Self-stroking: part 2

Sometimes when I am feeling frightened or insecure, I ask my husband if he will always take care of me. He always tells me that he will. At those times, my fear is that I can't make my way in life and if I fall, I'm afraid no one will be there to catch me. I need to know that he will be there, just in case I fall.

On an objective level, there's no reason to believe that I am incapable of making my way in life. For 12 years, I worked full-time and was the primary support while my husband worked part-time and was a househusband. I also worked full-time at various other jobs concurrently with my husband working full-time. About 6 years ago, after about a year of undiagnosed clinical depression (or nearly so) I went part-time, he went full-time, and I took over the household work. I have far more of my adult life under my belt being responsible for myself, but I don't think my fears are really about money or jobs.

I think my anxiety about being cared for is more generalized and I think it stems from the insecurity I spent my formative years dwelling in. Though I had a roof over my head and there was food on the table, my parents were constantly speaking about us being on the edge of insolvency. Money problems were always on the table and nothing was ever hidden from my sister and I. What was more, my parents were very absorbed in their own issues. They spent their days arguing about my father's alcoholism, my mother's spendthrift nature, and complaining about whatever trivial issues perturbed them. Neither of them was an adult in any way.

I know it may sound like an exaggeration to say neither was an adult, but they truly were not. My father refused to do anything that required even minimal interacting with other people if it didn't happen in a bar or a garage. He wouldn't go into a bank, shop in a market for food, go to my sister's and my school, or shop for clothes (not even his own). He abdicated all responsibility and my mother used the power that came with that to indulge her shopaholism and to live beyond our means. She created a loop in which she medicated her unhappiness with food and spending money and, in turn, created her unhappiness by being fat and being forced into bill juggling and loan consolidation to handle her debts. Her failure to be an adult was not in her refusal to take on responsibility, as she had it all, but it was in her inability to control her temper and the way in which she battered my sister's and my esteem to elevate her own. She heaped responsibility on us too young, shared her problems with us when we were incapable of understanding them or helping, and verbally abused us. Her failure was in not acting emotionally like a grown-up to her children.

In retrospect, I know that my mother created all of my family's financial suffering through her issues with spending. She had a vision of the life she wanted to live, and part of that was "keeping up with the Joneses". She was devastated when her siblings, especially her 3 sisters, lived a material lifestyle that was clearly superior to hers. Had my mother practiced moderate fiscal control, we would have been alright. We wouldn't have been rich, but we could have been secure and stable. Unfortunately, both of my parents were more interested in using what money we had to do what they wanted (my mother to buy junk and my father to drink alcohol and smoke everyday) than in providing a stable life for their family.

I mentioned in the previous post that food was the co-parent in my childhood, and the support that I carried with me into adulthood. It is the way I "stroke" (comfort, validate, reward, etc.) myself. Unlike my parents, food never hurt me, abandoned me, or disappointed me. It always gave pleasure and asked nothing in return. While my parents were inconsistent and my mother so mercurial at random intervals that I was driven to extreme nervousness and tension at times because of my fear of her wrath, food was the "good parent".

I realize now that my husband has taken on some of the role of a "parent" for me. I ask if he will take care of me because I was never taken care of by anyone as a child and I need to feel cared for and secure. No, I was not abused physically, nor did I starve, but I never felt secure, loved, or worthwhile. Neither of my parents gave me those things because of their own damage and immaturity. I don't blame them for it and this post is not about holding them responsible for my problems. That being said, ignoring the connection would undermine my ability to heal myself. I have to understand the roots so I know where to start tearing out the damaging weeds of my problems and planting more psychologically healthy "plants". Too many people think that "blame the parents" is what excavating your childhood issues is all about and that it's about finding reasons to be mad at them rather than change your life. It is not. It's about finding out what went wrong so that you can figure out how to make it right. My parents messed up. I forgive them. However, if someone breaks a complex mechanism (such as the human psyche), it really helps to know exactly how and where they broke it if you want to repair the damage as quickly and effectively as possible.

While my husband is functioning in part in the role my parents failed at, I know that he can't do it all and that is where the "self-stroking" that I mentioned in the previous post comes in. It's not wrong for him to do some of it because, after all, we all validate, comfort, and soothe our mates. It's part of the role they play. However, the fact that being separated from him for a finite period of time is so difficult for me means that I need to develop certain coping skills in this regard. As I mentioned previously, I used to have food to stroke me in his absence, and now I don't, so I need other things.

After yesterday's realization, I figured out, much to my chagrin, that I still use food to stroke myself and not terribly infrequently. The main difference between how I used it before and how I use it now is that I use extremely tiny portions now. Instead of eating a bag of chips, I eat 2 or 3 nuts. I don't eat a whole candy bar, but might eat 6 M & M's or a mini-candy bar. The calories are low enough to not be an issue, but the comforting still goes on.

That is not to say that every small treat I eat is an act of food-based stroking. Sometimes, it's merely that I want to enjoy these foods. Sometimes, it's a craving for a dessert after a meal (which is common for me anyway). However, there are definitely times when it is an act of stroking. It's not compulsive, but it is an act that tells me that "I'm okay". The food tells me, I'm going to be okay. Everything will be okay. This connection was forged in my childhood, and now I have to work to unravel it. This is the next stage in the evolution of my relationship with food, and I am not looking forward to the emotional fall-out which is certain to follow.

My approach to this is going to be relatively unstructured. That is, I don't plan to forever give up treats or even to swear off of them on a particular day. Rather than take some sort of rigid or Draconian view of food (which I believe is ultimately destructive and untenable), I plan to practice concrete self-stroking exercises at times when I feel I'm grabbing a tiny bite of a treat for self-stroking purposes. I'm also going to try and develop conditioning techniques to self-stroke in a higher order fashion. This is not an easy transition for someone like me, because it involves positive messages about myself to myself. This comes with difficulty because of my feelings of worthlessness, fear of narcissism or self-aggrandizement, and modesty. My mother reinforced again and again that I shouldn't form too high an opinion of myself to make sure I never thought too much of myself. For instance, when I got excellent grades and pushed myself hard in school, she made sure to tell me that I was "book smart", but lacked common sense or other intelligence. Even when I excelled academically and should have felt I was smart, she let me know that I was dumb and shouldn't be too proud no matter what I accomplished. She bragged to her friends about my sister and I, then told us we weren't so hot.

I'm also not the type of person who subscribes to hollow affirmations of my own awesomeness. A lot of people practicing self-acceptance resort to pat mantras about how "good" they are, but this simply does not work for me. My issue is not that I think I'm a really "bad" person and need to tell myself that I'm a "good" one. It is that I feel that I'm in no way special and that my value is less than that of others because my needs are less important than theirs (my mother always told me that it was selfish to put myself before others). Without my husband telling me regularly that I'm important, I can't keep the idea in my mind. I haven't internalized the notion that I am a person of particular value to anyone but him. If I am not with him, I cease to be anything because I am nothing to others. If they see me as anything, it is my feeling that they only do so because they view me as useful in some particular regard. If I cease to be of use, they will not care for me because I'm nothing special to anyone but my husband. I believe that he is the only person who will ever love me, the only one who ever could.

So, what I tell myself in affirmation has to be specific, important, and have deep relevance to me. It can't merely be that I say, "I don't need this chocolate because I'm a good person". I'm not sure what I need to say, just that I need to say some things which strike at the heart of the shortcomings of my childhood. One of those things might be simply to say, "everything will be okay," whether I eat this or not. I doubt that that will be all it takes, but it's a starting point after so many years of my youth being spent being told everything was not okay and I was not okay. As I explore this, I will post more about the process.

Above Average

When I read the thoughts of others who want to or are losing weight, they seem to ruminate on and be more than prepared to step into the shoes of "normality". I guess this is because I've been greatly overweight for most of my entire life and many of them may have either spent more time at "normal" or closer to it. I've spent more time at or over 300 lbs. than under it. Living like other people do isn't something I'm accustomed to and it's an emotional transition.

I've talked before about identity, and part of my identity is that of someone who doesn't fit in. Part of that is how other people have objectified me and marginalized me based on body size. Part of that is also the basic facts of existence in a world designed for people of average size when you are far above average. This includes not being able to fit where other people fit when it comes to spaces, but it also, quite obviously, includes clothes.

When it comes to clothes shopping, most people squeal with delight at the prospect of fitting into smaller clothes, shopping in another department, or looking "better" (frankly, I think most people just look "different" when they lose weight, not "better"). For me, this remains something odious and stressful. Part of the reason for this is that I don't care about clothes much and I hate wasting money on them. Part of it is old associations and new confusion associated with a changed body.

Shopping for clothes for me used to be "easy" because all I had to do was get a mail order catalog and order the biggest plus size items they had and hope they fit me. Most of the time, they did. Sometimes, they didn't. This system allowed me to stretch fabric over my form to conform with standards of modesty in a socially acceptable way, but the process was utterly utilitarian. I didn't know how I was going to look when I made new purchases, and I didn't care. Now, I have to care because I work outside my home again.

Yesterday, I went to the store at which I found my first off the shelf clothing which fit. There is no such thing as a "plus size" there, so I can only shop from the larger sizes of "normal". I hadn't planned to deal with clothes there because I don't believe I "need" anything, but I decided that I should push myself to try on some clothes. The main reason for doing this is that I don't know what size I am and doing so would give me an idea. It may shock some people to know that I'm still wearing pants I wore 200 lbs. ago. I've just progressively taken them in as time has gone by.

I realize to some extent that I hang on to my oversized clothes as part of my former image of myself and a rejection of my femininity. I wear XXL T-shirts that fit me close to being a dress and pants that are too big even after being cinched and modified. I need to let go of these habits as a way of letting go of my perception of myself as a shapeless lump. To that end, I need to try on clothes and find things that fit.

This may sound like an easy and possibly even enjoyable thing, but for me, it is fraught with stress and paranoia. I still have to find larger things among normal sizes for starters, but it's more the fact that I'm still fat and I think "everyone" is watching me paw through the clothing racks and thinking, "she's too fat for anything there." This is very likely the result of the spotlight effect error, and not reality, but my feelings are my feelings. I can't deal with them by invalidating them. They can only be dispatched if they are recognized.

Not only do I feel like I'm being judged by people who are sizing me up and determining that I have no business looking for clothes among normal sizes, but this experience also taps into my feeling of being a "fraud". I don't belong in clothes designed for women because I don't have the "right" to be portrayed in a feminine manner because I'm a valueless, gigantic wad of flesh. I'm only fooling myself by painting myself with make-up and trying on "girly" clothes. I "don't belong" in the women's clothing department.

I realize that these thoughts are irrational, though they have been reinforced during nearly all of my adult life. I didn't invent them in my own fertile imagination. They are the clear messages from society for extremely morbidly obese women and I merely internalized them emotionally, despite rejecting their validity on an intellectual level .

The irony is that I know that I am not my body. One of the coping mechanisms you acquire when you live in a body society rejects so roundly for most of your life is the notion that you are your soul, psyche, intellect, or mind. You divide "you" from the meat sack that you inhabit because not doing so would be to exist in a constant state of self-loathing because you'd evaluate yourself as society does. No one can live like that for long.

However, you know, beneath the surface, that you also cannot escape your container, nor the responses to it. No matter how hard you try to distance yourself from your physicality, it is right there with you. It's a conjoined twin with your personality. Pretending it's not a part of you only helps cope with the pain of social censure but it doesn't change the fact that it is inescapably as much "you" in corporeal reality as your mind or soul.

On the surface, I have rejected this for as long as possible, but part of healing is welcoming my body into a partnership with my mind in which it doesn't take second place and isn't regarded as my enemy. For most of my life, I've felt my body has betrayed me and I've hated it for it. My mind has to shape its thoughts toward looking after the body rather than shoving its interests aside in favor of catering to the psyche. No matter how hard you try to separate mind and body, you can't in this world. That's a task for the next one, if there is another.

So, I made myself try on clothes, but not because I'm so infatuated with my new figure or want to "look good", but because it's part of a process of learning to respect my body and view myself in a less pejorative light. I still hate shopping for clothes, and I still don't care about how I look. And, I still hate how my body looks in most things, but this is how I'm moving forward.

An Examplary Man

"Examplary

Ex"am*pla*ry\, a. [From Example, cf. Exemplary.] Serving forexample or pattern; exemplary."

Ricky Gervais is a British comedian known in America mainly as the creator of the British "The Office" series which has been adapted for American audiences in a version starring Steve Carell. He has also made a few movies, but they have not performed particularly well. For fans of British comedy, he is also known for a fairly brilliant, but esoteric comedy about actors and acting called, "Extras".

It was through "Extras" that I came to know Ricky Gervais's work, and the fact that he was capable as someone who was seen as "fat" of mocking his own physicality. In particular, there is an episode of that show guest starring David Bowie in which the iconic singer composes a song on the fly about Gervais's character being a "little fat man". As Bowie improvises a song, Gervais's character sits uncomfortably trying to take it with good humor but his face registers a range of conflicting emotions. The scene is not funny in a conventional way. It's more of a painful situation which people identify with and sympathize with the character's dilemma. It's exposing something real and extracting dark humor from it.

A lot of Gervais's writing and humor comes from exploring pain, failure, and the human side of characters. His characters expose bald character flaws and weaknesses and generally lack self-awareness. It is not easy humor to watch or enjoy at times, but it is intricate and subtle in a way that some may appreciate, and others may find boring or uncomfortable.

I think there has been a place for Gervais's craft and that it has been interesting to explore. That being said, his work as of late has taken another turn. Gervais lost quite a bit of weight and started to buff up some, supposedly in fear of dying from a heart attack. After he lost weight, he started to attack fat people at every turn. People argue whether or not he truly feels what he is saying or if this is a comedic persona that he has concocted like his other comedy characters as a next step in his "evolution" as a comedian.

To me, it is irrelevant whether this is real or fake, because the underlying reasons for his assault against overweight people would be the same regardless. The truth is that Gervais, like many fat people who have managed to become thin, has lost the weight, but not the self-hate. When he castigates and blames fat people, he's using them as representatives of his former physical self because mentally he remains full of fat person self-loathing. He may also feel the need to keep beating up fat people as a way of beating himself up so that he keeps enough disgust for his former self in place to stop him from regaining weight. If so, his capacity to control himself is being held in place by the weakest of resolve, and he deserves our pity rather than our anger that he abuses us so roundly.

Like many formerly fat people, he has found that losing weight hasn't resulted in self-love, but in continued self-loathing. Since the body in the mirror doesn't match that internal feeling, he has no option but look outside of himself for targets and to use other fat people as representative punching bags. The very sad reality is that when David Bowie sings about the "pathetic little fat man", it was really Gervais saying that to himself, and even though he's no longer fat, nothing has really changed for Gervais in terms of his attitude toward himself. He still hates himself and that is a state which he has grown so accustomed to that the anger has to go somewhere else. His inner voices must be raging critical demons, and they're attacking us in lieu of him.

I talk about Ricky Gervais not because he is famous, but because his life is a public one by choice. It is easy for others to follow my links and see who he is and what he says. I am talking about him because he is an example of something that happens to some fat people when they lose weight when they don't deal with the underlying emotions that they have had for years as abused and tormented people. These people are still around, and they tend to be the sharpest critics of fat people. They're the first to dish out "tough love", talk about "willpower", and point out how you are unwilling to "sacrifice" enough. They need to beat you up because inside they need to keep beating themselves up. They also need to elevate themselves at your expense because inside they still feel inadequate despite their trimmer physiques. Inside, they still are full of anger and self-hate, just like Ricky Gervais.

With incredibly hard work and difficulty, you can eventually whittle your way free of your fat exterior, but it's even harder to lose the fat person mentality. No one exemplifies that better than Ricky Gervais.

My Inner Masochist

The past five days or so have been difficult for me. From a mental point of view, it has felt like a real backslide. I've found myself hungry all of the time, watching the clock to see when I can eat again, and daydreaming about food while I'm working. Part of this, I believe, is biological as it could be PMS. Part of it, however, may be psychological.

Though I can say that I have done a pretty good job of beating back my impulses, the fact that these thought patterns have re-emerged after their having gone blissfully dormant for awhile has disturbed me. I had felt that I'd turned a corner and was living much closer to a "normal" (i.e., non-food-obsessed) existence for once in my life. With all of these mental struggles circling back around, I've been beating myself up for falling back into old patterns.

I have come to wonder if part of the resurgence of these patterns is related to some sort of unconscious need to find a reason to degrade myself. After all, my inner dialog for most of my life has matched the outer responses to my appearance. People let me know I disgusted them, so I told myself I was disgusting. People let me know that I was weak-willed and self-indulgent for wanting to eat too much, so I told myself I was a horrible pig.

Playing these negative inner mantras for myself day-in and day-out for much of my life is probably one of those routines that is hard to break. It is similar to the problems I discussed in my post on redefinition of ones identity. They need to be purposefully replaced with new thought patterns in order to vanquish them. If I do not make a concerted effort, then the vacuum will be filled with the old inner dialog, and that dialog cannot be motivated unless I'm either eating the way I used to or at the very least desiring to eat the way I used to.

What I realized today was that I have been castigating myself over the past few days for a backslide, but not one in which I have been eating too much or off of my desired plan. I've been berating myself for thinking about wanting to eat too often. In the absence of actual behavior to form a self-hating inner monolog, I have found a way to tear myself down for the equivalent of a "thought crime."

All I can conclude at this point in time is that my inner masochist was caught off-guard by the positive normality of my existence for the last several weeks. Since my ability to hold myself in check in terms of outward behavior thwarted some twisted need to hate on myself, I found a way to gratify that need by just thinking about such things.

The truth is that I think I'm not yet ready to love myself, and that deep down I still feel unworthy of anyone's love. The lack of worthiness is not merely rooted in my body (though it has found a way to brilliantly motivate and manifest itself thanks to my body for decades), but in my spirit. I've had so many incredible years of unconditional and oft-professed love from my husband, but that hasn't actually undone the damage to me that was inflicted in my childhood by my parents and those who I grew up around. On some level, I believe I'm duping him or that he loves me because of his greatness as a human being rather than mine. Some part of me still wants to think poorly of myself, and that part is asserting itself rather strongly at this point in time.

Among the many inner dialogs that I must battle to change, this one has been added to the list. If I really want to succeed in mastering my relationship with food, I have to deal with this need to self-hate, or I will find that I'll create reasons to do so. The easiest way to go back to a state of self-loathing is to do what I have always done, and that is something I absolutely do not want to allow to happen.

Still a Freak

At this point in time, I’ve lost about 100 lbs., and I’m happy with all of the changes I’ve made in my life, but there’s no joy that going out in public won’t rob me of. Today, I decided to push my normal amount of exercise a bit and was out walking around on a longer trek than usual and got one of those all too common experiences where someone blatantly stares at me and looks me up and down with a lingering gaze on my stomach. The gaze is always accompanied by wide-eyed incredulity or revulsion.

There’s nothing like being treated like a freak to bring me down when I start to think I'm doing okay. I’ve lost a lot of weight, but in the eyes of the world, I’m just as disgusting as ever.

Is that the baby... ?

When I started doing this, I eased into reducing portions and changing my eating patterns. I also slowly incorporated calorie counting one day at a time. Given my level of emotional and physical dependence on food, I felt that this was pretty much all I could manage. Now, in retrospect, I see that this was a form of systematic conditioning. It was, in layman’s terms, baby steps to a point where I had much better control.

None of this is news, but one thing I sometimes wonder as I follow other people’s diet struggles is why some people take an approach that is so hard for them to sustain. They throw out everything they have been doing and jump onto a “healthy living” kick. While this is really great (and better for you than what I’m doing, I’m sure), I sometimes feel that it increases the chances of failure geometrically.

One case in point that always baffles me is the surrendering of diet sodas (or all caffeine) at the start of a change in eating habits. Diet sodas didn’t make you fat, so why give up sweets, bad carbs, salted snacks, and heavy fat usage and toss the diet sodas into the mix as well? Isn’t it better to give up what you have to to lose weight first and work on losing the artificial sweeteners later? With so much to change in life, it just feels like tossing the baby out with the bath water.

I wonder if the drive to do this is essentially a perfectionist one. It’s not enough to do better, we have to “do it right.” It’s all healthy or all unhealthy all the way. And if we do it wrong, we do it all wrong. It fits in with the “all or nothing” impulses that drive people to see an entire day’s efforts blown if they make one mistake in their diet. You know the deal, you eat three slices of pizza and have already overeaten, so might as well just go nuts and have some candy, etc. You’ll start the next day with a clean slate.

It took me a long time to realize it, but perfectionism is really just another way of setting yourself up to fail. In fact, in retrospect, I wonder if my tendencies in this regard were a way of staying with in a loop of self-loathing. If I set the bar too high, I was bound to fail. When I failed, I hated myself and derided myself for being inadequate in various ways.

I think that part of what makes it hard to change is that we don’t know who we are if we aren’t someone we hate. If we grew up as people who were tormented or made to feel worthless, we may not feel comfortable feeling worthwhile so we become perfectionists so that we can confirm our self-image. “I have no willpower.” “I’m weak.” “I’m disgusting.” Tossing the baby out with the bathwater on the lifestyle change front just might be another attempt to self-sabotage.

A Teardrop

I'm starting to grow increasingly unhappy with my body shape. Because of the unequal distribution of my weight loss, and a belly apron that isn't retracting very quickly due to stretched out skin, I'm starting to feel like I resemble a teardrop in shape.

The belly is definitely the slow mover in my progress and continues to be the focal point of most of my self-loathing. When I catch glances of myself reflected in windows, it looks little different from how it did when I started because it hangs down nearly the same amount. It just doesn't stick out as much and feels softer. I'm thinking that a girdle of some sort is going to be in my future at the rate my skin is going to shrink in my lower body.

Of course, the view isn't helped by the previously posted issue of "clown pants". Seeing my disgusting gelatinous belly apron wobbling around freely in baggy pants really isn't doing much for my self-esteem. It looks like a tent has been pitched over some scary creature that wants to get out.

Serious Self-Loathing and Sex

Occasionally, I'll see a fat girl on T.V., either fictional or a celebrity, who is sassy and self-confident. Most of the time, such women are black. Part of me thinks that these women represent a type of confidence that is worth aspiring to, and part of me thinks that they're not doing other fat girls any favors.

The part that believes they're not doing us any favors is concerned with two aspects. One is that I'm uncertain of the deep sincerity and conviction of their feelings of confidence. Is it really possible to feel that comfortable with yourself at a weight which may be harming your health and certainly is frowned upon by society? It all feels like an act, and it's one I can't even begin to relate to.

The other part of me that feels this isn't helping us is that this image of "I'm fat and I love me, so deal with it," is that it feeds the fires of fat haters who latch onto fat acceptance as a sign of the decay of Western civilization. It's grist for the mill, sauce for the goose, fuel for their fires, etc. While I am in absolutely no way advocating self-loathing or discouraging acceptance of one's imperfections, brassy advertising of being completely happy with one's very fat self seems to be headed too far. The in-between point, where overweight people neither feel a hyper-inflated sense of confidence nor a sense of serious self-loathing would seem to be the resting point.

This issue is on my mind because last night I had a profound sense of crushing self-loathing. I used to have this sense much more often, but it has decreased in frequency as I've gotten older and my standards for my wished-for appearance have gotten less high. That is, I am old enough not to expect to ever be beautiful so I hate the way I am just a bit less.

That being said, an issue came up last night which I try to suppress, and which is very personal. That issue is that my husband does not have intercourse with me. He hasn't for years, and I attribute this to the difficulty of doing so at my current size. It's not that we don't have sexual contact. He's willing to do anything else in terms of touching me and is extremely physically loving and affectionate all of the time. And when I say "all of the time", I mean it with no exaggeration. He hugs me and kisses me at least a half dozen times a day and touches me by tracing his hands over my skin (usually my thighs and buttocks) every night when we lie in bed, sometimes for as long as an hour. He also tells me he loves me several times a day, every day, and says he loves my body whenever I make disparaging remarks about it.

My husband in no way shows any revulsion or lack of desire to touch me and is willing to do whatever he can to make me sexually happy, but we don't have intercourse. He says that this is a confidence issue, and I don't doubt that he has a confidence issue, but I'm also convinced that his problem is directly related to mine. That is, if it weren't so awkward and difficult to have intercourse, he'd be able to manage. It's not that there aren't other ways to have fun, but rather that this issue is directly tied to my body's state in a way that makes me hate myself even more. I feel like this is yet another victim of my eating disorder.

At this point, I'm trying to be patient, but last night I had a huge bout of self-loathing as a result of this. I was angry at my husband at first for not trying, and then turned that anger on myself and blamed myself for everything. I'm still in completely blaming and deeply hating myself mode, but it's slowly starting to fade away. Last night, I truly was a "screaming fat girl" as my inner voice was literally howling in self-disgust and pain.