Why It’s Easier to Focus on Your Weight Than Your Abuse
When I started therapy, it was to help me manage my drastic weight fluctuations. Given that I would gain and lose 50 to 75 pounds every two years, I was perfectly capable of losing weight and keeping it off for a time. But then I would gain it back and repeat the process. I wanted someone to help me understand why I was on this never-ending roller coaster.
Knowing I needed professional help, I looked for someone who dealt with eating disorders and found Rachel. She believed the only way to resolve my weight was by confronting my childhood sexual abuse. Rachel’s specialty is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from trauma. EMDR is supposed to help you work through things by dealing with them in a less emotional state. The thinking is that if you can focus on your physical reaction to stress, it lessens the emotional impact and allows you to process whatever feelings you have.
When Rachel and I began EMDR and started targeting the abuse, I was so disconnected from my feelings that I felt nothing. Over time it evolved, and my arms would go numb, and I would have other physical sensations but nothing in my head. Rachel said it was normal, the emotions were so difficult for me that my mind and body shut off before I could access them.
While that may have been true for my history of sexual abuse, it was most certainly not the case for my weight. Throughout our time working together, I was focused front and center on it and my body. I started a new diet when I met Rachel and steadily lost weight. I am a phenomenal dieter, so this was not surprising. What was is that I lost the weight slower than at any other time and kept it off. But my feelings of fatness never really dissipated. I had moments where I thought I looked good, but they were fleeting and inevitably led to a backlash in the form of a binge. Rachel and I worked together for 12 years and, in that time, explored my weight and body ad infinitum.
Here’s what I learned.
It’s not about the amount of weight you want to lose. If you hate yourself when you’re 100 pounds from your goal, there’s a good chance you’ll hate yourself when you’re 10 pounds from your goal. Emotionally healthy people don’t hate themselves because of a number on a scale or a piece of clothing. The disgust I had with my body at my all-time high of 252 pounds wasn’t so dissimilar to how I could feel at 152 pounds. Depending on my mental state, I still felt (and feel) monstrous. Like an obscenity. And it still plunged me into a sea of despair in which all I wanted to do was hide away from the world.
Weight can be a distraction. I am relentless in my quest to finish anything I start, and therapy was no different. I threw myself in with both feet and tried to excavate the darkest recesses of my mind to make traction on my issues. But it was exhausting and difficult and often felt beyond my grasp. I knew I was making progress and getting better in some respects, but I was no closer to meeting a man and revealing my past.
Whether conscious or not, weight is an easier and more tangible thing to focus on. Number of pounds, body measurements, how clothes fit, all of these things can be measured, and progress achieved or lost. It is concrete. There came a point where Rachel would want to limit our discussion about all things food, binge and weight related to get to meatier matters, but my distress was real. Yet I did recognize that in many ways, it was a distraction.
I tortured myself (and often still do) about my body, but it is an accustomed and recognizable pain including guilt and disgust. When you binge, you can punish yourself and throw yourself back into your diet and exercise routine. I’m very action oriented so having a plan enables me to feel in control. Dealing with childhood sexual abuse is a raft of different and extremely unpleasant emotions including shame, grief and despair. There’s nothing to do with any of them except feel them and that sucks. My fear was that if I allowed myself to feel those emotions, I would drown in my despair. It turns out that was not the case, but the fear is very real.
Weight issues can be a shared experience. I may have only had one secret, my childhood sexual abuse, but it was the elephant in the room and bled over into my interactions with men, why I was alone and constantly gaining and losing weight. But the only portion of that narrative I was ever comfortable discussing was my weight. I could lament my weight with almost all of my friends because it is such a universal experience. No matter how thin, in shape or great they look, it seems that most women still have any number of things about their bodies they find unacceptable. In a very real sense, bitching about my weight with my friends, acquaintances and even strangers afforded me a sense of community I didn’t have in other respects. I could be open and honest and vulnerable about how I felt, often over drinks and fattening food.
Binging can be a chance to forgive. Binging, while sometimes pleasurable in the moment but just as often not, would throw me into a whirlpool of disgust with myself. It wasn’t enough that I felt physically sick, I needed to hate myself. Torture myself. My longest ongoing battle in therapy was trying to believe that what happened to me was not my fault. After much contemplation, I thought perhaps I binged so that I could forgive myself. That perhaps this was my eternal quest for what I considered to be serious offenses I committed against myself and binging gave me that in.
It resonated somehow. Shortly after this epiphany, I had another couple hundred calories I could eat to keep within my daily range. I wanted chocolate and decided to go for some candies stashed in my freezer (I freeze all manner of treats!). I tried to analyze what I felt. And I felt...nothing. I just wanted some chocolate.
I took one frozen from the box and gnawed at it on my couch. Then I had another. And another and at four I realized I was at the top of my calorie range. But in some respects, I am a creature of habit and what is started should be finished. I took the remaining four candies back to the couch with me. After polishing them off I had two Skinny Cow ice cream cones. I didn't feel sick, nor was I filled with regret or remorse. I also refused to forgive myself because there was nothing to forgive. I made a decision to eat too much, nothing more. It is not a personal failing. It is not a hate crime. It is not a crime at all, even if it feels like it. I felt so sane.
Weight can be a way of taking control. My ultimate goal was to find love which I thought was impossible because of my weight. This was the catalyst that got me into therapy. But as long as I found myself unacceptable, meeting a man was off the table. How could I show myself? I couldn’t. The battle was within as these two dueling parts of me tried to assert control.
If I was thin, I felt too coveted, too desired and it made me feel unsafe. One of the worst things to come out of being sexually abused was that I didn’t feel entitled to set the boundaries I wanted (and I still must remind myself that I can and should do what is best for me). I didn’t feel as if my body belonged to me so I couldn’t refuse what someone else wanted. It was easier to lock myself away.
If I was heavy, I felt invisible which is how I felt growing up. How did no one see what was happening to me? It is an intolerable feeling.
For all my years of gaining and losing large amounts of weight, the question of why was actually pretty simple: I was never happy at any weight. But I was safe because I had myself in lockdown.
My weight was imbued with feeling, a stark contrast to the nothingness I felt about my past. Intellectually I knew my abuse was horrible and I felt badly about it, but it was never that deep. I never thought about it unless I was meeting with Rachel. By contrast, my fatness, whether real or imagined, I felt intensely. During a session with Rachel, I told her I felt the fatness all the time. Yes, she said, but didn’t the fatness feel the way the abuse should? Didn’t I feel gross, unattractive, unlovable and ultimately unworthy? And wasn’t it ever present, just always lurking beneath or at the surface? So even if I never registered the past or how that made me feel or makes me feel still, the fatness I feel almost every waking moment of my life.
After a lot of time and effort, I was able to tap into my childhood trauma and feel it in its own right. Thanks to Rachel and a host of other therapists and practitioners, I was able to stop using my weight as a proxy to punish myself, hate myself, blame myself, for what happened to me as a child.
It’s still not all rainbows and unicorns. I have moments where I loathe the way I look and lament my fatness. My weight rises and falls by about 10 pounds and I feel all the joy and despair within that range, but it’s been almost 15 years. On those occasions when I decide to eat enough treats to kill a lesser person, I do it with my eyes open and make an active choice. I choose to eat too much. I may well suffer the consequences in the form of fat, sweaty, carb-induced sleep and be so bloated in the days to come that showering is painful, but those are the only regrets. I don’t torture myself over it and simply move on and make new choices, either within that very day or the next.
My body was the scene of the crime, so it was easy to channel all my hatred and disgust to it. And while I may still have negative body thoughts, I think that is more about the times in which we live rather than a reflection of my past. In many ways, losing the weight and keeping it within a manageable range was the easiest part of the process. The truly hard work is about confronting what happened and trying to make sense of it. For me, that meant believing that it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
If you find yourself constantly battling your weight, don’t despair. Know that it is a symptom of a larger issue and by focusing on that – your history of sexual abuse – you can make traction in additional areas of your life. For me, the road was long and difficult but absolutely worth the effort in every conceivable way. If you feel overwhelmed at the thought of it, focus on one small step you can take. Maybe it’s finding a therapist or joining a support group or even reading blogs from people who’ve experienced the same things. If you just keep going, no matter how slowly, you’ll eventually get there. And if choosing between standing still and moving forward, forward is the way to go every time even if it feels that you’re taking one step back for every two steps forward.
