It took all my energy
(literally: ALL of it)
to confront my therapist: “I’m only staying in treatment with you because it would be easier to fix my issues with you, with you, instead of with another therapist, that I would also have to pay.”
LESSON #6: if you ever find yourself even considering saying this to your therapist or counselor or advisor, I don’t care how mentally ill or guilty or non-compliant or unmotivated or however else they “make” you feel, I beg of you, from the bottom of my heart: J U S T. LEAVE. T h e y S U C K. Therapists are educated and trained to notice and address issues as they (inevitably) arise. Did they think this lesson didn’t apply to them? That “I’m so competent my clients and I won’t have any issues” ??!!??!!?!? You are paying them to do this. Issues are inevitable parts of all relationships and it’s their job to deal with them honestly. Do YOU get to keep YOUR job if you, just, don’t DO it?!
You’ll find this story in another section of this blog but it bears mention, here, because it was the day I purposefully quit working on recovery because it was the day I lost all hope it was possible. Instead I resigned myself to trying to just “manage” my eating disorders alone. That session was the product of over a year of journaling and prayer and careful consideration and it consumed all the assertiveness resources I possessed, or I would have confronted her again, a month later, and fired her, because she never brought the subject up again.
Instead, I kept paying her for two more years until she”retired” – when she literally took me to a new therapist, and I do mean literally. As in, she was in the room, actually there, in the office, telling the new one I was over my eating disorder (in her eyes, apparently, merely “the worried well” to the very end, no matter how often I threw up or how little I ate.) It took 4 years of almost perfect therapy with this almost perfect therapist who had almost perfect boundaries and who listened almost perfectly with an almost perfect blend of compassion and firmness for me to realize and barely even begin to process the truth of what had transpired in that former therapist’s office.
So. Back to June 2007, after that session I called out my therapist: I purposefully quit even trying to recover. Eleven years later, December 2018: I quit trying to even manage my eating disorders and purposefully embraced them again, not caring how much/often I starved/fasted/binged/vomited/restricted … everything but laxatives. In the 11 years between, I wrote a lot of letters letting people know who I really was and what I really needed and what I really believed and obviously lost a few people. My beloved step-mom died. My dear pastor died. So did the car I’d driven for 19 years. I moved. Alone. I set boundaries and let go of a few more people. I got bullied past the point of a new PTSD diagnosis at my full-time job and plain old picked-on at my part-time job. I filed a lawsuit. I drank too much. Way too much. (Until I went to Racing for Recovery, an amazingly innovative and holistic treatment center for substance abuse, where I regained my self-respect, or at least enough to risk spine surgery:) after a bone graft, laminectomy, and fusion, I was out of work for three months and in and out of physical therapy for the next 2 years. And I gained weight. A LOT. More, than ever, in my life. I’d never, ever, for so long, been so sedentary or so restricted in movement or practiced so much patience, but it wasn’t enough patience to cope with the weight gain. I ran too soon and too fast and too far and it was too much for my knee. The following year it was my tushie. The injuries slowed me even more which led to even more weight gain and more discomfort. And I shouldn’t say “discomfort.” It’s worse than that. Instead of growing used to my own skin, my intolerance for the body I live in grows incrementally more disabling at an ever-increasingly rapid rate.
Enter Anorexia Effort Umpteen-Billion-&- something, binge/purge subtype. That was December 2018. It worked. It also led to me being treated at 2am in the the ER with a ham sandwich that the nurse brought to me to eat while he scrounged for supplies to deal with the wound on my forehead where my scalp was showing from slamming my face into the metal corner of the elevator frame from falling down from getting dizzy from not eating anything that day but 2 packets of chocolate covered espresso beans.
(Apparently, my body was a little tired of how I’d been “feeding” it the past 35 years.)
Shortly after, I started a temporary part-time job and was too busy with it in the early months of 2019 to starve or vomit too much because of how much it debilitated me. But. As soon as the job was over, in mid-March, I plunged down the rabbit hole and straight into the toilet.
Come on! It’s ridiculous!
One must have some sense of jocularity when observing the ridiculous.
So there I was on a Friday night, April 5th, 2019, to be exact, coughing up blood for the second time in the past two weeks.
Now, that was new. I’d vomited blood, before. Many times, actually. Not copious amounts, but enough to get my attention. But coughing it up? Like my esophagus was disintegrating? An earlier esophageal scope had found “tears” – as in, “torn.” But … disintegrating?
I remember saying all this at my assessment at River Centre five days later, and how angry and irritated I felt, not for being asked, not at myself for being honest, but angry at myself that this was my truth, angry that I was such an embarrassing human. And I remember her response, her brow furrowed with concern, the compassion in her voice
(don’t worry, she got over it)
saying, “You know – you’re really very sick”
and how completely taken aback I was to hear that. I fell for that like the sucker I apparently am and five days later wrote them a big fat check worth half a month’s salary.
Sucker.
Wait!! What happened!! How did I end up in the clinic?! Yep. That’s EXACTLY how I felt.