The precious gift of therapy

For a very long time, I rationalized a lot of my behavior as just being “quirky”. After a great deal of education and therapy, I have come to accept that I have what are called “comorbidities”. That’s just a fancy term for having a disease related to or because of a primary disease. Grasping this reality and deeply exploring it has been a grueling but rewarding journey for me.

I started regularly seeing a therapist in June 2016. I was starting to see some harmful behavioral patterns in my life. I suspected that my issues were intertwined in some way, but I had NO idea just how co-dependent my maladies were on each other until I sought therapy. Therapy has been one of the best gifts that I have given to myself.

My first inkling into needing therapy was my persistent battle with depression. I have suffered from depression to some degree for most of my life. Reading my childhood diaries has confirmed that and things have only deteriorated over the years. The other matter that has been a lifelong struggle is my fight with obesity. I initially started therapy because I wanted to explore those two aspects of my behavior. I thought that they were the two outstanding problems I was having and that they were not related to one another. I went into therapy thinking that my therapist would deal with one problem, solve it, and then we’d move on to the other.

I participated in therapy once before, from 2011-2012. I somewhat knew what to expect. Back in those days, I had been diagnosed with “adjustment disorder with depressed mood”. In layman’s terms: I don’t handle change well and I get depressed when it happens. During those therapy sessions, I had a significant change, spiraling me into depression. But, I didn’t truly see that this was my diagnosis in action. I mocked this diagnosis until a move to a new town in February 2014. As my depression increased, something else started changing. I had always enjoyed sweets, but after 2 or 3 days in my new town and at my new job, I realized that a complication was developing- I was stopping on the way home for a milkshake every day. Soon, I was stopping for fatty, greasy, or sweet fast foods on the way to work, during lunch, AND on the way back every day. I now realize that I was soothing my anxiety with foods that numbed me. The stress of driving in frantic traffic in an unfamiliar town to a job that I didn’t enjoy triggered my anxiety. Certain foods were helping me cope with the anxiety. When I suffered from my depressive episode in 2012, I had the opposite reaction and couldn’t eat. I lost about 50 pounds in a little over one year. By 2016, I had gained back all but about 20 pounds of that.

The biggest lesson that I have learned through therapy is just how entwined my behaviors are. My depression fuels my eating disorder. My eating disorder triggers my depression. My OCD powers my obsessive thoughts. My obsessive thoughts are usually about things that ignite my depression, my eating disorder, my low self-esteem, my low self-worth, low self- confidence, or all of those. My anxiety is the thread that ties all of my behaviors together.

As I’ve progressed through therapy, my world has been both turbulent and serene at the same time. I’m uprooted each time I’m confronted with one of my truths. I am also relieved to get my challenges out into the open so that I can start the work of revising them. My therapist has told me that I am very “aware”. That is true and I’ve earned that through honest introspection, research, patience, and practice. But, being aware of something doesn’t always mean that I know how to change it. Sometimes, I can only recognize and accept it at that moment. I have to constantly remind myself that merely being open to exploring is the first step towards unearthing a precious treasure.