Dealing with triggers: The Ugly Button - 5/15/14

I joined an online support group yesterday. I wasn't sure how I'd like it, but the experience has been good so far. The group is pretty large, but it feels small and intimate. I like that.


There were some wonderful responses to the short introduction I posted. Questions were being asked about NES and others even chimed in and said thank you for joining because they too suffer from NES and it's almost never heard of. Can I tell you...it was wonderful to speak with people who knew just where I was coming from. People who could describe feeling and behaviors that I was all too familiar with. Wonderful connections were being made. However, everything has two sides. For every good there is bad. The bad thing is nothing that's being done intentionally. What is it? Triggers. Triggers that occur when reading emotionally intense posts. It can't be helped. EDs, addictions, abuse, disabilities, life itself...all these things come with pluses and minuses. When we are invited to speak about our issues there's always the risk of triggering others. I don't see any way around it except to never speak. What good would that do? Silence is worse than the actual triggers themselves.


The people in the group are very nice and yes, some of the subject matter is very intense. I'm already feeling kind of weirded out by the fact that so many beautiful people aren't able to see their own beauty. I want to scream and take the whole feeling ugly thing, wrap it up and tuck it into a place where no one can find it. It's a reminder of how ugly I see myself. If I were to describe myself in one word it would be...leprous. I can except my own feelings of inadequacy, but I am not coping well will with others feeling this way. They are all so beautiful. I know...the way I'm thinking is not fair to myself or them. They have their reasons for feeling the way they do just as I do. Perhaps it's too painful to see the pain of others when I'm having trouble seeing my own.


The more posts I read the angrier I feel. Not at the people for feeling the way they feel, but angry about living in a society where we are conditioned to feel ugly if we don't fit societal molds.


HOW DARE society think they are doing us a justice by making a "conscious" effort to depict and appreciate what is already beautiful! HOW DARE it be an effort at all to show women with voluptuous curves or people with rich skin tones! What happened to us that so many of us hate what we see in the mirror? Why is there so much shame in having a pimple, frizzy hair, being chubby, thin or whatever other superficial what not we can come up with? How are we to feel good when everything tell us to feeling bad?


Confession: I used to be obsessed with wanting to fix other peoples problems.


Other peoples problems were a welcomed distraction. My issues were ever present, ominous, venomous and I needed an escape. I would retreat into myself, draw or read books, but my favorite past time was dissecting the problems of others and obsessing over finding solutions. I was the self proclaimed Trojan of resolution. Bring all your problems to me and I will help you solve them. I was about as useful as a snake oil salesman. Though I must admit, there were some benefits to taking a situation, breaking it down and presenting it in a way that may not have been previously explored. It sometimes opened the doorway for individuals to take another look at their situations and search for answers within themselves. That would be the most reasonable intent for my process, but instead, I took it up a few notches and bought into my need to be needed.


Thanks to being self aware, I put a lot of effort to undoing the need to be needed along with undoing the need for people to serve specific roles in my life. It feels so much better to simply enjoy people for the sake of enjoying them and not having them lined up like a list of to dos. Now that I am freed from trying to solve the world's problem I can redirect my energy into the healing process. I will have to periodically remind myself that I can empathize without giving into the impulse to fix or solve things. I will also work on allowing myself to feel pain and then release it.


I'm still eating rye bread for breakfast every morning. Today I had two slices of rye bread with a little peanut butter. Lunch was an egg and cheese frittata and dinner will be left over chili from last night's impromptu dinner.