anorexia nervosa

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Getting Away From All-Or-None Thinking

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Image by DanaMums via Flickr

Self-Care Tip #98 – Getting out of all-or-none thinking may mean getting medical help.

Number five on Bella’s list:

“The day has been ruined!” Bella said.  Her eyes sparkled and flashed as she spoke of her injury.  Bella was not so pleased with her labor’s reward.  She was not so satisfied with being accountable for her children‘s behaviors, when they thwarted her every effort at having a good family experience.

A reader eloquently commented what I now want to write on my mirror, about her walk through and away from all-or-none thinking:

..really only part of my day was ruined – the part when I was hurt or angry or frustrated or depressed, etc. – and, even then, only PART of me was totally miserable. I was still able to think about other things, get things done around the house, talk to a family member or friend. It’s really calming to know that I can hurt and still function because there are so many pieces of me and my life that are still okay. Suddenly, everything seems to be easier to deal with.

In an earlier post, “Adequate,” we talked about the truth being in the gray.  As my Dad so often told me,

Things are never as bad as they seem.

I had a hard time believing that at times when I was a kid, and now that I’m old-er 😉 I buy it cognitively but find I often doubt is at an emotionally intuitive level.  However, things do get much much much better for all of us after good sleep, exercise, water, and if medically needed, medication.

All-or-none thinking, extreme thinking, catastrophizing isn’t just about coping skills.  It can also be about our medical condition.  It’s very difficult to modulate emotions when you are emotionally ill.  I’ve heard so many confounded people say that they just couldn’t stop themselves from going into extreme emotions.  They struggled with reactions way past what the experience warranted.

A kid doesn’t listen to words and Dad is kicking a hole in the door.

A couple argues over levels of intimacy and the girl finds herself in the bathroom with a cutting tool.

Work is another day of punitive treatment by an employer with lesser intelligence and she’s vomiting up food.

In these examples, we reflexively coddle the person, saying, “Anyone would be upset if….”  However that is not true entirely.  Enabling someone’s illness is easy to do.  Bad things happen to everyone.  But not everyone responds in a way that is repeatedly unhealthy to themselves.

In order to treat ourselves well, we need to take care of our physical/biological/medical needs.  Say hypothetically that we are getting our sleep, and all that good stuff, yet still have involuntary inappropriate extreme emotions, think about an organic reason.  Give yourself a break.

I have told my Dad, “True, things are never as bad as they seem, but only as long as you get out of their current seeming-reality.”  Getting out of that reality, may mean getting medical help.

Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  How do you stay “adequate?”  Please tell me your story.

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Get Treatment to Move On – Addictions

Molested by his cousin, neglected by his parents, he watched his intoxicated father beat his mother.  Thinking she would die too many times, he ran away, returned in a police car over and over again, as if wanting to get away was a crime.  He came back and raped his neighbor, more than once.  He spent a lot of time trying to get sex even though he knew it was ruining him and others.  He lost interest in almost everything else.  He suffered uncontrollable impulses.

He was 18 years old when he left it all for the safety of prison.  During the next fifteen-some years he was diagnosed, treated, and kept.  But kept for what?  For eating.  He gained weight, until he needed 2 seats to sit in.  Eating became his preoccupation.  He didn’t have sex.  He had food.

He was released to a home for sexual offenders, put on a diet and lost weight.  He lost it big and fast and felt in control.  He started purging and not finishing his meals.  He thought about purging all the time.  He knew he shouldn’t do it.  His voice was changing, raspy and his throat hurt but he still purged.  He wasn’t having sex.  He wasn’t over-eating.  He was purging.

For whatever reason, no one had yet seen the pattern.  Mostly everyone saw sex offender.  Me included.  I was trying.  I was trying to treat him with empathy, trying to get past the bile that comes when I think of rape, trying to consider the courageous things this man was doing now in life.

In one of my favorite scenes from the film, Rachel Getting Married, Kim played by Anne Hathaway argues with her sister about her own chances to have a future:

Rachel: Kym, you took Ethan for granted. Okay? You were high for his life. You were not present. Okay? You were high.
Kym: [Whispering] Yes.
Rachel: And you drove him off a bridge… and now he’s dead….
Kym: Yes, I was. Yes, I was stoned out of my mind. Who do I have to be now? I mean, I could be Mother Teresa and it wouldn’t make a difference, what I did. Did I sacrifice every bit of… love I’m allowed for this life because I killed our little brother?

I thought of this and somehow through all that trying, I did. And because I could empathize, a space opened up for me to be more objective.  That’s when I saw it.  I saw the pattern.

Addictions migrate.  Someone who may have started out as a food addict, might turn to gambling, and then later to alcohol.  Someone with sex addiction, might turn to food and then later to purging.

It can be like that game I used to play at Chucky Cheese, trying to hammer down the little animals that pop out of holes.  We need to treat the disease of Addiction regardless of how it’s dressed, or else it will keep popping up.  And like Kym, if we do, although perhaps terribly wrong in some unchangeable ways, we will still have a future.  If you’d like to read more about this “kainos” (Greek word for the opportunity to be made new,) read the post New versus New.

Self Care Tip #62 – Get treatment to move on.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.