(A continuation of this post on eating disorder recovry - a response to a post on Eating Disorders Today)
I shouldn’t be writing right now - I have a million and twenty things that I need to focus on, but since my attention span is shot relating to work, now is as good a time as any to continue this post after a few days of getting random things like work, grocery shopping, laundry and screaming at the TV during the Superbowl done.
3. They give a person a private island of limited sensation and limited awareness. This is a defense that helps when a person is incapable of preventing physical, psychological or emotional boundary invasion.
Let me start by saying that I’ve never really been good with boundaries. It’s not so much that I cannot set them for myself - I have created an ample circle around myself that only a few people have ever been invited into. However, when it comes to letting those who I don’t know as well - or who make me awkward in one way or another - I find that I have trouble saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t be there for you about this.” My mother treated me as an equal well before I was old enough to understand half of what she was saying; I knew things about her relationship with my father that my grandparents used to divide my allegiances.
With various friendships and relationships, I know that I’ve taken on more than I can bear to think about sometimes, weight that wasn’t mine to carry. It’s during those times that I often struggled the most with anorexia - the more that I couldn’t set firm limits, the less of my own stuff I was able to carry.
My boundaries were invaded, yes, however I never lost an awareness of that. I never felt that I had a limited awareness nor did i feel that I wasn’t able to feel enough. My own experience was with feeling too much, and the more that I tried not to feel, the more that I felt. Perhaps I wanted to feel less; perhaps I wanted this to be the case for me, but it never really was.
4. They create an obsessive sense of entitlement to make up for the lack of boundary awareness or the lack of knowledge or skill in honoring personal boundaries or limits.
To this, I offer a very grudging agreement; I always wanted to believe, while I was in the thick of anorexia, that I didn’t want anything special in anay way and I know that I didn’t believe that I did. However, when it comes to attitude, I think that it would be completely disingenuous to say that there wasn’t an air about me that said, “I treat myself badly enough for all of us, cut me a fucking break already,” and that I didn’t get angry with those who read it differently.
5. They protect a person through numbness and obsessive thinking from knowing what they feel such as anger, fear, disappointment, regret, guilt and shame. A person may even need to block feelings of love, passion and joy if knowledge of those feelings would disrupt the status quo of her environment.
I think that the best way in which I know how to address this is to say that, well, see my post “I can take the criticisms, it’s the praise that hurts.” Shutting off is a really big part of life for everyone with an eating disorder - shutting off the voice, drowning out the voice of reason and trying to drown out the fear, howver, all seem to just make everything bigger.
Numb was always my goal when I was struggling. Whether it was the depression that even now I do not escape or the joy of a moment, I always tried to keep myself from feeling anything at all. Quite the contrary, in those rare and lucid moments, I could tell people it’s not that I can’t feel, it’s just that I’m feeling so much, all at once that I simply cannot contain it all.
Leave a Reply