Tuesday 15 March 2011

moderation...

 there is, so i am told, a concept that is commonly known as 'moderation'.  i have to be honest that i am not personally familiar with this concept, i am told that this is something that some people practice, i believe it will by now be obvious that i am not one of them.  dichotomy is something i am familiar of, i can do 110% or 0%....this has problems but it also has gains which is really where the problem comes.  society loves 110%, whilst you are in 'all' mode, you will be rewarded and for people like myself, that is very very appealing.  unfortunantly consistency is also a key concept and that is something i can't really balance....balance is also a key word, again not something i am so familiar with.
 as a child and as a teenager, being able to completely submerse myself in work gave me an out from a life i felt increasingly unhappy with, it divorced me from a self that i despised and numbed me from feelings that were incresingly unmanagable.  food, rituals and obsessions gave me the out that i desperately needed in order to survive.  being able to have that level of obsession can be extremely productive externally, however it becomes incresingly corrosive internally.  i found this out too late and by 15 i experienced my first nervous breakdown.  i took the idea of starting early with revision to a whole new level, a level all of my own.  when the teachers said it was important to give 100% they did not expect it to be taken quite as literally as i was capable of doing.  i had a deep felt sense that i was less clever than other people therefore to make up for this i needed to work considerably harder, which i did....i worked and worked and worked. i got results the teachers were thrilled with, i was ambivilent about (no result would ever be good enough), i then crashed and burned.
 i have spent the last 8 years trying to make sense of something that makes no sense and some thing that makes complete sense, a different kind of dichotomy but dichotomy nonetheless.  i have never recovered, i didn't learn and i have continued to employ these mechanisms to greater and greater extent...always an external obsession, never the actual cause of the distress, a distraction at best.
can you learn moderation...or is it only something you can achieve when you are no longer trying to escape something you don't know any other way of escaping?

Thursday 3 March 2011

hermit....

increasingly i feel that the hermit lifestyle is calling to me....now i just need to find somewhere in the middle of no where.  it's somewhat of a challege to be a hermit in a flat in the centre of a very small town, why is it i now have the 'cheers' soundtrack starting in my head?!  frightening, possibly even more frightening than having to face people at the moment...
people frighten me, i like them at a distance, well maybe only if they are attractive and amusing (i'm thinking sue perkins although i wouldn't say no to stephen fry or sir robert winston....)
ok, i should explain the stephen fry and sir robert winston comment.  i believe a marriage to them would be as close to perfect dammit.  both are hugely engaging in a very intense and hugely intelligent way, i would always have great bedroom conversation and in the case of stephen fry, both of us would encourage the other to cheat....in my head probably the only way i could survive in a marriage to a man...plus i can tell you in the case of robert winston, when i saw him at the cheltenham science festival thank god the tent was in the way else i would have jumped him.  in that case it was a lucky escape for the both of us (and saved me from notoriety and potential arrest, neither of which are particularly condusive to being a hermit) especially given that i had just had a long and very public argument with a leading dr from the maudsley hospital in london on his frankly cultish faith in CBT in relation to the treatment of OCD....CBT being what prozac was to the psychiatric community in the early 90's...psychiatry lives on blind faith (and plenty of money to heat their swimming pools) and given the suspicious circumstances that they produce their statistics on CBT (only the people who fully cmplete the 'course' of CBT are included in the statistics, only the people who are deemed as highly likely to be a sucess story are allowed to finish the course of CBT treatment)...suspicious i think....maybe i'm just a cynical and nasty little borderline.....i'll let my other parts of self be the judge of that i think.
anyway, so back to the hermit idea.  i rather fancy a tree house, i don't really know why i have such a fixation with a treehouse but i think it's probably a more bohemian slant of the idea of a castle with a moat and drawbridge.  that and i can have a postal address of a treehouse which has to be every child's dream and lets face it, my inner child is in charge most of the time.
ah dreams, surely the only plus side of being an adult is that you can actually achieve the dreams you had as a child, some dream of fame and fortune, me i dream of living half way up a tree and permanently confusing royal mail....

false hope or realism?

i (nowadays reluctantly) go to an ED support group of carers and sufferers.
last night it got me thinking. when dealing with an ED is it better to give a message full of hope but often false and unreal, or is it better to give a more accurate depiction of what someone at the beginning of their ED (or their carers) are likely to face?
or do carers and sufferers actually need different slants, different approaches?

for me, i find it far more comforting to have someone talk about what i am actually experiencing no matter how bleak it is, i do think hope is important. the unit i just came out of always said they would hold the hope for us whilst we weren't able too which i appreciated so much. however they also felt that it was really important to acknowledge and validate what it was you were experiencing at the moment (it's a DBT way of dealing with someone).
however the group i go to often undermines sufferers experiences when they aren't positive. they will often cut them off at the end and say 'however on a more positive note....' whilst i compleatly understand why they do that i don't believe it is always helpful and i think the hope they try and impart is often based on so little truth.
is it better to be falsely hopeful? or is being prepared of what you are likely to encounter at the same time as showing that you can survive it a better way forward?