Week 10/Day 6 Letting the Past Dictate the Future

I feel very much lately as though I am slogging thru mud. Getting nowhere fast, if you know what I mean...Nevertheless, I mean to persevere and continue to try to move forward, even when it looks as though the effort isn't netting any results at all.

Last weekend we were at Mama's where I usually weigh-in. Much to my shock the scales read 5#s higher, which really depressed me no end. Here I'd changed my eating habits, had actually been eating less and my weight INCREASED. Aside from mild verbal self-abuse, I let it go, cont'd to eat lighter and finally decided that it could just possibly be the usual menopausal monthly water weight. In light of the headaches and salt/chocolate cravings I've experienced, that is probably exactly what it is. However, I was disheartened and began to hear once more the "I can't" echoes that seem to be closer at times than others.

Well Monday came along and in a completely unrelated incident, I got some rather shocking news that upset me no end. It wasn't life changing news, but it was unexpected and it involved our finances in an offhand way and that always shakes me to my core because it rang with past associations of another life. My response, however, was almost as upsetting to me. I wanted to EAT. Not just the 'oh it's time for lunch, I should eat" response either. It was the planning of a major binge. I realized about halfway to my destination what I was doing, took a side road and headed back home to a reasonably healthy dinner of BLT on whole wheat bread with a diet soda.

But for those of you who have not experienced compulsive eating habits, know this: if I were an alcoholic or drug user and had had the same response to the temporary road bump, I'd have been just as devastated. Because no matter how far away from destructive behavior we may think we've moved, somewhere inside there is still that old response system that sometimes gets heard far more loudly and clearly than the newer and better systems we've instilled. That blast from the past was unwelcome and frankly, frightening. It was a reminder of how far I've NOT come.

That it surfaced at all began to feed a long line of fear based thinking which led to depression and anxiety. That response too was frightening. Again, depression, like compulsive eating, was put behind me long ago. I've been many years now without more than a slightly blue feeling here and there. I sat down to journal and found myself openly weeping, with fear! So I let fear have it's head and I began a long list of all the things I've been fearful of in the past few weeks. Some were silly, some were serious, some were based on 'if' thinking (I FEAR is an association I make with IF). Somehow seeing all those vague fears listed on paper took away some of their power. This was darkness and I fought it with all my strength until my husband came home. I told him of my struggles and how disheartened I'd become as the day went on and he laid hands on me to pray.

I am a huge believer in the power of prayer over the forces of darkness and could feel things in me becoming disentangled. I don't care if that sounds flaky to some, it's the truth. I have long said that the saddest response we learn as children of alcoholics is justification. Our reasoning doesn't run the normal route of A-B-C-D-E-F etc. No, our response is warped and we often reason things illogically. Z- Q-C-H-M-A-P would be more accurate of how we think. It's taken years to learn to step back and stop the stupidity and pray for logic before reasoning out situations. That's the tangles I mentioned above. I could literally feel all those strings of thought coming untangled within. And that led to an immediate response of joy surging through me once more. Praise God!

Back to the week. I managed to avoid overeating. I managed to avoid further depression and fear. But I hid out all week long. I did what I had to do each day so far as living was concerned, because come heck or high water the housework will get done but every opportunity I got I retreated into another little compulsive area of my life: playing games. Whether it's PSII or something online, anytime I begin to compulsively play, wasting hours of my time and life in meaningless scores I know there's still something more to reason out. Sometimes, I do let the compulsiveness take over in a non-harmful way as I reason out things, learning to get the A-B-C order of thinking laid out rightly in my head. And finally yesterday afternoon, it all gelled up for me.

I was backtracking through the past. First on my list: the triggered remembrance of my first marriage. Done with that, I prayed over the situation, let it go and moved on. Next came up a remembered hurt. No unforgiveness in the situation, but a curiosity about why certain events took place and a realization that when I'd finally confronted it, the person responsible had immediately and completely stopped the hurtful and wrong behavior. That spoke volumes about both my opportunity to grab my own power and the possibility that the other person hadn't realized how her activities were harmful until I pointed it out.

And finally, we drifted all the way back to childhood and weight issues. I was a plump child. I was a normally active child as well. I ran, I walked miles, I rode a bike, played ball, skipped rope, swung on the monkey bars, swam. I dare say compared to my own children, I was a very active child. I balanced outdoor activity with plenty of quiet activity too. However, my weight was consistently higher than that of other children my age my whole life. It was that negative association to my weight however that really began to shape who and what I became. I was shamed, ridiculed and harassed because of my size, not by other children but by adults, many of them in my own family.

Mama's response was to periodically put me on a diet. I always lost weight. ALWAYS lost weight. Now let's return to my remark of a few weeks ago when I said I felt much as my grandmother when she announced to me one day, "I can quit smoking anytime I want, I've done it 20 or 30 times already," (or something to that effect). I ALWAYS lost weight. Right up until the moment that Mama tired of her own diet at which point she began compulsively eating all over again and of course, she fed me the same things she ate as well. So I stopped losing and sometimes regained more than I'd originally lost. Somewhere in the midst of her lack of motivation I began to hear in my own head that I couldn't lose weight...

Do you see what I'm saying here? I at ages 6,8,10, 12 wasn't the controlling person where my diet was concerned. I was continually being told I was fat, continually being put on a diet, continually having the person responsible failing to continue to monitor my diet and then being told that I was the failure! Until I began to repeat to myself the words I'd been told repeatedly. I learned to be a failure. I learned to hate my body. I learned to say "I can't."

What does this mean to me now? It means that I need to go back to what I 'learned' and do something different. Just as I learned to stop eating compulsively as a response to pain, I need to learn once more how to live my life in such a way that regardless of my size, I feel happy. To take control of my diet and keep control. To be active in the ways that make me happy. To stop saying "I can't" as a rote lesson and instead begin to say "I can".

What this means is that I will try to relearn the ways I used to be active and enjoy them once more. I admit that at present, with my ankles as painful as they are, I am not likely to get out and play football, baseball or walk over uneven ground as I did as a child. But I can garden, I can walk longer distances when I'm out shopping, I can learn to move my body once more. I will try to find a way of eating that makes me feel good and energetic without feeling deprived or binge prone. Low-carb worked for me up to a point. Perhaps a more moderate low-carb approach such as South Beach is the very answer I need. Perhaps it simply means that I try to make healthier choices and watch portions and learn to recognize the fullness signals my body sends.

I want to learn from the past so that my future can be different. I'm not a Danielle Steele fan. I admit to reading only one of her novels, Zoya. But one line in that book stood out and remains one of those life changing quotes: The past is worth only what it makes of us. I want my future to be worth something more. I want the past to inspire my future to be better than I'd dreamed possible!