Recovering Old Wounds

My recovery from my achilles surgery is going "much better than average" according to my doctor and physical therapist. I am really flexible and other than some stiff scar tissue around the incision, there's not much I can't do yet. I started relearning how to walk normally because I was still limping as if I had the walking boot on and my therapist noticed I was doing that so that I didn't put any weight on the front of my foot. I was nervous to do it because it hurt a few times when I tried before but now I am doing it despite somw discomfort. My knees and hips are happier with a normal stride. When I saw my doctor for my final post-op appointment yesterday she said she's allowing me to go back to work 4 hours a day for 2 weeks, then I can go back full time. My coworkers are excited but I am going to miss all this low-key time! I did have a chance to get some things done that have been on my mind. One of them came after a day of binge-watching My 600 Pound Life. So many stories have a common theme of struggle UNTIL they see a psychologist. Then they sort through the things that are driving them to want to comfort with food and make a ton of progress. So I journaled myself a therapy session. I thought about all the things that really hurt me from my childhood and made a list of questions about it. For example, a trio of triggers that often show up together are guilt, shame,and feeling like I am a burden. So that's the trigger and here were my questions: What it wants: To make me behave in a way that I think will gain me approval/acceptance/love. How it affects me: Makes me feel embarrassed, crushes my self-esteem, sometimes makes me get defensive and other times I want to cry or hide. Solution when this trigger comes up: Remember my family lineage and all of the ancestors who were brave and whose blood runs through me. Realize that I have a right to take up space and ask things of others. I can speak even if I am not right. Choosing to be on my own side even if I feel no one else is. After doing this for a handful of triggers I realized that many of the "how does it make me feel" categories ended up in "unloved" and then when I wrote the next trigger, rejection, I started weaping. Something really hit me in the gut just writing the word. I started to put the pieces together and realized that most of my triggers can be reduced and encompassed in that one word When someone is degrading you, guilting/shaming you, always telling you you are wrong, making fun of how you look, they are rejecting you. And rejecting feels like you are unlovable to the core when your self esteem is so very broken. Fear of rejection has kept me from speaking when I had something dying to get out of me, It has kept me from standing up for myself and others, it has kept me from establishing boundaries in every single relationship I have had, it has prevented me from trying to get a job I like more (until recently). In my school years, my shyness made me an awkward outcast. I was shy from the verbal abuse my parents doled out, most of the time I wished I could be invisible. Making friends wasn't easy and when I finally did, I tried to hang onto them for dear life. My friends were the first people in my life that lifted me up. For the most part, my fear of rejection in school kept me from being confident and mean kids ate that up. I had my own quirky group of friends but I didn't even try to talk to popular kids because I was sure I'd never fit in, even though my sister was hanging out with cheerleaders and football players and was always surrounded by a big group of friends. Anyway fear of rejection has had a negative impact on my life. This all reminds me of a video I saw last summer where the speaker pointed to the connection between a mother and an infant. The infant relies on the mother for survival and in order for that to work there has to be bonding. If a mother rejects her child she stops holding it, feeding it, basically making sure it's needs are met. So very early in life we understand rejection as a life-threatening thing. As we get older, even if our situation improves, we are still hard-wired to feel that rejection as being a threat to what we want to protect. How spot-on! When I was eight, despite being super active I started getting bigger. I put weight on around my stomach and chest. Little did my mother know that in order to prepare for menses the female body has to have enough fat and often changes hormonally to accomplish this. I remember my mother making comments about my "baby weight" that hadn't gone away yet even though I was clearly not a baby anymore. I was a scrawny kid until then. I remember feeling the negative/degrading air to her talking about my body and thinking on it now I believe that's when I started using food to comfort. Her negativity toward me hit me like rejection and I was that infant afraid it might not get fed. Once the indulgence in food gave me a euphoric escape from my mom's scathing judgement the first time, I was hooked. And I still am. Every challenge or adversity or even celebration...even if I just need something in my day to feel special, I turn to food. I used to think it was funny when someone would say 'food never rejects me' because I never thought about it as the (damaging though it may be) antidote for rejection. It's more clear now. So my goal with uncovering this stuff is to hopefully become more aware when my grabbing or craving food is caused by these/this trigger instead of genuine hunger. I also want to start using mantras to begin to change my inner story and dialog. I know that the reason I have failed to live a healthy life is because of my emotions and outdated beliefs they caused me that I never challenged. I feel this is as important to this journey as any food I put in my mouth, probably even more because when I take the power food has away, eating healthy is easy. That's my suspicion at least. So I am going to cut my own path forward, listening to my own wisdom and stop allowing myself to get all confused by all the diet advice our there. I will share details as I develop my plans more.