Groundhog: Eat My Heart Out

The cycle of change seems perpetual and impossible to break out of.. The whispering of the Anorexia is so much louder than the voice of reason and recovery. The stupidest thing is that I fall for it time and time again. After years of the same tiresome thoughts and feelings; years of the illness telling me that I am piling on the pounds; that I am 'out of control' and that I look 'normal', I am STILL shocked when the scales disprove it. I am STILL more surprised by the hard facts, figures that plainly contradict the lies. 

A Day in Life at The Unit. Part 2

The state of neglect that has befallen this particular pocket of cyberspace is indicative of some of the trauma and some of the inexplicable sense of exhaustion that follows the experience of being cooped up in the unit day in, day out.

By the time I get home in the evening (having first run frantically around a range of supermarkets / shops / country lanes in an attempt to 1)get some sort of exercise and 2)create some sort of sense of separation between my life as a recovering anorexic and my life as a human being) all I really want to do is disappear into a protective shell.

At the moment, I'm thanking God (and Kate and William, of course) for the second three day week; thus a break from the intense goldfish bowl environment of the unit. However, I know that come Tuesday, the brief period of reprieve is over and there can be no avoidance of further weight gain.
With no exercise, supervised feeding of high fat foods and the addition of an obligatory three hundred calorie 'Fortisip' drink, the gain is inevitable.

I could write about the splits in my mind; the constant warring thoughts; the terror of the terrible losses that grow as I gain... but it's too soul destroying to even think about right now.

I am ruled by absolute fear.

I'm afraid that I will gain weight and lose the sense of safety that I worked so long and so hard for.
I'm afraid that I will lose weight and be forced to include another bloody Fortisip in my diet.

I'm afraid that I will be on this refeeding thing forever, yet I'm frightened that I might start piling on weight at a ridiculous rate.

I'm afraid that I might not be able to get over this hideous illness and I'll never enjoy food again, but I'm scared by the physiological responses to refeeding which make me hungry much of the time and less able to resist food.

I want to get better
but i don't want to put on weight.

It feels like a no win situation.

And I feel like a hamster, stuck on a wheel that won't stop turning, so I can't stop running, so it won't stop turning, so I can't stop running... and on it goes.

Hitting Critical.

So.

I've been found out.

Big time.

The unit I have been attending for treatment for the last four weeks demand regular ECGs and blood tests.

Although I have been complying with their re feeding stuff when I'm there, outside of the unit I have been over compensating to such a great extent that this week I weighed less than when I started.

I have been cheating their scales very well up until a spot weigh on Friday.

At about half past seven on Wednesday evening I missed a call from a doctor who left a message asking me to phone back to confirm that I was being followed up by the ED unit.

My most recent ECG showed that my pulse was under 40.

I know my weight has been under 5 stone for some time and has dropped significantly.

I have been informed that if my weight does not increase this weekend then more energy will be packed into me during the day and I may well face hospitalisation.

The terror of the situation has driven me to eat like I haven't eaten for a long time. And yes, the food is lovely but the torture and the panic and pain

of re-feeding is almost overwhelming.

The pain of the swelling in my hands woke me at five thirty this morning.

My feet are purple.

My body aches.

I am drained beyond belief.

Shattered.

Until now, I have managed to maintain such composure within the group.

They value my support but I have not been able to be truly honest with them or accept any real support from them.

The Woman suggests that this is all defence, denial even.

I know she is right.

I have never been so grateful for her.

Clocks go forward tonight and, one hour earlier, tomorrow

brings the fresh prospect of sunshine and an endless stream of food to make me feel more swollen, bloated and out of control.

I have been strapped into a rollercoaster which has jerked forward unsteadily and set off to a slow roll.

The screeching and grinding of the steel on the old metal tracks is drowning out my shouts as I try to tell them I want to get off.

Please.

Please.

Excuse me?

Can you stop it..? Please. I need to get off. I changed my mind I want to get off stop Please PLEASE LET ME OFF.

The Difficulty Of Getting Something Down...

... is partly due to my inability to find words apt enough to describe the way I feel. This is compounded and made considerably more difficult by the fact that the feelings surrounding the food issues which occupy my mind much of the time, are not only in constant conflict with one another, but also shift precariously from a mode of total freeze over, to a frenetic clamoring of overwhelming proportions and volume.

Add to this the tide of lethargy that ebbs away at the desire to even attempt to find a voice, and the contrasting sense of compulsion to never sit still (thus burning calories almost constantly) and you have the ingredients for a pretty hit and miss blog.

Due to a binge session which my body won't allow me to purge, no matter how far my fingers get down my throat, I am battling the urge to just tear my stomach open and pull the food out by some twisted, self performed C-section type thing...

Nice.

I am, as of next week, beginning a program of re-feeding at a new Eating Disorders Unit.

The terror I feel is pretty much indescribable, but the backlash against the inevitable weight gain has been drastic.

I never knew my weight could drop so fast once past a certain weight.

I now fall into the "critical" category with a BMI that puts me at very high risk.

With a body that is so weak and painful, I find it almost unbelievable that I STILL fear gaining weight... I don't know if I will ever understand how on earth my thinking has become SO WARPED, so disillusioned, that death seems to be the ever-so-slightly preferable option over watching the numbers on the scales increase.

At this point though, understanding hardly matters and in reality, the agony of my family is my greatest concern.

A part of me is looking for recovery, still trying to cling to hope, desperate for balance and normality.

I've bought SELF HELP books on eating disorders for goodness sakes.

I'm not a self help book person. In fact, generally, the trite, over simplified advice given in them, kills me... that or the fact that an equal number of books which profess to improve you, your life, relationships, memory, income, confidence, whatever, are written by people who learned to write alliterative lists of rehashed proverbs.

Moving on.

Reflecting today, I realised that this blog is less and less 'A Journey Through Therapy' and has (excuse the pun) been devoured by my eating disorder.

It seems that, for the time being, it will now centre around the struggles of 'recovery' (albeit, merely a notional reality for me).

With all this in mind, I apologise to anyone who has been misled with regards to the content herein.

I have considered starting another, more appropriately titled space, but realised one blog was hard enough to manage. The Woman still wants to see me weekly, if this is possible and so I will still be charting aspects of what goes on in The Little House In The Woods.

I guess in some ways, I will be examining the effects of both CBT and psychoanalytic therapy and just how effective and useful they are for me, and perhaps, for others in similar situations.

For Dear Life

A small platform stands high above the trees. My feet are squashed on the square and I wobble and bend into, and against, the varying winds in my effort not to fall.

I am frightened to even breathe.

I look up and see blurred lines in the distance but I am too scared to focus on anything other than staying balanced.

Those lines are the date of my treatment in the unit and they hang somewhere a space and a half away from me. I try to look up at them, to adjust my vision. If i try to brace myself I'm scared I'll tense up too much and topple.

For the time being, I can only look directly at the scales I stand on, hardly daring to breathe in the precarious safety of the diminishing numbers.

Somewhere in my mind, I am trying to come to terms with the fact that weight gain is going to be inevitable.

Two friends gave me this stone earlier in the week.

I've been holding onto it at night, hoping that somehow, it will sink beneath the surface of my skin.

The battle seems endless and hope is something that I know I need more than any other weapon in my armory right now.

Quiet

My silence does not reflect a lack of happening.

Rather it is me sitting very, very still in a vain effort to just hold on to the dream-tilting floor on which I appear to be crumpled.

No longer able to work out, I have experienced an incredibly rapid, not to mention painful, wasting of my muscles.

Despite the plummeting scales, pulse rate, metabolism, body temperature and capillary refill times, my 'rational'/natural sense of alarm is still usurped by this absurd illness' desperation to lay waste to my physical form.

The Eating Disorders Team insist on weekly meetings, blood tests and ECGs and have become increasingly forthright in demanding my attendance and compliance with their requests.

I stumbled out of Friday's meeting in the horror glare of full beam headlights, my autonomy waved in front of me like an over exposed photo.

I commence full time treatment in their new unit in the first week of March. Failure to comply will result in the section route.

One of the primary focuses of the treatment is re-feeding.

I suspect that you have to be half bloody mad yourself before you can begin to understand the absolute frozen terror which lies in thick sheets at the bottom of my stomach.

Disappearing Acts

Sharp, scagged fingernails of feeling trace swirling spirals through the inner fog. I feel the nails drag and pierce as they move across old, unseen wounds and I stare, in search of clarity, or discovery. But even as I look, the lines begin to blur and bulge, just like the clean cut of an aeroplane's path across the blue.
And it blurs and spreads into unfeeling mist.

I so often have the sensation of not being able to see something as soon as I look at it directly.
I remember in the early 1990s when 3 dimensional optical illusion posters were all the rage. Teenagers' bedroom walls would be covered with large bits of glossy paper covered in very repetitive, computer generated, patterns made up of tiny strokes of colour.
The pattern (called a Stereogram) was cleverly designed so that it contained an image which could only be seen when focused on in a particular way. Sort of modern man's answer to impressionism. Van Gogh meets Mac.

I used to find that in order to see the hidden images, I had to train my eyes to be looking beyond the poster; I almost had to DEfocus on the image.
The minute I mastered the 'defocusing' technique (actually known as 'parallel viewing'), the hidden delights of the poster were revealed. However, the minute I tried to sustain the image and look at it more clearly, it would disintegrate into a million, seemingly random, coloured particles again.

That's me in therapy.

I so often have the sense that, in order to glimpse something through the fog of dissociation and disintegration, I have to be glancing at it from an unusual angle. A sidelong look from the very outer edge of a very defocused eye.
The minute I try to keep what I've glimpsed, it slides into the mist of unfeeling and 'unremembering'.

That happened a few times in therapy today.

What also happened is very hard to write about.
I suppose because it requires a greater degree of honesty, explanation (and therefore energy) and recall than I feel able to muster.
Even as I type, it's somehow on the very tip of my memory but I can't quite catch it.

Whatever. As I left the little house in the woods, I hit my steering wheel enough to bruise the heel of my palm.
I wanted to shout.
In the room I had wanted to put my fingers in my ears. I spent the entire session with my hands on front of my face.
I didn't want to be seen.

We now have a two week therapy break.
That too has slipped into the unfeeling fog.

What hasn't is the fact that I have put on weight and I have eaten bits of chocolate almost all day long.
It would be nigh on impossible for me to explain the horror I feel at submitting to the cravings when I haven't done my exercise and I weigh more than I have for quite a while.

The levels of desperation and despair are way beyond anything words could contain.

I have replied to comments on my last post if you feel like having a look.

Today in Therapy...

... there was the woman and about four different me's...
Most prominent was the side that wants me to get smaller and smaller until I am nothing but a canvas of skin stretched tight over a bone frame. In direct oppostion was another part which, feeling the weary ache of that frame, just can't face the intense ferocity of the strict regime the other demands.

I am going on holiday in ten days. In that time, I will miss over 16 hours of intense cardio exercise. Weight gain is inevitable.

I'm split into different parts and although I could say more, right now I feel too sad and confused.

Emetophobia (Part 1)

Partly because I am so deeply ashamed of the sheer range of issues I have, and partly because I am so frightened of it that I find it hard to go near the subject, emetophobia is something I haven't particularly mentioned here before.
Or anywhere else for that matter.

I am aware as I type, that some of those who read what follows may have never heard of such a thing as emetophobia before. A few of those people may gain some insight into this fear and the impact it has on those who suffer with it.
Others will be completely unable to comprehend why some live their lives in fear and trembling of something which seems to be a relatively minor (and short lived) discomfort.
However, there may also be some people reading who know this fear only too well. People who have to carry the weight of uncertainty and fear day in, day out.
These unfortunate people are known as "emetophobes"; though, to use the term, 'known as' is somewhat ironic given that, due to the unprecedented sense of shame that surrounds this particular phobia, others are rarely aware of it.

So.
What is it?

This is where it gets difficult because the strength of my phobia makes it hard to use the vocabulary associated with its definition.
For the purposes of this post however, I'll go against my instincts and attempt to use the 'words' (which often feel dangerous or overwhelmingly repulsive to an emetophobe) to define the phobia.

Emetophobia is the intense and irrational fear of v*miting.
(I thought I could face the words, but even spoiling them is difficult at the moment.)
Emetophobes may themselves be terrified of the act of v****ing, may be terrified of others doing so, or it may be that, like me, they have an equal fear of both.

Although it is relatively unheard of, emetophobia is actually thought to be between the fifth and seventh most common fear in the UK so if you are suffering from this, you may at least take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.
Emetophobia affects people differently but can be so severe that it will render the emetophobe incapable of managing to leave the house, maintain employment, attend any function where alcohol may be present, be in crowded places or have children /fall pregnant.

In my own case I have learned that at times when a bug is going around, it may appear that I am both agoraphobic or anorexic, but whilst partaking in the behaviours of these conditions, they are symptomatic of the real problem, which is the emetophobia.
As I have already pointed out, the fact that it is so deeply repulsive and shameful to the sufferer, often means that most phobics are unaware of just how many others share their fear and can often lead to intense feelings of isolation and loneliness in the pain and terror.

Trust me. I speak from experience.

I can't recall the time when it dawned on me that my panic attacks were mainly caused by the fear of myself or others being physically ill.
What I do remember very, very clearly, is the moment when, walking over the bridge to the house where I was living in Greenwich about four years ago, my old house mate and best friend for 15 years phoned and told me that there seemed to be a name for what I had.
Now; I'm not big into labels and names and all that stuff... but I looked it up and I will never, ever forget the absolute relief I experienced as I read through the emetophobic websites I found.
Don't get me wrong
Since that time, I have hardly been near any of those sites.

It puzzles me that anyone with emetophobia would want to be in a community where the main topic of conversation is the very thing that they are most plagued by and terrified of.

A lot of the time, I can hardly read the words without feeling nauseous .

I also find it puzzling that people who are suffering with this condition (and yes, I do believe "suffering" is the correct term in this instance) would want to turn to others who are in exactly the same situation as themselves! As if someone else who is drowning could be saved or rescued by another person who is drowning.

I find it anything but comforting to be told it's all going to be okay by someone who feels exactly the same terror as myself.

However, we are all different and some people no doubt, find it immensely comforting to know that they are part of something like this.

To be honest, it is such a desperate phobia, if something seems to help, it should be clung to as if it were a life raft.

Emetophobia, or 'emet' as it is often known amongst sufferers, is one of the most difficult phobias to work with clinically.

Although CBT is widely recognised to be the most effective treatment, emetophobia is thought to be one of the most difficult to shift.

Exposure therapy is also thought to have had some success, although I have read that any relief from this therapy is temporary.

Hypnotherapy... Well... Don't start me on that one. That is for another post. Suffice to say, if you are reading this and considering hypnotherapy for emetohobia... be very aware that despite the claims made by experienced hypnotherapists, it is often a very expensive waste of time.

So.

Where does all this leave me?

I'm in therapy. Psychoanalytic.

Does this work for emetophobia?

Apparently not.

But then, nor does anything else.

I've said enough on this topic for one post.

It's absolute hell at the moment and I am terrified of breathing, but I will try to explain from a more personal perspective in another post.