Archive for the ‘abuse’ Category

Healing the Scars of Emotional Abuse [TESTIMONIAL]

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

I recently received a touching testimonial from a woman who found help from Healing the Scars of Emotional Abuse, a book I wrote several years ago, and revised last year. In her testimonial, she expressed a desire to help others who have suffered similar pain.

With her permission, I am sharing her story, in her words, below:

I filed for separation from my husband. There was verbal abuse, lack of empathy, stonewalling, and plenty of other warning signs. I was able to see abusive patterns that I had grew up with from my step-dad. He raised me from the age of 5 years. When I was 11 his job had him gone all week, I was left at home alone with my invalid grandfather who was in his 80’s. I was beginning to see the emotional damage that those actions might have caused me.

The step-dad was very verbally abusive. Calling me stupid, yelling at me, ignoring me, and put-downs.

I married at age 17. Now I can see that I did that to get away from the abuse. The first marriage lasted 14 years. Looking back now I cannot remember much detail of the bad. I do know it is there because when I remarried I had to go through this huge custody trial. In that trial, the ex-husband was vicious. It was a yearlong litigation. Any time I had to talk to him in that first year I would get triggered, my body would get heated and I would freeze. Which tells me that I had a history with this man that was negative. Within that yearlong trial, I healed and did not get intimidated by his threats and games any longer. I started to see him as an irritation and insecure to act that way.

Therefore, after I was having a hard time in this second marriage, I started to think that I was repeating my past. However, this time I chose somebody whom was worse to the extreme. It was a big burden to feel the guilt that I did not see a pattern. The treatment from the second husband was so much worse.

After four years of couples counseling, one separation, and a lot of pain, one day at counseling I mentioned to the therapist that I tried an idea. My husband works from home and some of the ideas why he was getting upset with me could have been that I was trying to interact when he was focused. I knew that this seemed off. One day I went a whole day without talking to him. The next day I did try to interact. He blew up. At counseling I mentioned this; that it was any time I would try to talk to him. I asked her what this problem was. She leaned over and gently told him that she has seen Asperger traits in him!

Whew, I did go through the emotions of healing. Finally it had a name. I was then able to take a load off my shoulders and let go of the guilt for thinking I was living in a generational cycle. It was a hard thing to go through which for a while made me angry at what I endured, then I thought of how it brought me through the deepest deep and made me look at my past.

I have been separated from my husband for 9 months now. He has since been officially diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. I have done a great deal of healing. I am attending school working towards becoming a Registered Dietician. That is another thing to be thankful for – that the abuse and stress that goes with it pushed me to learn how to take care of myself with nutrition, diet, and exercise. I got into reading self-help books from Gottman, Dr. Weil, Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Amen. I found my passion for health. I knew that I was at risk if I drank to hide from my problems. I have several siblings who have heart problems, diabetes, and addictions from not coping with their problems. I made it through!

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Your Relationship With Food: Facing the Truth

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

A brilliant woman pianist once gave an intimate performance for a group of society women in the sun-drenched library of a country estate. Later, while dessert was being served, a guest approached the pianist, gushing, “I would give anything in the world to play as you play.”

The virtuoso looked at the woman for a moment and said, “I’m sorry madam, but I don’t think you would.”

Red-faced, but undaunted, the guest tried again, quietly this time, “But really, I truly would give anything to play the piano with the skill that you do.”

The pianist, realizing she had not successfully made her point, said “No, my dear, I’m afraid you really wouldn’t. If you would, you might play better than I, at least equally as well. Yes, you’d give anything except your time, the one thing it takes to be good. You wouldn’t sit on a bench practicing hour after hour, day after day, while your friends were out having fun, enjoying parties such as this and otherwise getting on with their lives.”

Then she smiled.

“I hope you understand that I’m not criticizing you. I don’t even know you. I’m just telling you when you say you’d give anything to play the piano as I do, that in your heart of hearts, you don’t really mean it. You really don’t mean it at all.”

That story is about one very honest woman. The talented pianist knew that in music only a few succeed at what they attempt, even though most will say they want to be great, famous, well paid, and acknowledged with their name ablaze in lights. But in reality, only the dedicated few will realize that dream. Likewise, among those who try to lose weight permanently, only a few succeed. But with practice, discipline, and dedication, those few can include you.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

One of the primary ways you will lose weight permanently is by consciously disconnecting food and its associations from all forms of abuse that may have occurred in your life. As you read this, you may say, “I’ve never been abused sexually, physically, or emotionally, so this doesn’t apply to me.” You may be right, or you may be engaging in some form of denial. That is for you to discover as we go along.

Or you may say, “There really may be something to this idea that past experiences keep me going to food for comfort, and I’m willing to take a long look at my past to check out the connection.”

Or you may say, “I know that my eating problems are intricately connected to the deep hurts of my past. I am finally willing to engage in the battle where  it actually exists: in my mind.”

No matter how you respond to this message, you need to know you are not alone in your struggle. At times you may feel as if your picture would be next to the definition of loneliness in the dictionary, but not only do you have friends like me who are on your side; you also have a loving heavenly Father. You may have thought you were doing a solo performance as you engaged in your silent, compulsive behaviors, but guess what? You were not alone then and you are not alone now. Even more important, you are no longer addressing the symptoms of your problem as you’ve done in the past. You are now choosing to deal with the issues that really matter.

SOURCE: Chapter 8, “Eating Problems and Their Link to Abuse,” in Losing Weight Permanently by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Families of Those With Eating Disorders: 12 Characteristics

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

We often think we cannot live without the ingrained patterns of our past — whether they be good or bad, positive or negative. But people who lose weight permanently know that if they are to grow in every area of their lives they must look at every area 0f their lives.

The following are characteristics of families of those with food-related problems:

1. Perfectionistic, including high expectations from the father, either verbal or nonverbal. This most often applies to the first-born.

2. Mother frequently dieted, accompanied by an over-emphasis on weight and appearance, compulsive dieting and fasting, diarrhetic use or laxative use.

3. Father distant, fueling an intense desire to to please the father who is typically emotionally unavailable.

4. Parent (0ften the mother) is co-dependent, often denying her own needs and assuming responsibility for everyone else.

5. Rigid discipline with severe punishment, including guilt and shame used as motivation, and perhaps humiliating or hurtful punishment.

6. Sexuality ignored or considered “dirty,” neglecting to give children basic information about sex or no opportunity to discuss sexual issues.

7. Daughters used as confidantes, perhaps with the father complaining to the daughter about the mother, and in fact the child may be used as the parent’s primary form of emotional support.

8. Children forced to be adults, especially daughters who “raised” siblings and children who are not allowed to be children themselves.

9. Children victimized in any way, which may include fondling, incest, neglect or verbal abuse.

10. Parent (often the father) addicted to prescription drugs, alcohol or street drugs.

11. Family members tend to ignore or deny negative emotions, often resulting in explosive anger, or anger and sadness never addressed, even to the point of covering up negative emotions just to please others.

12. Overuse of food for pleasure or reward, with food serving as the primary focus for pleasure and emphasis placed on sweets and rich desserts.

For your ongoing emotional growth and your permanent weight loss, it is important that you look at whether you have avoided — and may still be avoiding — intimacy on some level. Intimacy issues have interfered in your life and sabotaged your success at weight loss.

Now is the time to say, “I need help.”

There’s no point in blaming your past, your family, or even a former abuser, if any. You have simply had numerous unmet needs that you attempted to address through intimacy with food. Now you are moving away from such erroneous thinking and are moving toward joining the two percent of people who lose weight permanently.

SOURCE: Chapter 7, “Developing Intimacy With People,” in Losing Weight Permanently by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Validating the Pain Behind Your Eating Disorder: Accept the Past, Heal Today

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Instead of denying the pain behind your eating disorder, you can learn to accept it. And what better time than now, during National Eating Disorder Awareness Week when I am blogging excerpts from my book, Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders: A Whole-Person Approach to Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating:

It is possible to replace your faulty coping mechanism with healthy skills for withstanding the stress of life.

It is possible to feel anger without feeling rage.

Through counseling, you can learn to understand and accept your childhood and its pain. If you can weather the storm of finally learning the truth and giving up your ideal image of the “perfect” family, your pain and hurt can become like parts of a puzzle, fitting into place and giving you greater understanding of why your parents do what they do. Once you understand the way, you can begin the process of filling in the void in your life with healthy choices: with laughter and love, with family and friends, with good things, and with God.

Verbal and/or emotional abuse leaves no visible scars, so the tendency to deny that these events happened can be very great.

Often the parent will remember the circumstances from a very different perspective than the child. Your child-self recalls one version of events, and your parent another. Which is right? They may both be. When you were a child, you remembered things from the perspective of a child, often unaware of the larger picture. Your parents may never have considered how their actions looked from the other side. Take that into consideration when examining the past. You will need to accept their vision of what happened, and they must accept yours.

Finding the truth and working with your family will not be easy, but it can be extremely illuminating and rewarding. It can mean the reconciliation of relationships. Or you can gain an understanding of the type of relationship you can realistically have with your family as an adult. Much will depend upon the hurtful behavior and that person’s willingness to accept your pain.

Egregious physical or sexual abuse, by its very nature, may lead to outright denial by the abuser.

The more valid the memory, the more vehement the denial. Because societal and religious condemnation of such acts is so great, the person who abused you may never truly admit what he or she has done. The abuser may believe that if the abuse is denied outright, you may begin to doubt that it occurred at all. In spite of this, you need to realize you were hurt. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter if memories are totally clear or recalled; you still felt hurt.

The next point is so important, I want to put it in bold type to make sure you don’t overlook it:

Your self-destructive behavior did not come about for no reason. Most people who develop a severe eating disorder have had some history of abuse, and I encourage you to believe in what your past reveals. You must be determined to examine your past and accept the truth that is revealed. You must take the truth of your past and put it into perspective as an adult.

Don’t allow denial, your own or others, to halt your journey toward healing and recovery  from your eating disorder.

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