I can’t remember where I first stumbled across this term. I think it may have been on a mental health community Facebook page. “Doughnut” was used to describe the feeling of being hollow and empty inside – the feeling of a void that won’t go away.
Today was a doughnut day. I felt as if I was walking at work frozen. I don’t know why this should particularly have been today. I had a nice day on Saturday with a very good friend whom I hadn’t seen for quite some time. Yesterday I was ill with a virus but I slept a lot and caught up on rest.
I felt so dragged down by this aching emptiness that I was exhausted. My brain would not “go” properly and I felt as though I was fighting through water to speak to anyone. All I wanted was to go home and hide and curl up under my blanket. I desperately wanted a hug and someone to tell me it would be alright.
I was angry with myself because the slightest task should not seem so hard and because I should just be able to get on with things, and because trying to fight through the water was making me irritated. I don’t do irritated, or anger, without punishing myself.
I’m really missing someone I care for very much, who I think no longer wants to know me. Perhaps that’s part of it.
I’ve been talking with a couple of people recently about eating disorders, eating difficulties and weight. Also, a kind reader commented that it was of interest to read a previous post in which I discussed some of the ways in which eating / not eating was (and at times still is) a coping strategy for me – a harmful one, but nevertheless a way of coping with something even more terrible to me than the eating disorder itself. I’d been planning to write more on this at some point and these comments have encouraged me to post on this topic now.
There are a couple of points I wish to make clear in this introductory chapter and I would be very thankful if readers would visit here before reading any of the other chapters in this Series.
Firstly, I want to make it explicit that my intention in this post (indeed any post on this blog) is not to promote eating disorders, food restriction, purging or any of the actions or thought processes that form part of them. This post and this blog are not “pro-ana”, “pro-mia” or for “thinspiration”. These terms are painful to me to write because I know just a little of the raw emotions and suffering that go along with them, for those struggling and their loved ones. I hope that there is nothing in this post that would come across as promoting starvation. Though it is something we may use to try to cope, it does immense physiological and psychological harm to us and I really, really hope that readers suffering in this way are able to get regular, face to face, professional medical and psychological help and support. I know how hard it can be to access that, both because of how hard it is to ask for help and because there may be so little specialist treatment available, with such limited criteria to access it. This is really painful and it’s a topic I will write on during the course of this Series.
In these posts I discuss and share my personal past and current experiences and feelings. Almost certainly they are not the same as those of the next person who has/had eating difficulties (although some of the themes I’ll explore I have heard other people with eating disorders talk about as well). I think it is important not to be afraid to discuss the reality of eating disorders and how they affect someone across their life – that is, across all areas of their life and often across many years as well. I think part of not being afraid and being able to find a way to recover from disordered eating is acknowledging this impact and the factors which may have been involved in the disorder taking hold and continuing.
Part of this process, for me at least, involved admitting that not eating, purging and so on and the state I attained through these things, did serve a purpose. Perhaps that is horrible and shocking. Possibly it is no longer as horrible and shocking to me as it might otherwise be, because I have gone through years of difficulties with eating, weight and body shape myself and I have also known many people with severe eating disorders. However, I do know, and share the feeling in myself, that it is a very sensitive topic.
I hope that acknowledging the purpose and even “need” for something that the disorder gives in a sufferer’s life, is a way to begin to understand the person and what will help them best to heal and walk the path of recovery. I believe that unless we find another way of reaching what the eating disordered state provided, or an alternative means of living, it is completely impossible to break out of the disorder to continue to exist without it.
The second thing I want to make explicit at this stage is that by talking about a “need” for something the disorder gives, I do not wish to imply any blame on the sufferer (or anyone else) or that it is anyone’s fault or choice to be ill. I state vehemently that it is my belief that nobody with an eating disorder chooses to be ill or should be blamed for it. I believe we are incredibly hurt in a way even deeper and harder than the disorder itself shows.
It is cruelly true that whilst there is no choice or fault in the illness, great strength is needed in the sufferer to contemplate breaking out of it and reaching for another way of living.
I am not yet sure quite how long this Series will be and I am open to any questions or comments readers may have. I would love to hear from you. Especially as this is so sensitive a topic, I would really appreciate you asking any questions on things that are not clear or you sharing your own experience and thoughts, which likely will be very different from mine.
Please do leave messages or questions in the “Comments” section. Sometimes I am slow to respond to comments because I have poor internet access and I am very sorry for this. I am not deliberately ignoring you when it seems that I take a long time to approve a comment or reply. I do read all you say and I am very thankful that you take the time to visit this blog and to write. I hope that soon in the New Year I will be able to set up better internet access and thus reduce these delays.
As always, thank you for reading.
Ginny xx
P.S. The title of this series was inspired by The Killers’ song “Dustland Fairytale”. I In the final chapter I will explain the meaning I intended behind the title.
Somewhere in the dark, his words cut the silent night –
“Take my hand, for the Child that you carry is God’s own,
And though it seems the road is long,
We’re not that far from Bethlehem.”
(Hopefully the above link works. It’s supposed to link to a video for the Christmas carol “Not that far from Bethlehem” by Point of Grace – see the footnote!)
It’s just a week til Christmas. I have very confused feelings around this time of year. Advent has passed so very quickly. It’s a time I really wish everything would slow down. I struggle all the more with relationships, especially in the family, and the knowledge that I am not what I should be is all the more painful. This must be normal for everyone, to some extent, I think. I think the more expectations there are, the more distance and emptiness hurts.
Feeling so weak, though it’s one of the most (if not the most) abundant times of hope and grace. It’s the time that Our Lord Jesus came to us, to love and heal and forgive us. It’s the root of our faith. Yet, this time of year it’s harder day to day and I feel all the more that I’m failing precisely because of my fear and emptiness.
Prayer and hope can seem nearly impossible and just as I feel a terrible darkness that seems to black out everything else when I’m distressed about interpersonal relationships, losses and so on, in the same way I can enter this state if I start to fear my God. The faith that at other times sustains me becomes a source of utter pain, “knowing” that I’m bad and can never be “enough” or with Him.
I start to make my God a sort of compilation of all the terrors and obsessional thoughts in my head, making God a punishing judge, who is angry with me and knows I am evil inside and cannot wait to punish and reject me for it.
This is so very dangerous. God is not the sum of my fears. My relationship with God does not depend on my thoughts, fears, hallucinations and sickness. When I read God’s Word in the Bible, He tells me that “perfect Love casts out fear”. He does not say we must be enough, but only “come to Me”. He does not say we must perfect ourselves to earn His love, but “you did not choose me but I [Jesus] have chosen you” and that we love because He loved us first and lifted us up in His arms.
So, this time of year, I try to answer His gentle voice, “come”. In prayer, I meditate upon drawing close to Jesus, Mary and Joseph at the stable in Bethlehem that first Christmas. Jesus Christ, who is all Love, is come to us as a helpless little baby, to share with us every joy, every suffering, every need, every feeling. He chose a young and poor woman, to be his Mother and to answer “yes” to God’s call, and through her “yes” and through her body, He came into the world. He was born in the “stable so bare” as the carol says, laid in a manger. He did not ask riches or a palace or great astounding things. He asked only love and a place in our hearts.
As Christ was born in that poor empty stable at Bethlehem, so He will come into our poor empty hearts. It does not matter if my heart is empty – there is the more space there for him to fill. It does not matter that I feel I have nothing to give him. A baby asks nothing but love and to be with us always. So does the Christ Child. He will fill my heart and He will be everything I am not. No amount of pain that I may feel can change that.
So I say yes, and in prayer and meditation I kneel close to the manger, and I wait and watch and hope and rejoice, with Mary and St Joseph. There we gather united with everyone who struggles, longs and hopes. However dark it seems, however long this road is, even in the midst of this most awful pain, we can never be far from Bethlehem.
We’re not that far from Bethlehem, where all our hope and joy began
For in our arms we’ll cherish Him,
No we’re not that far from Bethlehem.
Lyrics and score by Point of Grace – film extracts from “The Nativity” – with thanks to Crisen de Guzman for the video – all rights belong to the respective artists
please read the Introduction to Walking this Borderland before this or any other post in this Series. Thank you.
When I feel the compulsion to do something to hurt myself I find it very hard to resist and do something else to cope with the feeling or the desperate need to obey the voices in my head telling me to punish myself.
On the occasions I have a little bit of control, I sometimes say to myself, “Wait 5 minutes. You can do it, but not yet – just wait 5 minutes. ” If I can force myself to wait 5 minutes then when I do harm myself, then sometimes a little of the initial force of feeling has passed and I do it less viciously. I’m hoping eventually I’ll be able to wait longer, little by little, and then eventually sometimes not to self-harm.
I got the idea when I worked with people with eating disorders. One technique that may help people who struggle with purging after eating, is as a first step to delay a few minutes after eating before purging rather than doing it straight away. Then you can try to make the gap longer and longer and in this time, with support of a therapist or carer, try techniques for acknowledging and coping with the awful feelings and thoughts that are contributing to the compulsion to purge.
I’m new to doing this technique to delay self-harming. I think it’s working a little bit.
Please read Walking…#1: Introduction before this or any other post in this Series. Thank you.
Good things happen over tea. I saw that quote on a gift mug today. It’s true. Perhaps I’m particularly English 😉 though it’s my coffee I really can’t get through a day without!
This one follows quite well from#2 and is another way of practising grounding and mindfulness.
If it’s not too wet a day, I like to sit outside for a few minutes with my tea. I don’t mind if it’s cold – I wrap up well and the nip in the air adds to the sensations that keep me rooted in the present.
I hold the cup. Enjoy the smell. Watch the delicate progress of the steam wafting upwards and maybe feel it on my cheeks if it’s a particularly cool day. I sip slowly and really enjoy the flavour and the comfort the warm milky drink brings inside.
Then I turn my attention further outwards. A good place to start, I’m told, is to name 3 things you can see, 3 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 3 things you can smell. Sometimes I start there and then go on to appreciate in detail something in my familiar surroundings. For example, how many different shades of green / gold / brown are there in the big tree opposite my flat? Count them. What shape are its leaves? Are there fewer today, if it has been windy?
By this time, if I was feeling okay when I started I may be feeling calm enough to try some slow breathing exercises. If I was in a state of very high emotion, turning my attention outwards in this small way may have been enough to just slightly take me away from the extreme, to a place I can be a bit further from acting on dangerous impulses.
My imaginary world used to be safe. My escape and my protection. I’d call it up at first and hide myself in it.
Later it came unbidden, with an invitation to slip through the ‘door’ to safety.
Later still, I just suddenly find myself there. Protected and dissociated. I’m safe and maybe others are too. Usually I know I’ve gone there and can hold on to an imaginary line and fight my way back into the present world.
But lately I dissociate into a place I don’t like where there’s anger and hurt and uncontrolled expressions of needs left wide, raw and empty.
And another where I’m the scared and frightened child and I’m back THERE again.
The latter two I can’t choose to leave. I have to wait til they eventually chuck me back out. I am terrified of who I am in them and how they hold me.
The lines between the worlds are blurring with more and more of my hallucinations and flashbacks. The scared child world is flashing into the present.
Knowing that as a child I could enter, at will and without will, the alternative worlds, I’m scared that other things are also false. That things I thought were in the present world then, are actually not true. That this means the awful frightening things – the abuse – things my mother did and said – did not really happen. What if I’ve somehow imagined it happened? And it didn’t really and I’ve invented it? What if I was a horrible sick evil child? Or what if I was psychotic?
So much that happened when my mother and I were alone means it can’t be corroborated.
What about the things I’m sure happened when my father was there or that I told him? And that he now says he didn’t know?
I do not know what the answer is I just know it could mean I’ve done something terrible I can never make up or make right or hurt myself enough to punish myself for.
What do we do when we desperately wish someone could hear us? When we know fully that it is not anyone else’s responsibility to save us, yet we wish there were someone beside us. Is it disallowed, not to find oneself alone in the end?
Why do we keep trusting when we know what will come and know soon enough they will no longer choose to be there and why does the alone hurt more every time?
When we know nobody would choose us first, nobody would willingly turn and open to us, nobody really thinks we can bring good, but we long most desperately to give, give at any cost, and we are always here, for it is just obvious and right to us to be, though we are almost always dismissed – where can we try to be a friend?
When we’re screaming and hiding and hurting and clinging by a thread and falling over the edge, fragmenting, when maybe we dared share a little to someone or count on a tiny thing – and even that doesn’t come or they don’t respond – what do we do as we fall apart?
Is it terrible to be angry when we’re left there?
I don’t ask anyone to rescue me but just someone to answer and sometimes stay a little while beside me and please, please not disappear. To sometimes name the first move, come willingly and share and please not hate me when I cannot do all you think I should, please remember it is not an equation and I can’t always give out what you think I should.
I so so much need you right now and I am so much here if only you would allow me.
But perhaps most of all I should stop longing because I’ve learnt well enough what the end will always be – gone away, left alone. Alone should cause less pain as there would be no more losses so why does my inside scream and make alone so painful too?
I wish I could trust someone to answer. To ask how I am and actually want to know the answer, nor just the portion of it they deem acceptable or allow to be considered. To maybe call me or send a text if they know it’s a very bad time. To keep to an arrangement to meet and know how I will shatter if they cancel at the last minute because I was clinging so very very tight to that little bit of strength the meeting would give. To stay a little while in understanding when I’m terrified, not just say it’ll soon be over.
All these little things are obvious to me and so natural to give to a friend I would not think of doing anything else. Yet so very rarely do I ever encounter them myself. I suppose this tells me again if I had any doubt that I’m not if any value in a relationship to anyone and am not allowed even these most basic things.
And anger burns behind the hurt, with everyone who left and with myself, for needing, yet again.
I stumbled across this quotation a few days ago and thought it just perfectly expresses a deep longing I dare never verbalise, and I wonder if others with BPD, PTSD, or other mental health conditions may find something that resonates with them.
Here it is:
“Crawl inside this body.
Find me where I am most broken.
Love me there.”
Anne Lazuli
(I do not know anything about the author and plan to see if I can find out.)
I saw a psychiatrist at the personality disorder service yesterday. I’d asked if I could have a medication review and talk to someone about my fears about my hallucinations (because of the focus of MBT therapy we don’t really talk about them at length in group or regular 1:1 sessions).
I was scared why are the hallucinations getting worse and why it seemed to be getting harder to know they aren’t real. They used to be voices inside my head. Now they’re often outside and at the time they’re totally real. Only after can I work out they couldn’t have been. And I’m seeing things too.
My mother had hallucinations and I’m just a year younger than she was when she gave birth to me and after that things got really bad for her. So I was scared is the same thing happening to me at the same age?
The psychiatrist was really nice, understood me, understood my terror, understood the frightening experiences of my childhood and she took more interest in this background than I’d expected. Which was important because it allowed me to tell her about unusual, possibly hallucinatory (is that a word?!) visual experiences as a child and the very strong imaginary world I created to escape into, away from the bizarre experiences day to day caused by my mother’s weird beliefs and behaviour. I told her about feeling I dissociate into different personalities and worlds.
Then we talked about psychosis and schizophrenia. The psychiatrist used the words psychosis and psychotic symptoms for what I was describing. I asked if she thought I had Psychosis as another illness separate from my Borderline PD. She said it is hard to separate because having unusual external experiences is part of Borderline and I could be at a more extreme end of that, worsened by stress and perhaps as therapy is opening things up. Also she thinks I had a sort of ‘propensity’ towards it as a child – I can’t remember the word she used – and this interacted with my mother’s schizophrenic behavior and the abuse to make things worse.
I knew I have hallucinations. I was scared of Psychosis. One of the drugs I take is actually anti psychotic though I didn’t realise that.
It’s still scary that the word psychosis and psychotic symptoms is used for what I have. Partly, I think this is because I fear I’m going to lose all knowledge these things aren’t real and lose contact with the world and become as my mother did. Partly, it’s saying for sure I’m experiencing things that aren’t real. And I’ve so many fears about what’s real and what’s not real. Partly I don’t know yet.
I’m holding on to what the psychiatrist said, that if you keep taking the medication you do not tend to lose the knowledge that the hallucinations aren’t real. They might even go away.
So she’s writing to my GP for changes in my medication and higher dose of the anti psychotic meds.
I don’t know what to think right now. There seems a lot to get my head round again.
Please read Walking…#1: Introduction before this or any other post in this Series. Thank you.
Six ways to ground yourself when you notice the early stages of an overwhelming emotion building (eg, panic, fear, anxiety)
I find these particularly help me. The aim is not to deny or stop feeling the emotion, but to reach a safe state where you are not overwhelmed with distress or driven to compulsive actions, and where you can perhaps begin to recognise your emotions and also recognise that they are not permanent and are not all there is of you or of the world – they are valid and they are allowed and also, they will sometime, somehow, pass.
I know the ideas below sound as if they couldn’t possibly make any difference when you’re feeling terrible but somehow, sometimes, they do. I was taught that it is good to practice using them when you are feeling okay, so that they become familiar, and to try to use them as early on as you can when you first feel your emotions rising, because when you are already in a state of peaked, extreme emotion, it can be too difficult to be able to try to use them.
Step outside if you can, or if not, just into another room. Notice all the sensations around you. What does the ground feel like under your feet? What can you hear? What can you see? Can you touch anything – the wall, the door? What does it feel like? You are here and now. These things you see around you are concrete. They will remain. The emotion, no matter how terrifying, really will somehow pass.
Touch a favourite object. What does the surface feel like? What colour is it? Does the sensation of touch calm you? Is it an object that reminds you of a happy time or place or someone you love?
Count backwards in [threes] from 100 to 0. [Especially occupies your attention if, like me, you are not very good at maths/logic 😉 !]
Clench and unclench your hands rapidly, focussing on the sensations in your muscles and on your skin.
Make a hot drink. Hold the cup whilst it’s still hot. Focus on the sensation of the spreading heat relaxing the muscles in your hands. Breathe in and out deeply and focus on the scent of the drink or the warmth of the rising steam.
Repeat a grounding “safety statement”, even if you can’t really believe it at first. For example (replace the […] as appropriate): “I am [Jane Doe]. The date is [5 December 2015]. I am [35] years old. I am [in my room in my flat] in [name city]. I am in the present, not the past. I am safe now.” I am relatively new to using safety statements but my CPN told me that this is a good way to recover from flashbacks / re-experiencing memories.
Dignity Beyond Trauma 