Blaming
Whether you are blaming yourself, those around you, the world we live in, we all do it! And often times, without us even being aware.
Blaming is another cognitive distortion discussed in Key Four: Feel Your Feelings, Challenge Your Thoughts in the 8 Keys to Recovery From an Eating Disorder Workbook.
Blaming - where a person assigns the responsibility for a bad or unfortunate situation to someone or something.
Have a read of Kristie's story below where she shares some of the things she believed were stopping her from recovering, and the tools she developed to combat these.
7. Blaming
Feel like you can’t recover because of X? Let’s bust through that!
I will be the first to admit I was incredibly fortunate to receive the crème de la crème of eating disorder treatment in America. I am a lucky woman and I’m determined to pay that forward and teach others what I learned.
Incredibly, when I look back at my time in treatment, even though I was in a place that had a literal blueprint for recovery... my ED would still find reasons that I either couldn’t, or shouldn’t recover.
My eating disorder's favourite reason for quite a while was:
“Ok, maybe I do have internalized body fascism going on...but let’s say I go and heal it. I can’t be in the world with my natural body, because I will get judged for it.”
Being judged terrified me. Essentially, I was blaming western culture, I was blaming social norms and I was blaming anything I could in order to duck and weave recovery, because recovery was scary.
I had many special people in my recovery village and four of them had responses to my ‘society blaming’ that stopped me in my tracks. I wrote them in my diary, and they were my mantras when I got stuck in blaming.
- How does this perspective help me in my goal of recovering?
Truth, it doesn’t.
- Rather than striving to have the best body in the world, how about I strive to be the best for the world?
This one rendered me speechless for a while. This completely changed my focus on my values. It spoke to my soul.
- If I bend to body fascism by changing my body, what does that do to body fascism?
It increases it because it is one more person silently succumbing to social pressure. The only way to decrease body fascism is to have as many people as possible at peace with their bodies, flying the flag for peace and freedom. So...I decided to start my own revolution.
- No one is paying as much attention to my body as I am, because I have an eating disorder. IF there is someone paying as much attention (or more) they have some kind of body issue going on themselves. If I want to be free, I have to train myself to live freely.
It was here I found an excellent therapist who was skilled in DBT. They taught me ways to refocus my attention, be mindful about things other than my body, and detach from my thoughts.
Yes, society is messy when it comes to food and bodies right now. I believe we live in unprecedented times when it comes to the amount, frequency and consistency of food and body messaging. As a human on this planet called earth it is impossible not to be affected by it. Yet, I can and regularly do, vaccinate myself against our toxic culture by:
- Following on instagram and facebook, feeds that promote body positivity and diversity.
- Continuing to educate myself on Health At Every Size principles.
- Hanging out with people who don't diet or exercise to lose weight (yes, those people DO exist!)
- Spending time doing things that light my soul up - nature, animals, playing games, laughing, eating with friends, swims in cold rivers...
These actions build up antibodies to any body image virus out there in the world. When I see an ad to lose weight, I change the channel - not because I can't listen to it, because I don't want to. When I drive past a billboard advertising a gym membership to 'lose those Christmas kilos' I roll my eyes and tell the billboard it needs to lose its Christmas criticism.
What helps you build up antibodies so that you can safely be in a body centric society?
