Compulsiveovereating

The secret layers of the Perfectionism Complex.

Posted on by Rachael

The secret layer is just that—it’s a secret. It’s something that is not always visible, and because of that, it’s not always something people understand. It is the foundation that formulates the perfectionism complex: the how and why behind it.

It’s actually pretty simple, even though it doesn’t seem like it. It comes from early experiences in life. This could look like trauma—someone telling you that you are not good enough, chaos, neglect or other forms of abuse, and needing to be “good,” “perfect,” or “not a problem” for someone else.

As we grow and learn, based on our experiences, our body and mind learn what is safe and what is not safe. They learn what love is. They learn how to get approval and what is needed to avoid harm. It’s sort of a beautiful paradox. On one hand, our minds and bodies learn how to protect themselves, and on the other, it’s because of something not so great. The heartbreaking part is that, although we may have some options, these situations often happen when we are children, and we are forced into these protective measures—not by choice. Over time, we are conditioned into these protective modes: being sensitive to threats, living in fight or flight, and always being on alert as a baseline.

I’m recognizing now that, although I’ve worked through so much of my trauma, the “always alert” is my baseline. It seems to exist for me constantly.

Throughout our lives, we develop core beliefs like “I’m not enough as I am,” or one of my favorites, “I’m responsible for what happens.” Another is “Mistakes are not safe,” or probably my top contender: “Other people’s feelings are my job.” Many more contenders include “I can’t trust myself” and “My feelings are not valid or important,” and the list goes on. Although people may not say these verbatim to you, you grow to believe them because of what they say and do to make you believe them. They don’t let you forget—they repeat it over and over again so you remember, just in case you didn’t the first time.

There are so many repeated messages, in many forms, that create these beliefs. To name a few: conditional love, performance-based worth, and responsibility and overfunctioning. These messages can sound like: “You should have known better,” “Be the bigger person,” “Stop being so sensitive,” or “What’s wrong with you?” “You are gaining too much weight” They can even be messages you don’t hear directly, but instead learn through actions that shape your environment.

They are often created subconsciously because of these repeated messages, and we use them to make sense of our experiences. If someone I perceive to be trustworthy says these things to me, it must be true… I’m not fulfilling their expectations of me, so I must be—fill in the blank here.

These secret layers are the foundation of our existence. So as simple as these ideas are, and as simple as their origins may be, the complexity of undoing them almost seems impossible. It’s truly what I’ve been working on for the past 10 years or more—which is about a quarter of my life. Buckle up, friends. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

With time, and patience, healing is possible.

Perfectionism Complex Un-Packed

Posted on by Rachael

Perfectionism is less about doing things well and more about staying safe.

It’s hard not to talk about perfectionism without talking about how it develops. I believe there are four major parts, and so many subcategories of perfectionism under these parts… It’s hard to cover in one go, but I’m going to give it a try.

The first two go hand in hand, along with the second two:

  • Activated mind and body
  • Underlying beliefs
  • Symptoms
  • Coping mechanisms

When you are performing in a perfectionist complex, oftentimes your body and mind are activated. Your body has created a trauma imprint from experiences that felt unsafe. When your body is triggered, it identifies an unsafe situation and alerts you through teeth grinding, body tension, nausea, headache, heart racing, and panic. Because of your experiences, you have developed underlying beliefs and roots around why you have to perform under the perfectionism complex. For me, these are both linked to childhood trauma experiences. I have fibromyalgia because of my consistent body tension, and I always need to protect myself. The narrative I’ve developed often says, “I need to prove my worth.” I have many written posts about these beliefs and roots, so I don’t think I need to go into them more here.

The other two categories that come out of these beliefs and activated body experiences are symptoms or effects, and self-preservation. Symptoms are less about what your body feels, and more about what your mind experiences, guilt, and perceived anxiety (there are more, but you get the picture). Self-preservation is the coping mechanism—the way we allow perfectionism to show up in our daily lives. These are the actions we take to keep ourselves safe.

The complexity is that it’s not one-sided—they connect in a feedback loop. For example, something we can all relate to is anxiety. I did a short deep dive into anxiety because, when you hear this word, it has been associated with many things. Breaking it down, anxiety is a physical reaction; your nervous system is being activated. You can have anxious thoughts, or rather what I believe are rumination, worry, or intrusive thoughts. These are stories you tell yourself—essentially, we make them up to make sense of our physical alarms going off. Allowing ourselves to cater to these thoughts can also increase or amplify our symptoms.

To help prevent these feelings associated with anxiety, we create coping mechanisms. We create routines, try to control our environment, prevent issues, avoid conflict or other life tasks, and people-please. We sometimes go so far into avoidance that we develop devices to help us hide. My device was food; I was always using it to cope with my beliefs and trauma imprint. While this only works a little to calm our nervous system and help us, it also creates more damage in the long run. What protects us can actually harm us—especially if you are using devices that are more harmful than food.

In time, I want to break these categories out and give them more attention in relation to my experience. For now, though, this is what you get. Thank you for following along with me.

Open Feeding

Posted on by Rachael

Open feeding is a concept where food is accessible by multiple people at a time. Examples include restaurant buffets, family-style meals, and potluck type situations.

It is a place where people feed. It’s a place where people can eat anything that is available. The social norms of these places and or situations are; You can eat anything without judgment. No one will think it’s weird if you take seconds, fill your plate to the brim and eat every last bite, and or shove chip after chip into your mouth. If you are eating at someone’s home, you often eat more because you feel guilty or you want to make someone else feel better if you eat their cooking.

Several years ago I stopped going to buffets as a personal choice in my ED recovery. I remember eating at them as a child, and later with my dad when we would have visited after not seeing him for a while. It is a place that has options, and you can go through and eat as much as you want, and indulge in all of the options, with as many plates as you want. It’s a food addicts heaven.

Family meals, and potluck type situations have been really hitting me hard in the anxiety department for the past several years. These environments give permission for the ED to come out in safe non-judgmental, overeating accepted areas. It comes out like a fucking monster. It almost becomes its own being that has been awoken after a long slumber. Hello world, let me judge the fuck out of how much you’ve eaten, and what they have eaten. I look around at other people, I take inventory around me. I look at people’s plates, I look at their bodies, I calculate and create excuses. I did it before I became vegan and I do it now, only excuses look different than they did before.

My brain becomes a mess, and I fight myself and judge myself. It’s a battle in my brain, fighting to keep control when in reality I don’t feel like I have any at all. My anxiety is high, my teeth are clenching, and I surrender to alleviate the pressure that I’ve manifested myself.
What probably has pulled me in (other than the obvious food) have been social anxiety (even in my own family), feeling awkward, self-hatred, not knowing what to say to people, the fact that people have made special food for me… And I’m sure there are more, but these are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

What hasn’t helped: putting my silverware on my plate as a signal that I’m done. Shaming myself over and over again, mindful eating, judging myself or someone else for their food choices (it’s none of my damn business anyway), eating more, or drinking more alcoholic beverages.

What has helped: Self-parenting. Consistently I’ve come back to this concept of self-parenting. It essentially is self-soothing, telling yourself you are safe, you have had enough, you are okay, you do not need to eat anymore. Putting my napkin and my silverware on my plate and saying out loud no more.

What I will try to remember for next time (if we can ever meet in person again): Excuse myself to the bathroom or go outside for a few minutes, get up to get a glass of water, and ask lots of questions about the people around me. Those are what I have so far anyway.

Either way, it is important to be gentle with yourself. You are human, you are wonderful and you have got this.

Overcoming the Bully

Posted on by Rachael

Okay, first of all.. this is not something that has been happening over night. It’s years and years of therapy and changing the way I think about things.

Easier said than done and I’m not 100% healed, but I’m so much better than I was 3 years ago, even months ago, or moments ago.

Remember those I AM paintings I did? Well they started to work.

Side bar: In graduate school I took a tutor class which helped me with my papers and also gave me credit at the same time. But I learned something there that has stuck with me through out the years and has changed my thinking patterns in a way I could never have expected. You wouldn’t know this about me but I’m afraid of writing. I’m laughing as I say that because I have this blog with over 60 posts. But writing at the time was one of the most vulnerable places for me to be, and I was terrified of posting my papers etc. Anyway this writing tutor taught some psychology with her class and she taught about neuro transmitters and pathways. If we live one way, it’s hard for our minds to do something new unless we practice something new consistently. As we move forward in that practice, it creates new neuro pathways and those new ways of doing or thinking becomes easier.

Those paintings I started painting, have been really powerful and pivotal in this mind changing game. When I repeat I am enough, enough times… I’ve started to believe it. I even wrote it on a sticky note at my desk.

My next post will be about my most recent achievement with this and how I’ve been able to overcome the bully as I’ve been consistently working out!

After all this time.

Posted on by Rachael

I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

I’ve talked about these voices (I mean self critic, I’m not hearing voices). Let’s just be clear, it’s my inner voice that I’m talking about. But this self critic who has been holding me back, the one I’ve deemed my dad’s voice, is really myself. And I know that, but I’ve trained myself into being the biggest and worst bully of them all. All of those people who harassed me and made me believe I wasn’t good enough, has really trained me to be my biggest bully. I am my biggest bully. WTF.

Working out and self bullying.

Posted on by Rachael

I think I’ve posted before that I’m a cereal gym member and never really have been a goer. This has always been for reasons that seem really terrible at the time, but now feel super petty. It’s also the excuses I’ve made up in my brain about the reasons why I shouldn’t go to the gym.

I would join gyms because I thought it was the right thing to do. I would join them and be pretty good about it for a month or two and then something stops me from going.

One time I was working out at the gym a lot, I had a trainer and everything that I had gotten as a gift from my mom. What “ruined it” for me that time was this desk attendant. Every time I would come in, he would ask if I was meeting me with my trainer. I about lost it and eventually stopped going, because I avoided having that conversation with him. I lost motivation, and also, felt judged in my brain which then spiraled into a nasty fest of self doubt, confidence and self hate. You know the words: You will never be able to… or you are not good enough… etc

Anyway, what ends up happening, is me judging myself and comparing myself to other people at the gym. I’d get so wrapped up in what I wasn’t and what I couldn’t do, that working out was more stressful to me because of how much I would make up in my head about it and what the consequences would be. So frankly I would just give up. Now that I think about it, going to the gym under this mind set was super self harmy to my mental health. I was being my own self bully. Wow.

I mean, most of these are just excuses and reasons for me to not do it. Which seemed easier than actually doing it.

Next post is about what steps I’ve been taking to overcome this mentality.

What (almost) just happened?

Posted on by Rachael

First of all, getting married, while in recovery from an eating disorder is bullshit. I’m going to write more about this in another post when I have more time to think about it, and also insert some really positive words of wisdom.

What it has done though, has allowed me to reevaluate where I am in my life, and what I could be doing better at.

What transpired was my first dress fitting. My undergarment wouldn’t fit. I was mortified and upset. I breathed through it, decided I was going to loose 10lbs, and ran my mind through circles. Okay….. I have to pre warn you that I didn’t spiral so bad, it just felt like it. I just felt this sense of urgency. In less than 100 days I will be getting married. Fuuuuuuckk.

The re-evaluation was just an evaluation of where I was at mentally, how I was spending my time and what I was eating. I also started working out… this week it’s been 2x, but more recently I’ve just been trying to move my body more in general.

So what happened, or almost happened but didn’t… I didn’t give up an I encouraged myself along the way. I said you’ve got this, you can to this, to myself over and over.

I don’t mean to go off topic for a second, but remember how I wrote about my picking problem before? —- well anyway I was laying on the ground, doing a leg exercise, my belly popped out. I kept exercising, but noticed an inperfection on my belly, where I had something that seemed pickable. I started to touch it, and then what happens next totally surprised me…. I stopped. I looked at my belly and said picking will not make this better, and it doesn’t temporarily make anything better. I mean, logically we know this.

I just feel really proud of myself in those moments and it suddenly became really easy to be nice to myself. It feels good to be loved by myself.

It’s a small victory, but pretty impactful in the process.

Today

Posted on by Rachael

It became clear how badly I needed to address myself. My body, my mind, all the things…

I’ve been neglecting myself, and my mental health.

I cried to my mother today, and I made a call to my nurse practitioner. I made a decision to follow through. I had anxiety addressing some of my barriers, but I did it. I’m proud, scared and unhappy. Something needed to be done.

I FORGOT ABOUT FOOD

Posted on by Rachael

I forgot there was a bag of chips in the cupboard.

As someone who has been so obsessed in the past, and would know everything that was in the cupboard at all times. —I can’t believe how much I’ve recovered and how much I’ve changed.

I remember living with my friend who had food in her house, so much so it was overwhelming. She would forget what she had and would buy more. So much so that she would have several unopened and opened bags of chocolate chips in her cupboard. But I knew, I was obsessed with food. Always thinking about it, always knowing, always always always.

A few weeks ago, I opened the cupboard, and saw a bag of chips in there. I had forgotten I had them. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It was suddenly as if the gates opened and the light shined through. It was a moment to celebrate!

Invincible

Posted on by Rachael

Up until now I thought I was invincible. Or that death was this far off thing I didn’t think would happen for me. I don’t think that I’m going to die anytime soon, but as I grow older… the more I see time slipping and the people I thought would never leave this planet are.

My dad is in the hospital. With the flu. There is a slight chance he will recover and if he does, it seems as if he has less than a year to live. After all this time, after all of this created drama in my brain and now feeling like I have to cater to him one last time??? To give a little perspective, he’s 87. His chances are like 50/50 at this point, and if he does recover, he’s got like 6 months left.

I bought a plane ticket, I leave a week from Thursday. I’m going there, to see him. He won’t know who I am, he won’t know why I’ve come, but I’m doing it anyway.. why? So that in 10 years I won’t regret it. I’m not sure he will make it until I get there. I don’t really know what else to do.