I'm Coming Out!

So, I just outed myself at work. Up until now, everyone here thought I was your average single mom therapist whose only interesting or alarming features are her love for karaoke and weakness for cigarettes. They don't know that I'm a closeted woo-woo. But today, at our potluck lunch after treatment team, they all noticed that I had forgone the carnitas tostadas and rice for my own tupperware container of brocolli and edamame.

"Are you on a diet, Amber?" one of my coworkers asks.

"Well, yes," I say, reluctantly. I really don't want anyone to think I'm dieting. I've never been on a diet before because I hate diets. I hate people who diet. I have so much resistance around dieting because I watched my mom struggle with diets my entire life and I swore I would never be caught up in that energy. I watched her loathe herself as she ate out of the tiny plastic trays and I felt her shame as she swallowed the Fen Fen. I felt her judgment of herself with every Slimfast and every weight watcher point she consumed. I was witness to her silent but bloody battle with the Diet and I have resisted anything that looks like that war ever since.

In the end, I have just as unhealthy relationship with food as she does. She is restrictive with food, I am indulgent with food. Food is her enemy while food is my comforter. However, we're both food-obsessed women. And our similarities don't end there. We are both anxiety prone and avoid conflict like it is the plague. We underestimate how loveable we are and esteem ourselves lowly. While we're both fantastic at a party or in groups, we both fear rejection and mask it with humor and charm.

But its in how we deal with these feelings of not-good-enoughness that brings forward yet another difference. I go straight for the deep healing, submerging myself in childhood memories and exhuming the ghosts of my past. I try to erradicate my conditioning and give my inner child new messages about herself. I write and meditate and cry and feel it all, believing that once I remove the source of the deep, inner pain I will be free. My mom, on the other hand, resists inner work as if she's allergic to it. She'll often say to me, "I'm just not that deep of a thinker, Amber." She goes for the physical level of reality. Feel anxious? Take an anxiolytic med. Gaining weight and feel bad about it? Go on a diet.

I'm beginning to see that we both have something to learn from one another about healing. She could get over her resistance to inner work, I could get over my resistance to getting on the treadmill. In our mutual attempt to bypass what we percieve as challenging or too hard, we have stayed stuck. So it is true: What we resist, persists!

But back to what just happened.

"Oh, which diet? Is it weight watchers?"

"No!" I say, with a little too much disdain in my voice.

"Are you just trying to lose weight?" another coworker asks.

"No, not really." They all give me confused looks.

"Oh, then what is it?"

"It's just this thing I'm doing." Yes, I really said that.

"It's a medical thing?"

"No, it's not medical. It's kind of a weird thing I'm doing." Yes, I said that, too.

My coworkers looked at me, not used to this lack of self disclosure coming from me.

"Alright, it's kind of a spiritual thing," I say, scanning their faces for reaction. "My spiritual teacher (yes! I called her that!) told me that I need to eat from a restricted diet for four weeks. She says that the way I have been fueling my body is keeping me stuck in negative patterns in consciousness. So, I'm dieting."

"Oh, cool," one woman says and they all turn back to their food. They are totally satistfied with this answer. This was not a shock to them, at all. The conversation moves on and I feel strangely liberated.