that nothing I’ve dealt with has been ‘that bad.’ What I am learning to see instead is that since it deeply affected me, I need to acknowledge it in order to move forward. And even though dealing with it now kind of sucks, it will serve to help me in the long run. It’s been hard to face it and accept all that happened, but I think I’m getting there.

It still feels unfamiliar to not be suicidal, but I’m working on accepting it rather than questioning it. I’m looking forward to next semester and graduation, and have been keeping myself busy with things I enjoy. Winter break from school has been a welcome time to focus on my mental health and preparing for going back to school full time.

For the first time in a long while, I can honestly say that I’m okay. And while that’s scary, I think it’s an important step in getting myself where I want to be.

All my love,

Allie