Regarding relapse and denial:
"Your long-range interest will suffer if you catch yourself ignoring a lapse, but perhaps not if you arrange to ignore it without catching yourself. This arrangement, too, must go undetected, which means that a successful process of ignoring must be among the many mental expedients that arise by trial and error-the ones you keep simply because they make you feel better without your realizing why."
(p 203, quoted by Dennett from George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will)
On challenging your disordered viewpoints:
"Like sausage making and the crafting of legislation in a democracy, creed revision is a process that is upsetting to watch too closely."
(p 205)
I've been working hard at the "creed revision" thing in recent months, trying to swap out the disordered dogma for something a little more compatible with, well, with life. I feel like Bill Murray's character in 'What About Bob?,' just focusing on one baby step at a time, and occasionally falling down and looking like a fool.
It's been a while since I really wrote much of substance. Life has been crazy busy over the past few weeks. Good news is that the teeth are doing better. I now have a really stylish and sexy mouthpiece that I wear while I sleep, that is keeping me from further grinding my feeble chompers into oblivion. Bad news is that I'm incredibly uncomfortable with my body right now, and am in despair over how I will ever handle being at the Goal Weight, if I already so freaked out just with where I am now. I guess I will just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.
Swamped in work right now, so I need to say bye to the blogging for the night, will hopefully have something worth reading soon.
2 comments:
Something my psychologist said to me early in weight gain was, "if you're going to be uncomfortable no matter where your weight is, you might as well be uncomfortable and healthy."
I later rewrote her statement to be more motivating to me since I had some blocks with the idea of being "healthy." My rewritten version: "if you're going to be uncomfortable and think you're fat no matter where your weight is, you might as well be uncomfortable and at a weight where your internal organs and bones aren't destroying themselves."
I found this made a lot of sense. I also found the age-old ED advice "fake it til you make it" SO helpful when I was thinking like you. No, I WASN'T going to be okay with the weight gain, but I knew I needed to, so I would just pretend that it was okay.
I really love what Sarah had to say. And I also love your "What About Bob?" reference. The book sounds very interesting. Those passages made me think. I agree that recovery is a lot about "creed revision" -- rephrasing our internal dialogue to support health. Thanks for the post :)
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