visits to the psychiatrist

The day after, I had the appointment with the psychiatrist. My biggest fear was that he would think I was fat, and tell me he didn’t think I needed help. Instead, he asked probing questions, asked how I felt about certain things at certain times. Because I really want this help for myself, I want to clear these depressive thoughts, I was able to answer. Over the past year I had established many ideas on the creation and evolution of the eating disorder. They included how I wanted my own identity, how I was crying out for help, and how I needed a problem in order to handle my other problems. Interestingly enough he said similar things from what information I had given him about my life in a nutshell. He recognised that although I am an adult now, I am still trying to live out the years I missed because those years were nothing but the eating disorder. He understood that there were many conflicting issues happening in my head. There is the issue of knowing what is right for my body conflicting with the irrational need to look sick, and not be healthy. He recognized my hesitation in trusting people. This is something I had only discovered my self recently, and since then I have been even more wary of people. I explained to him how I often let people into my life, yet somehow they always let me down, and it may be that I just have too high expectations on them. I was relieved when he actually said that he could see why would feel that way. Toward the end of the session he gave a sum up of what he thinks has happened with the eating disorder. He said it has pretty much been a survival mechanism for me. Not physically of course, but more in that I relied on it to get me through problems. Rather than going through problems and becoming tangled in them, I became blind to them and fell to the eating disorder. His goal for me is to create other means in which to handle life, and to sort out the conflicts in my mind.

The second visit

I know he’s a good psychiatrist because it’s the second visit and the second time I have left there feeling depressed. May not sound like a good thing, but it is because it means I am talking about issues that have really bothered me. It took one and a half hours to drive home (because the place is so far away) and I think I cried for most of it.
He mentioned this time my intuition (last week) that the problem was due to feelings I had in my childhood, and he is willing to work with that. This means that for the first time I am being honest in how I felt growing up. And how I felt was lonely. I know that hardly anyone has it easy, and my story is probably a bed of roses compared to others. But it’s not that that counts, it’s how we react in situations, and how we perceived them that matters. As I mentioned before, Mim and I had two completely different perceptions of growing up. We both saw each other as the dream child and as the one mum favoured. I couldn’t see then what mum was really giving me because I guess I had different needs and I could only see that those needs weren’t being filled.
I tend to look for those needs in other people and in other relationships. The psychiatrist pointed out that I often get to a stage in a relationship (friend or other) and I no longer know where my boundaries are. I have a need to be accepted but am unsure how to do that. So I start out the relationship by giving and giving parts of myself and always surrendering to the other person. Then there comes a time when I realise I have needs in this relationship to but don’t know how to get these needs fulfilled. Generally I revert back to the eating disorder because it is the one way to be noticed, then from there I fear I have gone to far and start to distance myself from those people.

Trip 5 to the Psych

I can finally say I am getting somewhere in all of this. I am expressing feelings and events that I have never really felt comfortable before in dealing with. To start this mim and I had one of our best conversations over the past weekend, about mum. Both of us withheld tears as we remembered things that bothered us. A few nights before this I heard the dog running up the stairs (where I am living). The sound was exactly like the noise mum made when she fell over at nights times because she had had too much to drink. It was a pitiful situation, and initially we fell for it and ran to her rescue. In the end it was frustrating, and I felt such an inner anger towards her for doing this. Mim agreed. She recalled endless nights sitting in the lounge room watching television. We were home because we couldn
Talking about this to the psych, and about how I am today I can almost make a connection. It is an ongoing joke here at home about me always being out. I can
It’t be satisfied if a haven’t got a week planned of nights out. A night sitting at home freaks me out to some extent. If I choose to have a night off I can be happy with that, because it is something I want to do. Sometimes I just need to stop and recharge. But other times it is this inner drive to always be doing something. I feel guilty if I am just sitting in my room watching television. I feel as though I need to justify what I am doing so no one thinks I am lazy. It’s like being in my room is a bad thing because that’s how I felt when I was younger. I could never feel comfortable just going into my room to do anything without having reason for why I am doing it. If I was to read a book in my room, it was questioned. Even if I just wanted to sit in there it was questioned. It was almost as if we had to sit in the lounge room because mum wanted and needed our company. ’s a weird feeling that I have all of these angry and upset emotions over just these things when Mim is fine with it all. The psych identified that there is still a part of me that needs to grow and find out who I am because I wasn’t able to do that as a child or teenager. He could clearly see how strongly I felt about all of this and how lost I am now because I just didn’t know how to break away and become my own person. There is more to me, but I don’t know how to find it. I am afraid about exploring that because I don’t know even what I am looking for but I just know part of me is missing. ’t go out, if we did go out there was a guilt trip placed over us. Mim always sat so still, never complained about it. I was always so restless, knowing I could be out doing something. I never sat still, always complained how bored I was. I find out now that Mim hated it as much as I did, except she was able to lose herself in a little dream world and accept it for what it was.