Most Human
beautiful sunset over the sea

The Magic of Finding Our Voice

“When did you lose your voice?”, I asked Paula. She said, “I know exactly when.” Paula didn’t realize that her depression had anything to do with her marriage. She thought she had a chemical imbalance. Until the therapy with the family, Paula didn’t even let herself know that she felt angry at being shut out by her self-assured husband. She had given up trying to get him to hear her, and her quiet despair and helplessness showed up as depression. As the therapy unearthed these patterns, she discovered her voice. Her mood lifted.

“Control Issues”: A Young Woman With An Eating Disorder Challenges Her Family

In contemporary culture, as portrayed in commercials for pharmaceuticals, family members are portrayed as bystanders to suffering, having to “manage” the symptoms of their  bi-polar loved one, or “suffer” the effects of the depressed person’s symptoms or behavior. But families, couples, all of us, can unwittingly get stuck in patterns, sometimes destructive patterns, of which we are unaware. Those patterns can cause distress in ourselves and others, which can show up as a “symptom” in one person. This is rarely intentional, more a product of the tricky,  powerful and subtle  nature of relationship dynamics.

Eating disorders are no exceptions. Most of the clinical writing and popular assumptions about anorexia and other eating disorders note that these conditions are characterized by the need for individual “control”. There’s truth to this. But if you expand the lens to include the family,  you learn a lot about what this “control” can look like.

Don’t Worry About Feeling Bad

We have become a nation of fixers. We want to fix stuff as soon as its broken, including our moods. We don’t have much tolerance for ambiguity, or lack of resolution. Or emotional pain. What’s the problem with that, you might ask? Because often our attempt to “fix” our moods, or our pain, ends up making the problem worse, or more long-lasting. Here’s another way to do it.

%d bloggers like this: