Now that I've been moved in for about six weeks, I've started back to therapy. This break over the summer (due to 13+ hour days) is the longest I've gone since I was diagnosed. In some sense, it was a nice break. I get tired of talking about my crap with people so much, and having it usually followed with obvious statements:

You mean- I'm a perfectionist? Holy leaping lizards, Scooby!

After much searching, I finally found someone who a) wasn't going to pin everything on my mother, b) had office hours that were convenient (I couldn't find anyone with evening/weekend hours!), and c) had some chance of being partly reimbursed by my insurance. K is very nice, and I like her, and all is going well after two sessions.

Is my therapy focused on the eating disorder? Somewhat. K does specialize in eating disorders and no, I am NOT fully recovered. So yes, the topic comes up regularly.

On the other hand, I don't know if I'm in therapy for my eating disorder. I'm there to deal with all of the crap that primed me so perfectly to get sick in the first place. Anxiety. Perfectionism. Depression. Emotional lability. Inflexibility. (Lack of) stress management. Feelings of inadequacy. Social issues. Identity issues. And many of those have been amplified by being sick for so long. How do you function in this world as a person without an eating disorder (or other severe mental illness) when you can't really remember much else?

I suppose that's what I'm trying to learn here.

Being weight restored and stable and in recovery means that I can actually address these issues. I'm not always in crisis mode, trying to find ways to stay out of the hospital or try and eat more. And my brain is recovered enough that it can begin to process these things.

I guess we'll see what happens.

I'm a veteran of therapy. I've been seeing a counselor/dietitian/etc pretty much weekly for the past 7.5 years. I know a whole freaking LOT about therapy.

I've talked about my problems. I've thought and thought about how my parents might have screwed me up, of my fears about growing up. I've tried how to change my thoughts. I've tried to change my behaviors. I've set goals. I've learned to tolerate my emotions. To ask for what I need.

And sometimes, that isn't the best kind of therapy.

When you leave the apartment at 6:45 am and don't get back until 8:30 pm because of multiple transportation snafus, talking isn't going to cut it.

I highly recommend loud angry music, several reruns of Grey's Anatomy on DVD with a big bag of microwave popcorn and scrubbing out the sink to deal with anger (and a boatload of dirty dishes).

And an early bedtime.

It's cold and rainy and windy out- my apartment building is creaking and groaning.

I need a cup of hot tea to make this right.

I'm kind of getting (kind of) how powerful yesterday's realization was. I feel skillful- I knew what I had to do and I did it. This is not to say that I felt good or happy or stuff like that. Just...skillful.

As far as I've come in recovery, when Ed starts yelling like that, I usually give in. I don't know how to tolerate the anxiety that comes with eating when every fiber of my being is telling me to not eat. This is so conflicting, because on the one hand, I realize that it's somehow wrong (as in contrary, not wrong in a moral sense) to skip meals and snacks, and yet it seems wrong to actually eat.

And I don't know how to explain this to people.

This is why I still have my old meal plan stuck to my fridge. I know what I need to eat. It's right there on the paper.

Another one of my motivators is my New Zealand trip. Obviously, there's the trip itself, but that's not always enough. What adds to that, though, is how much I've paid for the trip. I'm, how shall we say, frugal (cheap, stingy- take your pick) and I do NOT want to waste all of this money. There are several ways the money could be wasted: I could get too sick to go or I would still go but be completely and utterly miserable and obsessing about food. Which seems to be the more egregious sin in my book.

The mentality of "I'm going to enjoy this bloody trip whether I want to or not!" is kind of odd, but it does work.

Letting myself hate eating also helps. That I can eat even though I don't want to. Even though my brain is telling me not to, that I'll become obese and die a miserable death only after living a miserable life. Guess what? These feelings won't kill me*. The eating disorder will.

There are still days when I'm not all gung-ho about recovery, even days when I'd rather go back to starving and purging and overexercise. It's real. Those feelings are still very, very real. And my turning point was that I could still have those feelings and still do what I needed to do in order to recover.

This is sounding far more chipper than I intended it. I don't want to be a downer, and didn't intend for this post to be depressing in the slightest. Things aren't perfect. But I do feel better about what went down last night.

That's it.

*Yeah, I know. It's easy to say this now when I'm not in front of a plate of fatty food. But it's still good to remind myself.

This is something that has been making me think a little bit. Many treatment facilities use a wide range of "therapies" to combat a person's eating disorder. Now, really, the more ammunition, the better. I have no fear of the use-a-sledgehammer-to-kill-a-fly approach, because Ed is one hell of a big fly. So let's bring in the big guns, shall we?

So is psychotherapy actually therapy? Technically, yes. But I'm not entirely sure that it is, or rather that hving someone to talk to every week is therapeutic. There's a difference, I guess. Wikipedia defines psychotherapy as: The treatment of people diagnosed with mental and emotional disorders using dialogue and a variety of communication techniques.