The missing piece in western psychology
Is the answer to our pain the reason we go to therapy in the first place?
“What I’m hearing is a lot of grief. I wonder if you wouldn’t benefit from a retreat where you can mourn in the presence of others.”
Chapter names pounce out at me through the window of the Seattle cafe. Readers in fuzzy hats noveling at the intimate details of a marriage gone wrong.
“I think you’d benefit from grief counseling.”
Therapists have a way of cutting through my bullshit. Once again, I feel too seen. It’s unnerving.
It’s been almost three years since our divorce, and two since I published my memoir.
I didn’t plan for the book to be about us—it was meant to be an honest account of my eating disorder. A brutally transparent look into living with mental illness.
Does anyone do the crazy shit I do? Am I really this fucked up, or is no one talking about it?
A decade alone in my thoughts gave me reason to share them. Maybe someone would feel less alone.
“I think you might benefit from grief counseling.”
I’m here for eating disorder therapy, I thought. I’ve been symptomatic and know I need support.
“What’s your goal with recovery?”
I started to cry.
“The last time I went to recovery I really felt like I made long lasting changes to my relationship to food.”
She nodded.
“But my life is still completely dependent on my body. I want to stop placing so much emphasis on my appearance. I want to let go of that as being the most important thing in my life, because I want relationships, and I want love.”
“I’ve been watching a lot of videos about memoirs and self-help books and they say people want stories of how people got better or overcame what they’ve struggled with, so I’ve been trying to incorporate that in there too.”
Randy is a client of mine. We’re working on his own memoir of his experience with bipolar, and he’s in the beautifully brutal part of the process where nothing makes sense, and everything does.
“You know what, that’s true. People do want answers. Of course we do. When we’re struggling we want relief. You know every time I poll my Instagram audience about my weekly newsletters I’ll ask, would you rather I share tips for anxiety or a story about my mental health? And 90% of the time, people vote for tips. But the newsletters I share about tips tank. And honest stories about being in the shit storm do incredibly well.”
He laughed.
“I think this is because we want relief, so what we seek are solutions. We believe and have hope that solutions will relieve the pain. But when we read about someone’s success and the tools they used, we often find ourselves in a state of comparison, shame, or still not-enoughness: these people could do it but I still can’t or haven’t. I’m still less than, I still have work to do, and if this doesn’t work for me or I don’t do it I’m still a failure.
“But we read stories of people who are also struggling, and we actually sigh in relief. We actually feel the sensation of 'I’m ok, I’m not broken, Other people are like me. We seek solutions, but what gives us the relief we seek is relation. Relating heals. Comparison kills.”
We seek solutions, but what gives us the relief we seek is relation.
Relating heals. Comparison kills.
We often think what we’re seeking is an answer.
Perfection. Readiness. But these are prerequisites we place on our path on the way to what we really seek: love. connection. belonging. What would happen if we just started there? What if we didn’t wait for answers? What if we didn’t wait for perfection? What if we didn’t wait until we were ready? What if, today, we just skipped the marketing appetizer we’ve been sold and go straight for the main course?
This is a reminder that bends and fits itself in every narrative of my life. My usefulness on this earth is not boiled down to a how-to: we aren’t problems to solve and I’m not a solution-artist. Nor are my desires in life dependent on being devoid of imperfection.
So often we focus on ourselves—my recovery, my values, my goals, my trauma. But I think this is the glaring hole in western psychology: we are missing the point.
We are missing the reason so many of us want to get well in the first place: Love.
My eating disorder started because I felt unlovable. Unworthy of love. Rejected and abandoned. It’s relational. The disease did the opposite of what I intended to do: it isolated me, alienated me, and constricted my relationships.
Read more about my eating disorder in my memoir “Where the River Flows.”
“My biggest advice,” I said in a podcast interview this week, “which I don’t like giving because we are all different, is get your support team in order. Call a friend. A family member. Tell them you’re scared and excited and ready to work through a trauma. Or finding a therapist for grief. Or joining a meditation group for anxiety. Or dance class for sexual healing. Tell them it will be hard and strange and ask if they’ll support you, or go to a class with you.”
This week I am calling in my support team. Something I would not have done years ago, and something I haven’t done in past iterations of a breakdown like this. Which I believe is why I don’t feel as hopeless. I have people on my side. People backing me up. People who know I’m heading into the belly of recovery, and people who are willing to sit with me when it gets hard, painful, and messy.
People.
I hope you find people. I hope you look for them in messy places. I hope you don’t wait until you’re ready to start the search. We’re waiting, ready to hold you in the scruff.
XX
Rachel
You say that your eating disorder started because you felt unlovable. How did you come to feel unlovable? Might it have had to do with the way you were parented?
Physical, emotional, sexual abuse are not the only ways in which parents hurt their children and leave them with lifelong issues. Intellectually, I know that my parents loved me, but as a child, I felt that I was lovable only when I behaved myself, as that's when my parents were affectionate, calm, and kind. If I made a mess, broke something, left my toys out, or did anything else that upset the balance, I got yelled at (sometimes spanked, not terribly often). Most of all, I got shamed and confused. I felt emotions like anger, sadness, maybe even joy, but was not allowed to express them because that rocked the boat. When my mother was worried, she got angry. When she and my father fought, she gave all of us the silent treatment. How was a young child supposed to understand any of this? All I knew was that losing my parents' love was a risk to be avoided at all costs, so I tried my best to be the girl they wanted me to be. Then, as I grew, I did the same with everyone else.
About a year ago, I came to understand that I have an emotional eating disorder and was fortunate enough to stumble upon the books of Alice Miller. The world and my life (and my husband's and children's lives) look very different now. We've dug into memories that sting with shame or confusion or pain and we allow ourselves to express the emotions we were never allowed to before: with no guilt, no shame, no questions about whether doing so is right or wrong. The body responds to every experience with emotions. They are neither right nor wrong. They just are. Until we understand that and allow our bodies to let go of the pain, anger, fear, sadness, confusion, hate that we still cling to, nothing changes. These emotions just switch places and instead of fearing the loss of our parents' love, we fear the loss of someone else's love or respect, or we fear social situations or food or driving. Just about any substitute will do (yes, drugs, alcohol, sexual perversions).
Every Alice Miller book is worthwhile, but some are more straightforward than others. Right now, I'm finding "Free from Lies" quite helpful. Here's a sample from her website:
"I think that the worst pain we must experience in order to become emotionally honest is to admit that we were never loved when we needed it most. It is easy to say this but it is very, very hard to feel it. And to accept it. To get rid of the expectation that one-day my parents will change and will love me. However, in contrast to children, adults can get rid of this illusion – to the benefit of their health and their offspring.
"People who absolutely want to know their truth can do it. And I do think that these individuals will change the world. They will not be “heroes”, they might be quite modest people but there is no doubt that their emotional honesty will once be able to break down the wall of ignorance, denial and violence. The pain of not being loved is only a feeling; a feeling is never destructive when it is directed at the person who caused the pain. Then even hatred is not destructive as long as it is conscious and not acted out. But it can be very destructive, even very dangerous, for oneself and others, if it is denied and directed at scapegoats."
Remember, Alice is not talking about intellectually knowing that you are loved; she's talking about your body knowing that you are/were loved.