Fight, Flight, Tears, and a Time Out
I think a lot about change and changeability. About how I actually have tools to change my life now. And how slowly and strangely information is dispensed to me. By Life. By the Universe. By my own ability to comprehend and implement it.
The other day my husband and I got into an argument. He said a true thing about me rather angrily and it made me cry. Which upset him. It is difficult for him to see my crying. It is awful for him to feel like he “made me cry.”
I cry a lot. I always have. But I have come to understand in the past year or so that it’s the way a body, my body, reregulates after I have gone into “fight or flight mode.” Which I do. Kind of a lot. (Way less since I got my eating under control, but still a lot.)
Growing up, I cried, and everyone told me it was me being overly sensitive. And me being emotional. And me being some sort of way. So I fit myself into the narrative. I could find the emotions there in the crying. The shame. The hurt. The anger. The fear. The indignation.
Plus I had a whole world of stories and books and all manner of art depicting overly sensitive weepy girls unable to manage their emotions. Hysterical women! I didn’t have to look far to reinforce the idea that my tears were because I was too emotional and the emotions were shameful ones, if only for their inconvenience to others.
But this time I didn’t need to look for an emotion. Not because I knew what it was, but because in that moment I knew it didn’t matter. I was having a biological reaction. I could assign an emotion to it later if I wanted. (And I did. I was embarrassed that I had been called out. It sent me into a panic.) But in that moment, I just wanted to calm back down. I told him I was just in fight or flight and I just needed a minute. I excused myself and got myself together.
Having my eating under control, not eating foods that make me feel drugged, knowing what and how much I am going to eat every day, have all contributed to lifting my food obsession. And not being obsessed with food means lots of time and room and energy to think about other things, and plenty of time to work on myself.
When I learn something like this now, I remember that I couldn’t have known it before. That some things can only be understood because they are a culmination of knowledge and experience.
As my mentor likes to remind me: More will be revealed.
onceafatgirl 