I remember reading once that relaxing during a vehicle collision would lessen the probability of injury, or even death. While there is some dispute around that particular fact, relaxing when we least want to has been an important reminder these past two weeks.
I’ve been experiencing an extremely high level of physical pain lately. A severe systemic nervous system inflammation, followed by another very inflamed back tooth, has led to feeling elevated pain day in and day out. While this is not something I would wish to prolong, and there’s no sugarcoating the rawness, it has forced me to become very embodied. When painkillers make only a dent, there’s no running away from the experience. There’s no way of distracting oneself, and, while it’s exhausting, it’s also very grounding.
We can become so used to resisting pain when it arises, whether emotional or physical, and often without even realizing that we’re doing it. We instantly label it as wrong. Often we blame ourselves. But what if we relaxed into the pain? What if it became a neutral experience? This does not mean ignoring the message. I definitely went to the dentist for my tooth. It means relaxing enough to hear what our body is telling (or shouting at) us, to be with ourselves in a softer way when there’s no instant fix.
Emotional intelligence
It's really not about the food.
There is a misconception about eating disorder recovery is that it’s mostly about food. Eat more, eat less, stop throwing up, follow the meal plan, become weight restored, lose weight, whatever. It’s not.
Real, lasting change requires learning how to set firm boundaries. How to start saying yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no. To repeatedly and bravely speak what’s real for you. To no longer put up with relationships, environments and beliefs that are not helping us be the person we know we’re meant to be and live the life we most want to be living. To remember how to have fun. It involves learning how to accept being disliked and rejected, but also embrace being more loved and seen than ever before. It’s a lot more nuanced than following a meal plan, but the exponential growth is endlessly rewarding.
Errors.
The inevitability of making mistakes as a human can be a tough pill to swallow.
When we accidentally hurt someone, when we are reactive, when we are reminded of our own messiness- do we armor up, become defensive, look away and pretend it never happened? Or can we sit with humility and allow it ground us, to further open us to the world?
Instead of categorizing them as failure, we can take the necessary steps to move forward and remedy our errors with grace. We can bow our heads and acknowledge that, even though we do the best we can, we always have more to learn, and that there is nothing wrong with that.
Loss of the fantasy.
Warning: eating disorder trigger.
When we experience grief over the loss of a person, environment, identity, etc, what we’re often grieving is the loss of the fantasy that whatever it was represented for us.
This was my experience with the loss of what I had come to think of as “the perfect” (aka thinnest) body. When restriction failed me and I gained a lot of weight, I grieved the feeling of being untouchable and forever in control. The numbed out fantasy world that I was floating in evaporated, and I landed flat on my face.
Fantasies are there for a reason. They give us perceived safety from a reality we’d rather not living be in. When the bubble bursts it’s frightening and might feel excruciating, but it’s from there that we are given the opportunity to build a life we won’t need or want to run away from.