Even in the Storms, Your Body Is Not the Problem

When I began outpatient treatment, I readied myself with a kind of stoicism and every maladaptive defense mechanism I didn’t know I had. I was strong. I was tough. And really, I wasn’t even all that “sick.” Or so I thought. I was going to learn some things, make some changes, and just like that, I’d leave treatment recovered.

In hindsight, it’s probably better that I had no idea what I was opening the door to, because if I had, I may never have opened it. And I don’t share this to scare you or to suggest that recovery isn’t worth it. On the contrary, the road to recovery is far more splendid than the road of disordered eating. Both are bumpy as hell, but one is filled with hope and life, while the other is a dark dead end.

Instead, I share this to plant a seed of hope. A seed not just for recovery itself, but for the moments along the way when you find yourself standing in a dark storm, wondering why you’re struggling so badly, questioning what you’re doing wrong, reconsidering your decision for recovery in the first place, and uttering to yourself, “I can’t do this anymore.”

I’ve stood in those storms more times than I care to count and 12 years into recovery, I’m at a place where although the storms still come, I can stand in them and say to myself, “I’m okay. I can handle this.” And I don’t try to change myself in an effort to calm the storm.

Instead, I do the thing that has made not only recovery possible, but also living, growing, learning, and being a kind human possible. I feel. Feeling emotions has been one of the biggest game changers for me in recovery and, if you can begin to develop this skill, I believe you can stand in those storms too and continue on the path toward freedom.

But how? How exactly do you feel? 

First, I want to emphasize that just as there is no one defined way to recover, there is no one way to feel. But this is what I have discovered through my own adventures in feeling.

When I talk about feeling, I’m talking about a whole-body experience. I remember sitting in therapy with my psychologist and talking about feelings. In that context, it was a cognitive experience. I could identify my cognitive awareness of anger or sadness, but there was no connection to the bodily experience of it. 

Things began to shift as I learned to connect the name of the emotion to what was happening in my body. Anger came alive with whole body sensations of heat, tension, and rigidity. Sadness was connected to heaviness in my shoulders, darkness in my heart, and a piercing, burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. 

It didn’t stop there, though. Beginning to feel emotion in my body was overwhelming and intense. Almost intolerable at times. I had to build capacity for feeling. And this started with something called pendulation - moving in and out of the feeling instead of staying in it all at once.

At first, I could only handle the awareness of one emotion in my body at a time. When I got used to that, I could start to expand and hold more than one sensation in my awareness at once.

As my awareness and capacity grew, I learned to ride the proverbial emotional wave. What’s interesting about emotions is that they can feel like they’re going to suffocate or overwhelm you. The experience can be intense. But emotions don’t actually have the power to harm you, even though it can feel that way. If you can learn to sit with them and ride that wave, you begin to realize that you can survive them instead of being drowned by them.

That’s where skills training, like DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), came in handy for me. It helped bring everything together into a manageable framework. DBT skills are grouped into four main categories - mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness (Linehan, 2015). Mindfulness helps you become aware of emotions. Distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills give you the ability to ride those waves. And then, the interpersonal effectiveness skills help you step beyond and develop your relational skills to move about in the world in an interdependent way.

These are the things that helped me learn how to feel. It wasn’t a step-by-step process, but rather a set of pieces of the emotional puzzle that, once they came together for me, formed a solid foundation that has allowed me to confront challenges without collapsing, blaming my body, and trying to make my body feel different so I wouldn’t have to feel it at all.

And that’s the key: no matter what the experience, my body is not the problem. And neither is yours. 

Author Bio: Kristen Elliott

Kristen (she/her) has lived experience and feels deeply passionate about supporting others through their recovery journeys. She is currently a placement student with NEDIC and is completing her diploma in Social Service Work. Her background includes training in body-based approaches, which informs her interest in the connection between physical sensations and emotional experience. Feel free to connect with her at kristen4edr@gmail.com.

References

Linehan, M. (2015). DBT^Ⓡ Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.

Photo by Matt Paul Catalano on Unsplash