Learning to Listen.
It doesn’t take a background of abuse to experience a strained relationship with your body.
It doesn’t take an eating disorder to make you realise that your definition of “health” might be wrong, or that it might even be tyrannical.
My path to knowing my body and pursuing nourishment has been dramatic and maybe even extreme. It doesn’t take anything so extreme, though, to find yourself chasing ideas of “health” that aren’t intuitive or nourishing. There is counterintuitive teaching and misinformation everywhere; from the public crash diets on The Biggest Loser, down to a loving parent struggling to lose “baby weight”, demonstrating the diet-failure cycle to her growing child. It takes a lot of effort to swim against that tide.
Three and a half years ago, at age 21, I was diagnosed with PTSD, which marked the beginning of me realising that my early life was not “healthy”. Growing up, my whole concept of “health” had been filtered through the dysfunctions of my upbringing. I have spent most of the last few years learning how much I don’t know, and what I missed out on; at the same time, realising that somewhere underneath the mixed and blatantly incorrect messages I had been fed, that I still had the right instincts to nourish myself.
This is the story of how I taught myself self-care. To me, that is now the only positive way to define the pursuit of health.
As a child, teenager and young adult, I was psychologically abused, frequently in the language of my body. Physical humiliations, having clothing stolen, or being called fat, awkward, smelly, uncoordinated. Physical abuse was enacted against my body in creative and unusual ways. To cope, I’ve had eating disorders most of my life. I ate compulsively from ages 6-11, had subclinical anorexia from 11-13 (I just didn’t eat for days at a time; somehow the weight never disappeared) and bulimia from age 15 years. As a child, I was encouraged to “eat healthy”, to “be healthy”, but at the same time there was always junk food hidden in the high cupboards I couldn’t reach, which was not for me. I explicitly wasn’t allowed, and told I didn’t deserve it. Instead of being taught to eat nourishing food until I was full, I was taught a complex method of ranking the worth of human’s lives modelled on what they were “allowed” to eat. That sense of forbiddenness in food, of the seeming anorectic pleasure in denial followed by extreme permissiveness, was internalised very early on.
I was encouraged to believe that there were universal truths about myself that made me bad. It followed that I was not permitted sensory pleasure, relaxation, or even happiness. I believed, and had been taught, that if I was to be happy, I had to pursue that through denying my needs. As a young adult, I pursued academic excellence by denying myself sleep and rest, and entered into abusive relationships where what I needed or wanted was never a consideration. I alternated between extreme purging and restriction, and unmitigated binges when I could not hold myself to unearthly ideals of denial.
Somehow I had to seek redemption, not only by not listening to myself, but by explicitly denying my desires.
Years on from realising that I was living my life in that way, I am still very much on the path to eating disorder recovery. It is entwined with my recovery from PTSD, and I’m not sure that either of them will ever be something I’m completely over, and it may be that recovery is a life’s work. Central to my recovery is that I have had to learn the foreign language of my own body and instincts, to learn to trust them, and to act on what they genuinely need.
Every time I try to listen and learn from my body, I try my best to ignore everything I have been told about it. All judgements, rules, preconceptions.
I then take some deep breaths, and put my attention into my body. Not quite meditatively, but enough to feel the experience of the moment I am in.
Then, I ask only questions. What is going on here, in my body? What would help? How does my arm feel now? My stomach? Do I like what is happening, or what has just happened? What am I missing? What are my emotions, and how do they relate to what my body is experiencing?
This isn’t something I remember to do all the time. It’s something that I perhaps started off doing a few minutes a week, then forgetting for a few months, then remembering again, then doing intensively for a fortnight before abandoning it as “useless”, and finally finding my way back to after a flirtation with older, more toxic ways of thinking and being. Recently, I forgot about it for about four months, experienced a crashing relapse where I somehow joined a gym (I hate gyms) and cut out carbs (I love carbs). I’m back now though, and overall the three and a half years of learning to listen has yielded many small, valuable discoveries, which form a growing collection of knowledge about what constitutes care for MY self according to MY own needs.
Listening to my body involves not treating it as the opponent of my mind, but recognising that my body and my soul are intertwined, as are their needs. It involves recognising what I need and what helps me; such as that I need private space and quiet, and that when I binge that is usually what I am craving. That carbs are not the enemy, and I’m allowed to like brown rice. That I naturally crave more food in the evenings, and that I don’t need to fear that. That walking and dancing are how my body prefers to move, and running feels more like torture. That I need to be creative to feel whole and healthy. Each of these fragments forms an important piece of what health, self-care and nourishment means to me.
The most important part is what I do with that information. Not only do I (try to) listen, I put it into action. Do I want something sugary? Then I will eat it. Am I tired? Then I will sleep. The struggle comes when I can’t act on the messages from my body, such as when I want to rest but I have work that cannot be put off. It’s very hard then to not go running back into the arms of old, outdated body torture practices, like extreme caffeine abuse or disordered eating. Overall, it’s about trusting the trend, and making sure that the trend is running the right way. Living with mental illness teaches patience like that; I may not be able to fix everything right now, but I can try to find a temporary solution to this one small thing, and that is good enough.
Ultimately, knowing what is nourishing to me, and what is not, is not something I’m ever going to be finished with. It’s a life’s work to learn to listen, and to act in tune with what I really feel and want. But then, health is not something with an end goal. We might pursue it, but it’s not a destination that can be reached. It’s a process and an attitude, a way of being that involves emotions as much as science. It might be tough work, but it’s still a joy to have found that path. It is its own reward.
–Lauren
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