I came across a post from someone I follow on Instagram and the caption said something to the effect of “Why you are still holding on to your overshoot weight…” When I say bells went off in my head a millions times over, I’m not exaggerating. At this point, I’m just over 2 years into recovery (2 years and 5 months) and I still have ALL of my overshoot weight. So this point was of particular interest to me.
I’m summarizing and missing some important parts, but the gist of it was that there is a REASON why my body does not feel safe to release the weight. There is an emotional cause. My overshoot weight is still somehow serving me. What do I think my body perceives that would happen, a negative thing, if it were to allow me to release the weight? Or what is something bad that is currently happening that it feels it needs protecting from.?
I now need to take action to show my body that the “bad or negative things” will not happen anymore and that I will protect my body from it happening in the future. It’s not enough to just know the “why”, I have to be ready to take action in order to fully heal.
It took me a couple of months (YES, months!) to realize that I think my body is holding onto overshoot for one and ONE reason only – I’m still in my abusive marriage. For the longest time I convinced myself that I could do the inner work in understanding and healing my childhood trauma while still in my marriage. I also felt that growing and understanding WHY I was drawn to my abusive husband and how this attraction was formed in childhood would somehow make my life suddenly easier.
I’m stuck. I’ve felt stuck for a while. And it has nothing to do with my body, but in a way it does. Let me explain. I am FULLY healed from my eating disorder. There is absolutely no restriction of ANY kind; either physical or mental. I have made peace with all foods. And, to tell you the truth, food often bores me most of the time. I simply see it as a way to fuel my body. While sometimes it does give me some enjoyment, my day to day food choices are very boring and not exciting at all. Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the food I am choosing to have in that moment, but the surge of dopamine I used to get from certain foods is gone. It is quite boring. So boring that I often get annoyed with having to eat at all (not like being mad at my body for being hungry, but annoyed that I have to prepare food to eat, ha).
The physical side of healing is still in limbo. I’ve spoken in the past about the weight set point theory and how, according to the medical experts, it could take anywhere from 3-5 years for my body to settle into its set point. I could stay exactly how I am today (which is exactly the same weight I was 2+ years ago, within 4 lbs!) or I could gain more (which I doubt at this point unless I start going through perimenopause) or I could lose weight. All of which are happening without me really caring about the outcome. But, that outcome is REALLY important to my body. And I was getting feelings about WHY it was.
So, if you recall, the last straw with my husband was when he called me “ugly, fat, disgusting, repulsive and unattractive” after I gained my anorexia recovery weight. It was the cumulation of almost 2 decades of abusive that just ended in an explosion of fireworks. He was spewing hate, venom and utter disgust that I even had the audacity to exist in this world looking the way I did. This wasn’t a complete stranger, this was the man who claimed that I was the “love of his life”. That was traumatic as FU*K. Like, life changing, nervous system vibrating at all levels, telling me to wake the hell up from the nightmare kind of trauma. It rocked me to my core. I didn’t realize HOW much until I tried to process everything.
After a year or so working with my therapist she pointed out to me that I knew, in my heart, that I was ok the way I was. I knew, in my heart, that I was worthy of existing in this world. That my husband was not a safe person to trust and that I did not and should not value his opinion of me. But whenever I would do affirmations work, when I tried EMDR, when I tried somatic work, my body always came back to that event.
And finally, FINALLY, I realized that I could do ALL the therapy in the world, I could do ALL the trauma work in the world, I could do ALL the new age healing that existed. But, as long as I was still in his presence, there is NO WAY my body would ever release the overshoot (if there was any to release at all). I realized that seeing him every day was just my body’s reminder of how he felt about me. I was choosing to be in the presence of someone who truly hated me to the point that he didn’t think I even deserved to be alive in my current body.
It took me a while to admit that I couldn’t have it both ways – I couldn’t stay in my marriage AND expect my overshoot to release. There is NO WAY, after my body put in all the hard work it did to heal and recover that it was going to release ANY overshoot while I was still living in the environment that caused me to become a full-blown anorexic in the first place. As my body should – as she should. Her job is to survive and protect me from pain. So right now, I am making a choice. I am choosing to stay in my marriage, live in the same house as my estranged husband – knowing that my overshoot will NOT release. I am choosing my children over myself right now, and I know that I should be choosing myself. My husband wouldn’t hesitate to choose himself over the wellbeing of his children. But my end game here is to break the generational trauma. Right now, our household is not particularly traumatic. My husband (was forced) to take on his fair share of the household duties (only because I told him he could either pay someone to do it or do it himself) AND because I am so fine tuned to covert abuse, I can call out his behavior almost instantaneously and remove myself from the situation.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to stay here forever – I will be leaving him. But for now, I have both of my children in therapy to help manage their day to say stress and it helps them to have another adult who is healthy, safe and emotionally available. If at any time I get any feedback that my husband’s words and actions are beginning to hurt them, I will leave immediately. But for now, they have a stable home, my husband and I are communicating effectively, the verbal abuse has stopped (for now – I am VERY aware it can return at any time, with a vengeance). I have a plan in place to leave at any time. I have funds tucked away, I have a place to go and I’m finally at a place in my recovery where I’ve been thinking about going back to school to get a Master’s. So things are finally looking up and up…..