May 15, 2016

When I first started seeing my past therapist in private practice I recorded our sessions. I did this for about three years. A few months after she terminated our therapeutic relationship, I pulled out these recordings and started to listen to them. I have been using my old sessions as my own form of therapy to continue to help myself process what had happened. I am using me, my healthier self, and the person who my therapist had once believed in, had wanted to be in relationship with, and had cared for. I use these sessions as evidence that the relationship was real, to keep myself moving forward.

These conversessions continue to provide insight into who I am and what happened. They are also acting as a lifeline. This is how I am being my own therapist… and holding on.

The value of these can not be described in words and I don’t expect a reader to grasp the complexity of this relationship. However, my hope is that in sharing some of these,  others may begin to start to understand, just a little bit, how valuable the therapeutic relationship is in recovering from an eating disorder. While I can only speak from my own experience, I know that, for me, how absolutely essential this particular relationship was for me to live. I know it from a client position, and I can feel it in my heart, soul and body, but even I want to understand it on a deeper level. Especially as I move into the role of therapist and begin to develop relationships with my own clients.

This relationship was different and unique, and that makes it hard to explain to others. And at times, that has me even feeling very alone and misunderstood, judged, and unseen. Sometimes I feel wrong, and that somehow I messed up and should not feel the way I do. However, how  I feel is how I feel. And what I have learned in my entire journey, is that feelings are just feelings, they aren’t right or wrong. They aren’t there to be judged.

Its been hard these last 7 months. Although our relationship did not seem to change, meaning, the dynamic of it has always been what it has been, yet my therapist no longer experienced it the same way. Instead, something shifted her experience of it, and she decided that the way our relationship has been for over 8 years, our dynamic, was no longer ok; was no longer working – that it wasn’t good for her or for me.

That has caused me to question and doubt myself. As she is someone I respect and believe she is interested in what is best for me, its hard to understand how this decision makes sense.

My Truth

I tried to change my feelings and beliefs about the relationship, I tried to alter my truth and agree with her. But changing your truth to fit someone else doesn’t work.

And my truth is our relationship is the only thing that has ever helped me recover. It is the only relationship that has helped me live a life, as oppose to survive day-to-day. Our dynamic is what allowed me to find a reason to fight back against the eating disorder, to face so many of my fears, and keep pushing forward, despite all the struggles and challenges life continued to throw my way. Feeling her frustration when I was struggling with anorexia again, was the ONLY thing that kept me fighting against the eating disorder.

“I tried to change my feelings and beliefs about the relationship, I tried to alter my truth and agree with her. But changing your truth to fit someone else doesn’t work.”

Yes, I absolutely HATED feeling her frustration. It scared me, and upset me, and at times that made it harder for me to be honest about how stuck I was and how much I was caught by the eating disorder. However, that fear and sadness was about me, it wasn’t about her. I didn’t want to be struggling. To this day I still have SUCH a hard time accepting that I was, could, or  still am struggling with anorexia. I want to be recovered. I want to be a therapist, and working in this field, and far far away from all things eating disorder related (with regards to myself). THAT desire is SO intense, and my memory of what struggling with an eating disorder is like, what it feels like socially, relationally, emotionally is so big. I was so afraid of those memories of what life with an eating disorder is like, that I could barely even tolerate entertaining the possibility of ever-living that life again. When I am closer to the eating disorder, my relationship with my therapist is one of the first areas of my life that is affected, and that the effects of the eating disorder are noticed, and its one of the biggest areas that it becomes noticeable.

“The care I have for that relationship makes it so hard and intolerable for me, that experiencing the negative effects of my choosing to be in relation to the eating disorder motivates me to fight for recovery.”

It isn’t that my therapist is overly centralized, or that I am doing my recovery for her...the eating disorder is just so strong, that it needs something as strong (if not stronger) to fight it. And FOR ME, that needs to be something very high, something very concrete, something very real, something very tangible, and something very important.

I didn’t know that for a long time. And I spent more than 4 years of my life in treatment for an eating disorder and not making any progress. Programs were able to put weight on me but that part is purely behavioral. It didn’t stick, as soon as I discharged, I couldn’t eat. I didn’t have anything to fight for and nothing to fight the eating disorder with. When I met my therapist, I knew I wanted to recover, but I was very afraid it was not possible for me.

At some point in our work that changed, and for a period of time, I believed that I might actually be able to recover. I started to imagine my life without anorexia in it. I began to see me living the life I wanted, but could never picture myself having. For so many years I had this feeling that my life would end early. I didn’t know how or why to explain it, but when I would try to envision myself 5 years out, I couldn’t see anything.

“Sometime in this last year that hope for my life has started to disappear. My fear now is that I won’t live the life I had started to believe was possible; the life that my therapist saw as possible for me. And that breaks my heart. “

In the same way I know that my relationship with my therapist was what I needed,  I also know  I am not ok. I understand how that sounds, and for a very long time I have kept that to myself. But I hit a point this weekend where I don’t feel like keeping it inside is helpful. Yes, people will read this or hear this and was that I’m being deterministic, fatalistic, close-minded, that sort of comment is evidence to the fact that I am overly attached, the relationship was unhealthy, or crossed boundaries, etc…and from an outside perspective, trust me, I understand why one would say that. It’s why I’ve kept this to myself. However, as someone on the inside, who knows the situation, all the events at play, and who knows herself REALLY REALLY well, the fact is, it’s none of those things. It’s just true.

When we ended I was in a very bad place. Probably one of the worst places I had been in many years (possibly the worst place I’d ever been in). If I was not as honest about that with her, then I made another very big mistake. I always knew I wanted to end our therapeutic relationship at some point, however I knew it needed to be when I was doing well, and was not in crisis mode. At the time she decided to terminate, EVERY SINGLE area of my life was in crisis and transition. I was dealing with trauma and loss and hadn’t even begun to work on that yet. When things ended with us, the walls of my life came crumbling in.

Beyond the eating disorder

Beyond the eating disorder, this relationship, for me, was more than that, but I still struggle to find the words to explain it. Perhaps if you knew my life up until I was 21 when I came here then maybe you would understand a little bit more. I had no friends, no relationships. I didn’t celebrate birthdays with friend, I didn’t get phone calls or text messages on New Years, or have birthday text messages. I could go an entire day without anyone talking to me and no one even noticing if I had left my room or spoken to anyone. I could drop off the face of the earth and no one would notice or care. I didn’t know what I liked, what I didn’t like, I didn’t know what I wanted or what I valued, because I was so afraid of whatever my position being offending someone else, and that being one more way to separate me from others, I just wanted to fit in. But I didn’t fit in. I felt isolated and cut off where ever i went, and people didn’t like me. Every year hurt worse than the previous because my life continued and nothing was changing. I wanted to feel seen and connected. Our work together changed this.  And up until October, it was the longest relationship I’ve ever had. I guess even if it’s over it’s still the longest relationship I’ve ever had. Just because it’s ended doesn’t change that.

I’ve been through a lot in my life, and yet, I have never been in a worse place than I am now. No matter what I try to do, I can’t get out of this hole I’ve fallen down into.

Underwater

My therapist used to always use this metaphor to describe progress on a scale as me being underwater. She would say that its great that I have moved up 4 feet and acknowledge the work and effort I have made to move up 4 feet, but the problem is, I’m still 10 feet underwater. I never liked that metaphor, because it always had me starting at such a low place, and it felt like someone else was measuring the distance I swam up. It wasn’t objective it was subjective. And the people who got to make that decisions where the therapists and clinicians, members of the treatment team. I didn’t get a say in how far up I had swum, or how far underwater I felt I had started and how far up until I hit the surface I had to go. So while it acknowledged my progress, it still focused on others experience and didn’t take into account what it was like for me. It was more about them. That metaphor was for them, not for me the client.

Thrown Overboard

One metaphor I would use to describe this place I’m in right now is that I’ve been thrown overboard and told to find a dingy (lifeboat) in the ocean, swim to it, climb in, and row my way to shore.  When I make it to shore in a couple of years, at some point my therapist will come by and greet me with a smile.  However, when I went overboard I was sick with the flu, I didn’t have any life preservers, my dingy was not  within eyesight, and a huge storm hit, creating giant waves. The boat I was thrown off of sailed away, and I’ve been left in the middle of the ocean with nothing. I am trying to swim towards any debris I can find, and cling on for dear life, hoping to just stay afloat. Each wave that hits me pulls me under, and I fight so hard to make it back to the surface, gasping for air. Each time I get pulled under, I worry if I will find the strength to swim back up to the surface. I am growing more tired, and more disoriented. Although I know the boat has sailed off, I can’t help but occasionally looking at the horizon to see if it turned around to check on me; recognizing how dangerous the a situation it left me in. But in my heart I know its long gone, and not coming back. There is not lifeboat for me. My only chance is to save myself and swim to shore. That’s my plan, and that’s what I am trying to do.  But there is this deep knowing I have that I’m never going to be able to swim to shore, and unless the boat comes back for me, at some point, my body is going to give out, and I won’t be able to keep swimming, and I will sink.

“I don’t want to sink. But I’m already afraid I’ve started.” 

Fading Away

As each day passes, I feel that happy, hopeful, healthy, recovered version of me fading farther and farther away. And no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find her. I keep reaching out to grab hold of her, to pull her back and hold on tight…but nothing I am doing seems to work.

I can’t get to her.

It’s as though she’s locked away, and I don’t have the key to set her free.