The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
i'm sorry if anyone thinks this in an inapropriate topic. after reading through some of your entries and getting a feel for the real crisies that are happening in your lives, i am once again humbled, and realize once again how very silly the crisies i create in my head really are. but i still make them into crisies, so i hope you won't mind if i air them here.
one of the things i really had to work on last year was just a basic acceptance of self. it was my last year at uni, i had just come back from a wonderfuly free year abroad, and i sunk into a very dark depression. northern new york is an awful place to be stuck in the winter. anyway, i had very few friends at uni, and spent a lot of time in my head, chasing my own tail trying to figure out why my life didn't work. and the conclusion i came to was one i had origionaly codified as a young teenager- i was disgusting physicaly. i felt i was fat, zitty, just a walking disaster of a person.
i tried all kinds of things to improve my apperance- went to the gym every day (like i said, i had very few friends), went to weight watchers, obsessivly watched what i ate. but at the end of the day (or about once a month) i would fall off the bandwagon. i am a binge eater- i would start, i would feel guilty, and i wouldn't be able to stop.
now when i look back on that period, it's pretty laughable. hopefully i can post some pictures eventually so you all can see just how laughable. what i took from al-anon in the short period i was there was the fact that i was seeking an excuse for a problem, and that weight (and food) was the perfect thing to obsess about to keep me from doing anything concrete about that problem.
i have a great life here in japan- my own life. and i have a great group of friends to share it. but as the time without al-anon meetings ticks by, i find myself getting more and more obsessive about what i'm putting in my mouth. and more and more upset when my wonderfully full life means i don't have time to get to the gym.
anyway, i thought some women out there might be able to understand where i'm coming from. it's easier to blame my vague emotional discomfort on my own failings, rather than being kind to myself and searching for more relevant (but more painful) emotional blocks.
I am alot older than you are at 49 and the Alcoholic in my life is my 20 year old daughter but I can relate to some of what you wrote. My daugher is currently in inpatient treatment for alcohol/drug abuse. Ten years ago I was in an inpatient treatment center for an eating disorder which is binge eating or compulsive eating. I do not have anoerexia or am not bulimac but food is my addiction. ON top of that, I was also compulsively shopping which for some is another kind of addiction. There were only two overweight people at the eating disorder clinic in Kansas called Menningers Clinic and it was a very interesting experience for me. My disorder is like a coping mechanism or crutch just like other addictions are to other people. IT is something I have to learn to live with because it obviousely hasn't gone away. There is a twelve step program for over-eaters too called OA or Overeaters' Annonymous. When people with addictions don't deal with the first addiction they can do what is called piggybacking which means to add other addictions to the first.....or at least that is what they taught me at Menningers. My psychologist of 10 years who specializes in eating disorders feels that it is harder for eating disorder people to manage their addiction than an alcoholic due to the fact that we still have to eat to survive. When I have a need to binge it usually means other things in my life are stressful and I am unable to cope or use other tools rather than binging on food. Unfortunately, you can't always tell someone has an eating disorder that is thin or you can't tell a person is an alcoholic by looking at them but you can tell when someone may have an overeating or binge problem when they are overweight. IT is important to love yourself for who you are,,,,thick or thin. WE are who we are inside and not on the outside. But, at your age it is hard to realize that as it was for me at that age.....although I was not overweight back then but still had the disorder. So, yes,,your post was appropriate because you may also have an eating disorder/addiction. And, the twelve steps may help you with your journey through that too. I hope I said something or shared something with you that was of help. cdb
Interesting Topic! And, my experience, was--heavy drinking of my spouse's made me lose my appetite--heck, I'm outta here, gonna lose weight, get my own life, something better out there for me than this. Then he gets sober....now all I want to do is get comforted by ice cream, even though it's sugar free ice cream...I just do not want to remember any of the bad days....so why not drown it in smooth stuff! It's like my appetite, eating habits change with the Changing TIDES ! UGH!
