doo doo butt therapy
As an avid hater of dialectical behavior therapy(DBT), it pains my soul to say that I use DBT on a daily basis. I’m continually telling myself that things will get easier when I accumulate positive experiences. Or that things will feel less anxiety provoking if I check the facts. I tend to disregard mindfulness as its become a wellness buzz word instead of a therapeutic practice but needless to say, I’m actively engaging in one of the modules constantly.
However, I’ve recently found a slight flaw in my DBT usage. I have found that eating disorder treatment might have caused me to be overly reliant on DBT techniques leading me to even more emotional distress. I mean lets be real here if anyone was going to overly engage in something good and turn it into something bad, we all knew it was going to be me.
Let me explain.
The initial shock that institutionalizing yourself to learn how to eat again doesn’t automatically cure an eating disorder is a lot, but you learn to make peace with it as time goes on. Chances are, if you’ve been in treatment, you’ve heard that your disorder might not ever go away but it will get easier to deal with. A win for the disorder, an agonizing thought for your healthy self. So from there, DBT teaches you how to cope ahead. You grow very accustomed to playing scenarios out in your mind and preparing for the worst. How will you handle it when you get asked to dinner? What will you do if you’re at a friends house and they want to eat ice cream? What will happen if the clouds fall out of the sky, we find out they were made of whipped cream all along, and the only way to go anywhere is to eat your way through them?
It might sound crazy but the fake scenarios we work through to learn about coping ahead can get pretty preposterous. Like sure, I’d be terrified, but I’m not really sure that Marsha Linehan was thinking about eating her way through a cloud of whipped cream when she created the curriculum for coping ahead.
Unfortunately, all the planning for things that could very well never happen has spilled over into my life outside of anorexia. Being someone with an addictive personality, seldom do I do things, good or bad, in moderation. Because I know that my eating disorder might always make my life feel really hard, I assume all of my life will be hard. Where I have learned to plan for the absolute worst possible eating scenarios, I have also learned to plan for the worst possible scenario in any part of my life. I feel like I have to be ready for the next painful thing so I feel heartache before I even need to. I feel let down by people who haven’t done anything because I’m so busy preparing for things to go wrong. I’m losing faith in others and pushing people away over “what if” situations.
This is one hundred percent my fault. I’m not blaming treatment or DBT but I am trying to process how interesting the DIALECTIC is that coping ahead can be so beneficial but also so detrimental.
As I learn moderation and I learn to be okay, I’m trying to learn that I don’t have to plan for everything. I don’t have to assume that pain is going to come. Ironically, I can check the facts and know that things aren’t always going to hurt me. I can be mindful of what is going on without having to fixate. And I can know that I will be okay if I’m not prepared for every last possible outcome.
