Today in therapy I talked about the eating disorder that I recently wrote about for In Our Words. My therapist was talking about neurological effects of eating disorders, especially starvation, on the brain. Then posed the question of how much/what damage that did to my developing brain. The frontal lobe is just starting its growth toward becoming fully formed by 25. Hmm. Something to research. I wonder if the malnutrition is one of the reasons my head is so small, too. It's abnormally small.
He wondered aloud at the correlation between eating disorder and substance abuse further down the line. Anorexia is an addiction, it would make sense to have other addiction problems.
The conversation turned to the way my mother treated me during that time, and during the rest of my teenage years. She was controlling and manipulative, she wanted me to depend on her for all my emotional needs when clearly I was trying to differentiate myself from her, which is normal and healthy for a child to want (need) to do. By her not dealing with the eating disorder as an eating disorder, she was making me dependent on her by not getting me outside help. By allowing me to be sick and weak, I had nobody else to turn to but her for anything I needed for survival. She made me more isolated by taking me out of school. She didn't address the other mental health problems that I was having at that time either. I didn't mention this in the piece I wrote for the salon, but during that time I was also extremely agoraphobic, I wouldn't leave the house for weeks. And I was also extremely paranoid. I was terrified of spontaneous human combustion (that I would somehow burst into flames), and of falling into a parallel universe where I would never see my family again (ala this episode of the Twilight Zone I saw as a kid), and I was a hypochondriac. The reason I didn't want to leave my house was because if I died, I wanted to die at home. That is not the sort of shit a 14 year old should be thinking about. I was not being taken care of properly.
He told me today that he thinks I probably have PTSD from all of the things that happened. I've thought that for a long time. He also asked me how it is, dealing with my emotions, without using alcohol to numb myself. I told him that I feel like I am/my brain is waking up. It's an entirely different feeling. At first I felt like an exposed nerve, and very afraid to let myself feel a full range of emotion. But it's a lot better now, and I'm reveling in the intricacy of emotion. I feel alive. And happy to be so.
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