TW Heavy discussion of eating disorders
ive had an eating disorder my whole life, and it's always been very inexplicable until i got an ARFID diagnosis in 2019. That answered a lot of auestions, but therapists would still express confusion at my admission that i /also/ aspire to be skinny, even though i dont feel that aspiration as a driver, it's mostly an afterthought, of wow i feel so skinny today, everything is right. i mean its not even that its mostly me laying in bed and feeling my stomach and hearing someone inside me just be satisfied about it. ahh yes. so skinny. I'm going to inpatient next week because my eating is out of control. I've been pounding 1600 calories of smoothies just about every day on top of trying to have at least one or two meals, but sometimes i can only manage a snack or two and sometimes it's just the smoothies i have. I work a very strenuous job, so I do need to be consuming more than 1600 calories daily in order to gain weight, but the thought of eating much more at this point makes me cringe and my mind blocks out the thought of eating any further food. im trying a lot of verbalizing these healthy food thoughts, saying out loud 'i need to eat another bite, i should get up and finish that meal' etc, to try and connect my brain back to my body. but i just dont have the energy most of the time to say anything out loud. even when i do, i just hit a point when im eating (not over eating, just trying to finish a bowl of soup or a box of chicken nuggets fr) where i have to stop or i will throw up. not force myself to throw up, i mean if i have one more bite my body will reject it. and the amount of times ive pushed myself on that bite only to throw up everything ive just eaten in the last hour, you learn to just not have that last bite. but im so hungry, all the time. So I'm going to inpatient. But I fear once I'm there any attempt to 'comprehend' my eating disorder will fall short because of the seeming lack of knowledge of dissociation in therapy settings. My most recent therapist began ascribing a lot of my food avoidance to OCD, as i frequently eat only two to three specific foods at a time and i am prone to losing one or all at once as safe foods if i experience something stressful enough. And since I am traumatized complexly, my stress tolerance is very low and im currently in a permanent state of fight or flight or freeze after opening up to my mom about my CSA. I think that is what is behind my inability to recover currently. The bandaid has been peeled off.
Has anyone had success helping a dissociated anorexic part? I know it is not the only reason I'm stuck in this cycle, but I think if it wasn't so scared of eating there would be a lot less of a push to not eat. Anyone know what I mean?
All this to say, shout out anorexic parts. Theyre so willing to anything to keep you safe. But that's not what I need anymore and I'm so sad that it's fighting so hard to help the only way it knows. SOS