I met up with someone I hadn’t seen in a while. Within minutes we were chatting away very happily. As we departed to collect our respective clans she turned to me and said thoughtfully: “You know what’s funny? every time I see you we end up talking about the same thing.”
We laughed about it, and in fairness, the topic itself was an interesting one. But it left me thinking about how easy it is for us to fall into patterns without even recognizing them.
At the moment I am working on breaking some patterns that have been a source of angst for me for too many years to count.
Slowly I’m learning that in order to break a pattern, two things need to happen. One is, I need to figure out why it was created in the first place, and secondly I need to work out what’s going to replace the void created when the pattern itself has been dismantled?
There aren’t simple answers to either of those questions. But I do know that phoning to make an appointment to see a therapist was one of those defining moments for me. I'd been thinking about seeing one for a while. After reading Mia Freedman's book I had a bit of shift in my thinking and that maybe if someone like Mia who seems to have juggled alot quite successfully saw no shame in getting help, then maybe I could do it too.
I’d kind of reached a flash point. There’s a great line that’s always stayed with me about a character who admits he is going into therapy and he says: “I’m trying to figure out why some things seem to be harder for me than they are for other people.”
In my case, it’s a disordered approach to food. I’ve lost weight. I’ve gained it. I’ve obsessed about it. I’ve eaten too much of it. I’ve bored myself and others senseless talking about food. I’ve only now realized that spending my teenage years talking to people obsessively about diets, that I was the one with the problem. Not them. I could literally feel the penny drop during one session where I realized the person who had the eating disorder was me. It wasn’t my friends who were bored senseless with me talking about what we should or shouldn’t eat.
Weight Watchers was great for me. I lost weight. But I never figured out why I ate too much in the first place. So for me it wasn’t ever going to be a long term solution.
I started a journey a few weeks ago. I’m examining patterns. Some of them are confronting. But the relief. God I can’t adequately articulate the sense of relief at working my way through this.
Finally,
Finally I’m breaking some old patterns and creating new ones.
And these ones are really lovely.
