A Truth About Me Part V

I can't believe I haven't written since Monday. Where has my week gone? I have no idea. I thought instead of commenting on Meyer Monday, I would continue with A Truth About Me. It's about time I started to wrap this one up anyway.

When I left you last, I told the story about my dad's death and how it really affected me while I was pretending/believing that it didn't. That was the second wall to go up around my heart, keeping me "safe". With the second wall firmly in place, there was only one person left to keep out.

That was my husband.

Maybe it's taken me so long to write this particular post because this is the most difficult. Who wants to admit that they slowly and methodically walled the love of their life out of their heart? I honestly thought I could do this and maintain a marriage that was "just fine". I got news for you - when one person is not well in the relationship, the relationship is not well.

I can't tell you when I first started working on this third wall. I believe it was not long after my dad's death. You see, at that time I would do anything to not focus on my grief. Crying - any crying for any reason - reminded me of my dad's death. So I focused pretty darn fiercely on NOT crying AT ALL.

Like a lot of wives out there, I would often cry whenever my husband and I had a fight. Or when he'd do that thing that men sometimes do - you know, say something insensitive and stupid and not even realize it. I'll give you an example: my husband once declared that women cry just to manipulate.

Now, I'll go on record to say that, yes, some women do cry in order to get their way but by this time in our relationship we had been together seven years and, in all honesty, he should have known me better than that. I simply don't cry to get my way!

The fact that he said that made it all the more easy for me to shut off that part of my emotional self. He reduces my emotions down to a manipulative school-girl ploy and expects me to just take it? Oh no you don't, Buster! I'll show you! I just won't cry at all!

Ever.

Nothing.

No way!

Zip! Zilch! Done! Whenever I felt that tightening of the throat and prickle in my eyes, I would literally, drill sergeant-style start forbidding myself to cry. I would do all sorts of deep breathing, counting to ten, picturing kittens playing in my head, etc., to make it stop. And, you know what? It worked! I was tear-free in just a matter of a few short weeks!

Now here's a little secret I want to share with you all: You can't shut down one aspect of your emotions without holding the rest hostage. You want to suppress sadness, anger, hurt, grief, pain? Fine. But you are also going to give up joy, happiness, laughter, awe, hope and love. The pendulum can and will swing both ways but you can't just make it stick to one side. Doesn't work that way.

Refusing to let my husband in on all the bad stuff going on inside of me meant I couldn't let him in on all the good stuff, too. No more sharing ideas, thoughts, dreams, amusements, hopes. Nope, it's an all or nothing kind of thing and for my own "safety" I chose nothing.

This does not make for a happy marriage. That's not to say things got ugly around here, they didn't. But growth did not take place. An erosion of sorts occurred instead. Thank the Lord, He got to me before it all crumbled into nothingness.

Fast forward to today: I no longer bury my emotions and cry freely whenever the mood strikes - this is a good thing. My husband and I are in a good place. I'm completely open with him now as I am pretty much with everyone. It wasn't an easy road to hike, these last 12 months or so, but it wasn't all that difficult either. The Lord carried me most of the way, anyway.

I don't know where this story will lead to after this post. There is more to tell you about - how I got from point A to point B and where I'm at with my food addiction now - and I will tell you about it soon. It's just that, really, it's an ongoing process. It never really ends, I suppose. I can tell you this much though - honest self-examination isn't all that pretty and there were some pretty hard pills to swallow. Some of those pills I still have to go!

I hope you continue to join me on this journey!

A Truth About Me Part IV

With the first wall around my heart successfully built after deciding to close out friends, old & new, it was time to start construction on the second wall. This would come all too easily in 2001 when my dad died suddenly from pancreatic cancer.

I say "suddenly" because from the time of diagnosis to the time of death was nine days. Something had been terribly wrong with my dad's health for months but having that "pull yourself up from your bootstraps and shove on" mentality, Dad wasn't in all that of a rush to find out what it was. The cancer would have gotten him anyway. Pancreatic cancer is a losing battle. It's as painfully simple as that. I don't know if the extra time of knowing would have done any good. It would have just caused people to fuss over him and being fussed over was not something Dad was terribly interested in.

I handled my dad's death like a pro. Spoke clearly at his memorial without so much as a quiver and pulled my own self up by the bootstraps and shoved on! The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree, ya know.

I came to understand that their are five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Denial I could totally relate to seeing that is was pretty dang close to daydreaming and, since I consider myself a professional daydreamer, I jumped right in.

Being the impatient person that I am, I had no time for the three stages in the middle so I jumped ahead to acceptance. I saw no reason to even consider the other three since acceptance was where I was going to end up anyway, why not just get there sooner rather than later, right?

I had a simple plan: Anytime I felt myself even coming close to the other three or, heck, any kind of emotion resembling grief in any way, I would jump right back to denial since I was so good at it anyway. Besides, pretending is fun & easy. Why not do it in place of actually working through your emotions and heal from your grief? Phffftttthhh!!!!

Remember the movie Finding Nemo? Of course you do, it wasn't that long ago! Anyway, there's this scene where Dory and Marlin, after getting directions from the school of fish, are supposed to swim through the trench, not over it. Marlin decides that swimming through the trench looks dark and foreboding. He's scared to go through the trench (we all are). So he decides to do what looks easiest and that is, swim over it. Well, it turns out that swimming over it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Sure, it started out fun but Dory and Marlin end up in worse trouble, more painful trouble, than they ever imagined. Trouble that nearly cost them dearly. Take it from me, you need to swim through the trench!

Oh, for heaven's sake! The jellyfish! Remember? The jellyfish, people! Remember? Dory almost died! It was not that long ago!

Anyway, back to my simple plan. The problem with it was that it was nearly impossible to NOT come close to those other emotions whenever I was around my brothers. I didn't want to avoid them, especially at this difficult time but I absolutely, positively, for my own "safety" (there's that word again) could NOT speak to them about the death of our dad. Do you know that NOT ONCE did I call my brothers afterwards and ask them how they were doing? Not once.

What? No nomination for Sister of the Year? Come on!

I just couldn't do it. I could not take on the pain and sorrow of my brothers'. Not for even one small phone call. I couldn't deal with my own. How could I deal with theirs? The truth of the matter is, when we help to carry each others burdens, we end up with less of our own to carry. I didn't know that at the time, and thus went up the second wall around my heart closing out my family.

As long as I kept my family at bay, I could continue mistakenly believing that I had accepted my dad's death and shove any emotions proving otherwise deeper down into my soul. And now that I had successfully barricaded my friends and my family from my heart, there was only one more person to go...


To be continued...

A Truth About Me. Part III

When I last left you, I said that telling you my story about when my compulsive eating began involved a friend whom I had no intention of hurting and, if necessary, I would skip that part.

Well, that good friend of mine proved even a better friend when she called me and immediately gave me the go ahead to tell the story.

The truth of the matter is, I probably had a food addiction before the issue with my friend, it's just that I seem to be able to pinpoint a seriously bad habit I formed right after that that I don't recall having before. A bad habit that, in my opinion, is worse than just shoving copious amounts of food into my mouth. That habit?

The act of knowingly, willingly and purposely ignoring my emotions, pushing my feelings down to the depth of numbness and closing off every person near and dear to me from my heart. Not good, my friends. Not good at all.

I've heard it said that when you bury your emotions, you bury something that is alive and one way or another it's going to dig it's way back out. Mine dug their way out in the form of a food addiction and compulsive eating among other things. Those other things I'm still trying to figure out. Heck, just the other day I realized I may have rejection issues. Who knew? But believe me, you'll know about them when I do!

Anyway, back to my friend. The long and short of it is, we were best friends for fourteen years. All through high school and then some. I was in her wedding, there for the birth of her second child and she rode every emotional rollercoaster ride with me that I could find. As a great many friends do, we found ourselves on different paths in life and, I don't know, maybe we just didn't know how to handle that. So we did the only thing we knew how to do and that was have a rip-roaring, all-hell-breaks-loose, knock-down-drag-out falling out. That was in 1997. We didn't speak afterwards for eight years.

EIGHT YEARS, people! Take it from me, that is a long time to hold onto anger and resentment.

The truth of it is, I was unwilling, for quite some time, to accept responsibility for my end of it. Sure, it may seem easier to put all the blame on the other person, but in the long run, you end up paying for it.

Anyway, as a result of constantly blaming her and not looking for any truth within me, I then took the next natural step - I ended up distrusting all of my friends. I figured if "she could do that to me, they all could". That is when the first wall went up around my heart. I not only no longer shared my emotions, problems, anxieties, fears, dreams or really anything of value for that matter with my friends. I also absolutely refused to form any new friendships with other women. As far as I was concerned, I was done in the girlfriends department.

Sounds healthy, right? I knew even then it wasn't healthy but it sure did seem safe to me. And "safety" was exactly what I was after. Oh, if I had only known about the safety of Christ at that time!

Now with friends "safely" on the other side of the first wall around my heart, it was time to get busy building the second one. That one would go up almost immediately after my dad's death in 2001. I'll fill you in on that part of the story very soon.

Until then, thanks for listening.

A Truth About Me. Part II

Sorry about the delay. I'm fighting a nasty head cold and will be quite surprised if I'm able to string two coherent sentences together in this posting. Let's see if I can put more of this story together, shall we?

As I stated before, it was an Oprah episode that smacked me upside the head and made me realize something about myself I had never before. I remember the day clearly...

It was a cold and murky day...I'm kidding. It was actually quite nice out as spring was just turning into summer and yet I had decided to spend said nice day indoors cleaning my floor. I had the Oprah show on for "background noise". No, really! Oprah had her trusty fitness guru friend Bob Greene on and he was talking to several people who had found success using his latest techniques.

Now let me just stop right there and switch gears on you for just a minute. I'd like to discuss the term "self-medicating". I had heard the term several times on Oprah and Dr. Phil and similar shows (painting a real nice picture of a stay-at-home mom who does nothing all day but watch daytime television, ya think?) many times before. I had honestly never thought about applying the term to me or my issues with food. It really never occurred to me. I honestly thought that people who self-medicate, whether it be with drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, etc., did so because of some trauma experienced in their childhood. I didn't know that someone could experience a trauma in adulthood and then go on to self-medicate as a way of coping with that trauma. I know that sounds silly to say I never realized that, but it is the truth.

One of the women on Oprah that day told a story about how her job meant everything to her. It was her life, her passion, her identity. She told how when she was fired from her job she felt like a part of her died that day. She then explained how she went on to self-medicate with food to help her cope with her loss.

That's when I received the smack upside the head. There I stood, Bissell Steam Mop in hand, jaw agape and resting numbly on my semi-clean floor, staring at the t.v. Did I hear that right? This woman suffered a trauma as an adult and now she was self-medicating with food as a result of it?

The words "I'm self-medicating" came rolling of my tongue. I realized right then that self-medicating with food was, indeed, what I was doing. Thus began the process of delving back through my adulthood in an attempt to discover just what trauma I had endured. But, you know, I just couldn't think of anything. I didn't lose a beloved job. I hadn't suffered a divorce, lost a child, my house hadn't burned down, my dog didn't run away.

Okay, I've never owned a dog but still...

The only thing I could think of was my dad's passing from pancreatic cancer. But I had handled that so well. I accepted my dad's death upon diagnosis - before he even died. And, come to think of it, I was having problems with my weight and food before his death. If it wasn't my dad's death, what was it then? (turns out my dad's death did play a part in it)

Mentally, I went back to the time I first started plumping up and I narrowed it down, quite specifically, to the time my compulsive eating began.

I'm going to have to stop right there. Please believe me when I say that I WANT to tell you everything but to tell you the story about how my compulsive eating habits began is going to require some prayer. You see, telling you the story may end up hurting a friend. I have no interest in hurting someone even for the purpose of confession or to help someone who is reading my blog and struggling with their own food issues. I just won't.

I'll continue in a few days either with or without this component. In the meantime - sorry to leave you hanging - enjoy your holiday! Happy 4th Everyone!

A Truth About Me. Part I

As I said in a previous post, I discovered a few truths about me 'round-about this time last year.

I told you that one of those truths included M&M candies, Nicole Kidman, Oprah and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Makes for an odd picture, wouldn't you say? Allow me to put the pieces together for you (this may take awhile).

The start of the summer of 2007 found me with a new baby boy who struggled to nurse and a three-year-old who was set to potty-train. For you experienced mothers or non-OCD/control freak types, this is not enough to put you in a tizzy. For me, a slightly OCD/control freak type (albeit a charming one), it was tizzy-city!

I was in a strange, post-partum, sleep-deprived, unshowered, tizzy-city haze when I made the brilliant decision to go on a diet at this time. Not just any diet. No, not me. I decided I'd go on one of those ill-conceived, no-plan, change it from day to day, no formal guidelines, willy-nilly type of diets. And do you know, for some strange reason, it just didn't work? Go figure.

Did I mention I was in a strange, post-partum, sleep-deprived, unshowered, tizzy-city haze?

At the same time, I was in the beginning stages of potty-training my daughter. I'll just get it out in the open right now: I whole-heartily believe and support the act of bribing a child to pee in the potty. Whatever gets the pee in the potty, people! Use it!

And my brilliant dieting-self was bribing her with chocolate M&M's. A bought the biggest bag I could find at Wal-mart and swore that they were just for use as a potty-training reward. I figured one big bag was enough to see us through. I re-filled that bad no less than three times. Not because my daughter was pee'ing on the potty 67 times a day but because Mommy has some deep-rooted chocolate issues.

Oh, and I stress eat.

Imagine Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining with a bag of M&M's and no typewriter to bang his frustrations out on or ghost bartender to pour his heart out to. He would tear up that bag of chocolaty goodness! And tear it up (no less than three times) is exactly what I did.

All the while, wondering why on earth I was struggling to stay on a diet and lose weight.

You see, I have never had a problem sticking to a diet (a well-planned one with guidelines) for several months. I almost always saw success with my diet plans but this time around I could not get past even two or three days. I could not figure it out.

That's when an Oprah episode knocked me upside the head and I made a startling revelation about myself.

To be continued...