The Monday Messy
The Pause: how we build trust in the middle.
Once a day, I come to this spot and I cry.
I don’t think I’m depressed. I know depression. I know bottles of empty wine and empty cereal boxes. I know broken mirrors and closed curtains. I know bruised thighs and swollen cheeks. This isn’t that. Right?
Still, I feel an impending sense of doom. Like everything is falling apart. As if the work I’ve done to finally feel safe in my body is crumbling, and the patterns I constantly find myself in will always be there.
How do I stop abandoning myself? How do I stop hurting myself? How do I stop shoving myself back in the dirt, and let myself tread long enough to finally form a path more familiar than this one?
Sometimes I think I’m the most abusive person I’ve ever been in a relationship with.
Life gets good for a while, and then I go and do something stupid to shatter my joy. When everything is shattered, I berate myself for being so stupid. I curse at my body in the mirror. I look for ways to put the pieces of what’s been shattered back together, and in the looking I promise myself I’ll never do this again.
For a while I externalized this part of myself. It was my Eating Disorder—a part of me that promised happiness. A part that promised peace. Love. Attention. Respect. All the things I desired but didn’t know how to ask for or give myself. She was the one tormenting me—not me, her.
This helped. To externalize her. To remove the cruel voice from my own thoughts and imagine her as something or someone else. It was easier to lose her this way. To ask her to fuck off. To remember it wasn’t me was broken or bad, it was that I was infected by a disease that tried to trick me into believing that my life would somehow magically transform if I was thin.
But what about the voice that tells me I’m worthless? That convinces me to drink alone and internet stalk my ex-husband’s new girlfriend? That hits and bruises me then promises the next morning to never hurt me again? Is that my Eating Disorder? Another part of me I haven’t figured out yet? Or is it just me?
I finally trusted myself, and still some inner bitch was like, “nah let’s shatter that.”
Last month I came to Scotland with a one-way ticket on a gut feeling. A gut feeling. This is probably one of those stupid somethings I do to shatter my joy. After 6 months in Mexico, I was ready for a change. I wanted to find somewhere quiet, somewhere secluded, somewhere free from distraction to work on my next book.
After a rather rocky summer and bout of depression (yes, a real bout this time), I’d finally found stability. And dare I say, joy. Life felt stable. Balanced. For the first time in my life, I’d developed self-trust.
“This might sound strange, but I don’t think I’ve actually trusted myself since I was a little girl,” I told my therapist in September.
“I finally, really trust myself. And even though I’ve loved myself and felt compassion towards myself, this feels like it was the missing piece.”
Self-trust was huge for me. As someone with a history of binge-eating, binge-drinking, self-sabotage, perfectionism-driven burnout, and a general theme of not finishing what I start out of fear and self-doubt, trusting myself felt like a joke.
How could I trust myself to not binge again when over a decade of history tells me it’s a-definitely-gonna-happen? How could I trust myself to “only have one drink” when literally every time I’ve said that, I have 4-10? I couldn’t.
I started a practice of “keeping promises to myself” (I have a free journaling template on my website if you want to try it). Every morning, I’d write down a promise I wanted to keep, and why it was important. This actually helped, because throughout the day when I’d find myself “just wanting one glass of wine” or noticed the urge to turn on Grey’s and open a box of cereal (the way most of my binges start), I’d remember my why, and I’d actually pause.
The Pause: how we build trust in the middle.
Pausing before action was something I knew I needed to do (I’d learned about The Pause in therapy ages ago, but struggled to implement it). The idea is to give yourself 5 seconds between urge and action, and pause.
The Pause is hopefully enough space between thought and behavior to choose differently. To sit in that middle space between the angst and the branch we always reach for. To hold the tension there and be brave enough to ask, “is there another way?”
A client of mine talked about The Pause in our session a few weeks ago. She struggled with reaching for sugary foods in moments of overwhelm and was looking for a way to stop this pattern. Not because she wanted to lose weight or felt shame about eating the sugar—it wasn’t about the food. Spoiler alert: it never is.
“I just wish I could keep those commitments I make. I wish I would do the things I say I’m going to do—not for other people—for myself. I want to stop this because every time I don’t, I feel that I’ve let myself down. Why do I do that? Why don’t I show up for myself like I do for everyone else in my life? And why does it feel so hard?”
We talked about self-compassion. How it’s great in theory and can be effective. But how sometimes it’s not enough, because as kind as we can be to ourselves in the wake of self-sabotage, self-betrayal, or self-harm, we are still hurting ourselves. I wouldn’t compassionately comfort someone else for hurting me, so why on earth are we prescribed compassion after hurting ourselves?
I’m not suggesting additional harm. Self-flagellation for hurting ourselves is just harm upon harm. What I am suggesting, though, is that self-compassion is step one, and we need a step two. Because if we truly loved ourselves, if we truly had compassion for our pain, we would also seek ways to stop the harm. To intervene at the source and ask, “how can I, with the utmost kindness and forgiveness to myself for past harm I’ve done to me, do better? Because I deserve better, and I damn well am not going to do less than best for myself anymore.”
This, to me, is self-love.
Self-love is not acceptance without action. Self-love is not compassion without courage. Self-love is radically acknowledging who and where we are at every juncture of life and daring to ask, “what step do I need to take next?”
When I go to the cliffs and cry, it’s not because I’m depressed. It’s because I stopped daring to ask what step to take next. I stopped acting with courage. I stopped pausing, and started letting myself get away with harming without repair. Instead of sitting in the middle of the discomfort and choosing something different, I closed my eyes and let myself skip the middle part.
I’m not depressed, I’ve lost my trust.
And it’s time to build it back. In the middle, one pause, one step at a time.
Did this resonate? Spark questions? Disagree? Leave a comment and let’s discuss! This is a safe and open space to dialogue about these topics. Let’s get into the mess of it.
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