Distress

In session with my Eating Disorders Psychologist last Thursday she told me that she was suspending my dieting treatment because she doesn't think that I have an eating disorder as such, she thinks that I have such a deep sense of shame and self-criticism that it disables me, and that the only effective mechanism I presently have to soothe my distress is eating to the point of discomfort to stifle it. She is continuing to treat me for at least another four sessions, but she will be trying instead to come up with a strategy to help me cope with the distress I feel, so that she can perhaps continue with the weight-loss therapy afterwards if it succeeds. She says she doesn't want to take away my one source of self-soothing even though it is causing me health problems and exacerbating my psychological problems, because she seriously fears for my mental health if she did.

I've known all my adult life there was something badly wrong, although until this impotence began and it shut down my sense of a future, I did have other things I could do to distract myself from how bad I felt.

I've explained elsewhere that when I came to realise why I felt so paralysed - the years of bullying from my dad, and my being mocked and excluded by other kids and even by teachers at school because I was fat - and I told John G, he said "I knew it. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I suspected it had a lot to do with your dad: of all the people I've known, you were the one who should have been supercharged for success, and I knew it must have been something huge that was holding you down".

Asking me about my feelings and my hopes, My psychologist said "you must feel very frustrated and feel that life has been very unjust".

Yes.

On a tangent, I remembered yesterday evening that in the couple of years before my dad died, my mam told me she had been looking for a little job and a bedsit so that she could move out and leave him, so bad had their marriage become. At the time she would have been nearly 70. I think she probably would have done had he not taken ill and her sense of duty made her stay and nurse him. In a fair world, he would have been the one who left.

She was a better person by far than he was. She was a sweet, kind woman.

It occurred to me yesterday that he was essentially Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, a shrivelled creature obsessed with having his treasure and with hiding it from us and the world so it did nothing for him and us except eat him up and deform our lives.