Skewed reality

Ah, food feels back on track...finally! No binging the past two weeks. Yeah! It's still hard but at least I feel a bit more grounded in reality now and am more focused on my skill use.

I've had another group session, a session with Doug and a session with Amy since I wrote last. Group was good this week. I actually sort of found myself looking forward to it, still nervous but looking forward to learning more. What struck me this week about group had to do with this one woman who had very similar answers/comments as I did. My first impression of her was that she appears so confident, strong, intelligent and fun. I would never have guessed she could feel about her body the way I feel about mine.

I felt sad for her, that she could feel so badly about her body because she seems like such a neat person. What struck me was that while I was journaling about this, I realized that I felt bad for her but not myself. In my head, it is not okay, whatsoever, to look the way I look. In my head, being overweight means I'm worthless leading to my self worth being based almost entirely on my body image. The negative thoughts in my head about myself and my body have become my truth. I honestly and earnestly believe these things regardless of what facts Doug (or anyone else) tries to dispute them with.

Sharing this with Doug led to a pretty difficult discussion with him Thursday. Doug asks why I am holding on so tightly to my negative self-reference. I do not know. He asks what purpose holding on to this is serving me and I don't know that either. I'm sure there's a fear involved in letting go as well. If I understand this correctly, there is a term called (I think) Cognitive (dif)Fusion in which I have meshed my beliefs into facts which gives me a distorted perspective of myself.

We are going to work on "diffusing" my truths to try and get them aligned more factually. It's really frustrating to me that I cannot come up with a reason for Doug's questions. He also asks, why do I feel the need to look and be perfect? I don't have an answer for that either. I don't think to myself "what can I do to be perfect today?". It's not a conscious thought. I understand that trying to be perfect is a losing battle since I am far far from perfect. Perfectionism is a major issue in my eating disorder, I've come to realize. It rears it's ugly head over and over. Doug says we don't necessarily need to know where all this comes from but to be aware that it exists and try to dispel it.

Super tough stuff ahead. Doug says the body image group will be very helpful and that it is important to continue to dig into this stuff in individual therapy. These issues are keeping me stuck, making it more difficult to move ahead. Most of this feels pretty impossible right now but I guess baby steps will take me through it.