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margharris
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BDD 30% hell remains.

Permanent Linkby margharris on Fri Jul 03, 2015 12:06 am

His life has returned for him. Out and about almost as much time as he is here with me. He reported his BDD was 70% improved. He has been to two AA meeting and I bought an excellent key ring with the inscription of the Serenity prayer and the other side had UNITY, RECOVERY and SERVICE on the other. The centre contains a circle that can be etched with the months of sobriety. He has got to be holding those keys when he buys the bottle. I hope he feels my presence at that moment. It is just another thing I could do to stop the cycle of pain. You can't anaesthetise BDD from your brain.
A friend of his is now staying here for a week. He was so anxious that he would need to control his BDD all this time. So his BDD spiked yesterday. Touching started it off and then he repeated all the stories as though he had to endorse all he thought and give it air time to let it out. More attention he gave it the worse it got. I had to leave the house and was thinking the motel was a likely outcome for the night. But the friend was coming so i knew he would be distracted and pull himself out of it. I stayed at the table with them and talked to take the pressure away from him to do all the entertaining. This allowed him to eat his way through everything he had bought to share.
I suppose this highlights the need for him to monitor and be in control of what he thinks. We all have to be accountable for what we do with our bodies and with our minds. He just can't let himself touch and he can't let himself repeat hurtful, unhelpful, sick stories to try and legitimize his own illness. It is an illness after all. I think this is where mindfulness has its much needed place in recovery. He has got to retrain his brain not to go to this behaviour pattern.
It is NOT SAFE to repeat your BDD story.
Once you really understand your brain is creating FUD and you are assigning it to something on your person as a secondary consequence only to explain it, then you realise how you are contributing to why it always gets worse.
You can't live well relying on excuses and explanations to pardon you from adult accountability and responsibility for why your illness doesn't get better. It is not the progressive nature of your flaw or your genetic load. It is what you keep telling yourself. That attention and value you give your thoughts. We would all be sick if we told ourselves our flaw was so horrible and we were ugly as sin. We all have flaws that could self sabotage our lives. We just dont have the brain constantly firing FUD at us that we need to interpret and look to explain.

Think of it as the doorbell going off when no one is there. You stop giving the alarm attention.
No story of who might be at the door. Just recognition that the doorbell is faulty. In the same way your brain is faulty too. You have got to stop responding as though it says anything helpful about looks. It is MINDFULNESS training to make another brain circuit that explains the fear by assigning it to the brain.

So all of you who keep repeating your worry story of how bad you look and who you can compare too and how bad the trajectory is in the future...Well how can you ever improve if you aren't mindful of how such negative attention is fueling the concern. You can't give these thoughts any attention...

But I know after years of doing this, the personality is affected. It is your identity and you defend against the knowledge that makes you feel you know youre right and I must be wrong. A part of you doesn't want to stop. You just want to get it out now and so you let it. It is part of recovery to unload but at some point it must stop so the story gets left behind.

You need a new story that really knows you don't have to think this way. There is no trauma you have experienced as bad as what you are doing to yourself through storytelling.

Monday is our next appointment. Marg

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