Feelings

I have been on medical leave from work for my depression since the middle of May.  I started going to IOP (intensive out-patient therapy) last week.  We have been talking about how we need to stop listening to stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and focus on what is happening in life now.  Part of that is learning to feel the feelings that come up instead of pushing them away.  This is not a new concept for me; but I sure do have a hard time doing it.  Like most addicts, who push their feelings away with drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, I too thwart the feeling process.  I am an addict.  I am addicted to food.  Food is what I use when I want to avoid feeling something.
Our therapist, Tammy, always talks about how we need to feel our feelings and then they go away.  Today I tried that.  I realized that I have been really irritable for the past few months and when I got thinking about why, I realized that I was feeling angry, so I just let myself be angry.  Sure enough, just as Tammy promised, the feeling went away and the next thing I knew, I was singing as I was driving to IOP.  After IOP, I went to lunch and was actually able to stop eating and throw away the rest of my food when I got full.  I was actually able to throw away my safety net (food) because I didn't need it.  There was no feeling to be pushed down at the moment, so I just stopped eating when my body was satisfied.  For those who are not addicts, I'm sure that just seems like common sense, but for me not using extra food is a big deal, and throwing it away is even a bigger deal.
This evening, I am feeling sad.  I think.  Sometimes I have a hard time identifying feelings because I am so used to ignoring them.  I just feel like crying.  I don't know why, and I'm not sure it matters.  I just need to sit with it until it goes away, otherwise, I'll turn on the TV, sit down with a plate of nachos and a bowl of ice cream and drown my sorrow... until, of course, it comes bobbing back to the surface, because my feelings seem to have the worlds strongest life jacket and they come back with a vengeance as soon as I'm not stuffing them down.
So... sadness.  I feel like crying, yet at the same time, I feel like feeling this will kill me.  It is so tempting to just grab some food and stuff the sadness down, yet it is screaming to be felt, to be acknowledged, to be free.  I'm sad because I don't want to be alone.  I don't want to be overweight.  I don't want to...  I guess I'm mourning the loss of things I don't have.  I want to have a family of my own.  I want to be thin and healthy so I can enjoy life, so I can bike and hike and have fun.  I'm sad that my whole life, my dad told me that no one would love me if I was overweight, so like a self fulfilling prophecy, I became more and more overweight the lonelier I got and I became more and more lonely the more overweight I got.  This vicious cycle has plagued my life.  I'm sad and angry and frustrated and disappointed.  Yes.  That's what I'm feeling.

Tammy made the comment today that "You don't know who you are if you don't know how you feel."  Today I am a daughter of God, who feels angry and sad and frustrated and joyful and excited and happy, and annoyed and disgusted and silly and hopeless and helpless and hopeful and confident and grateful and loving and accepting.  The point is, that we were meant to feel our feelings, or God never would have made us capable of feeling them in the first place.  Today, I choose to feel.  I choose to be me!