Introduction!

Alright everyone!! I am soo excited to start this blog! I have wanted to start one for quite some time but due to my perfectionist personality, which I constantly attempt to keep at bay like a fire that strives to rage despite firefighters efforts to squelch it, I have hesitated in starting it feeling like it was essential that my first post is so FANTASTIC that it blows everyone out of the water. Basically I decided I'd better just start it and eventually one of my blog posts will be meaningful and help some person with whatever they struggle with :). I love life! I love sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Addiction 101 and Eating Disorders: Explained, continued :)

I am so happy to be writing again!! I have been on a vacation with my family in Wyoming where we went to Lava Hot Springs and jumped off huge platforms into the water. It was an awesome challenge. Then we went down the snake river and saw all the little places from my parents past. They met and fell in l-o-v-e there you see. :)

My post today is about addictions. I feel that addictions are soo common and understanding the nature of an addiction is what grants us the ability to recognize it when it attempts to grab us in its insidious claws or to fight it if it has secured a grip already. I think that turning to an addiction all begins with emotion, whether it be the absence of an emotion we desire such as peace, self love, happiness etc. or the presence of a negative undesirable emotion such as failure, discouragement, hopelessness, depression, low self esteem etc. Due to ignorance, conceivably attributed to lack of life experience or lack of proper instruction, we don’t turn to true and functional ways of dealing with the negative emotion OR, in the case of the positive emotion, don’t have the understanding of how to cultivate a lifestyle which inevitably will lead to the presence of the positive emotions in our lives. So, lacking the knowledge of how to constructively deal with/keep at bay the negative emotions and create these positive emotions respectively, we turn to sources which AT SOME POINT in our lives we have been influenced to believe will give us relief from the negative emotions and the state of happiness we seek after.

This explanation is essential to continue the post Eating Disorder: Explained. And now I will continue to explain what the eating disorder was all about for me.

Not only did I have to be perfect in every area including school, sports, relations with other people etc. but feeling emotions such as rejection, embarrassment, self consciousness, sadness, fear were signs of weakness which made me imperfect. So basically I felt as if I was failing and I couldn't feel any "negative" emotions about anything. I felt the desperate need to be perfect and the desperate need to get rid of the "negative" emotions because I wanted soo badly to feel loved and feel of worth. So I turned to the idea that being skinny would give me worth and make me lovable because of the attraction and respect it would give me among either gender. I became obsessed with being skinny because I had a desire like non other to feel loved and valid as a human being and I embraced the belief that being skinny would give me self worth and lovableness. (SIDENOTE: The thought processes I have been describing were virtually all subconscious. I will write a post soon about my conscious thoughts later.) Whenever I felt a "negative" emotion whose presence in my mind threatened my very lovability and self worth, instead of dealing with them the way I do now, which I will blog about :), I turned to the addiction of being skinny to snuff out the emotion and clung to the belief that it would give me everything that I wanted.

I was so sick of failing in every other aspect that I decided that I didn't care about failing in any other area and I would focus all my effort and energy on being perfect in that one area, being skinny. And believe me, it requires all energy and effort musterable.

2 comments:

  1. I was wondering why you disappeared this past couple of weeks.

    I think many people feel the way you do. They want to be loved and feel some self-worth. It's a constant struggle.

    I must confess, though, I don't think I can relate to eating disorders b/c I've never been there.

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  2. Leonis, even if you have never been there, it is important for everyone to realize that it is not only the problem of the person struggling. There is a reason why many girls and some men slowly kill themselves-- and it is partly because nearly everyone pushes appearance. In movies, love does not happen to those fat or ugly-- and often, in real life, those who view themselves as fat and ugly see themselves as unlovable. Everyone can make a step forward in changing the way we view the world-- changing the way we value others. Love is not physical. Love is beautiful. Very few people understand this.

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