Weight, a Control Issue
Adults who have suffered sexual abuse as a child often use weight gain as a form of protection. This is not to say every overweight adult may have been abused. For those of us struggling with weight since childhood, the issues are deeper than we are just too lazy or stupid to control ourselves.
You may ask what did this have to do with losing my son. His death was the trigger that opened the floodgates. I could not function with the powerful feelings related to his death. That's what brought me to therapy. In therapy, I realized I had been living my life in hiding, suppressing other feelings that overwhelmed me. One of the ways I did this was to gain and lose weight. Each weight gain added another ten pounds. Interestingly, towards the end of my therapy, I gained more weight than ever before. I weighed two hundred forty-seven pounds. I had spent five years in therapy facing my demons and fighting facing them at the same time. I fought so hard I hit an all time high in weight gain. I was fighting to hold on to my protection.
Much of dealing with a history of abuse has to do with regaining a sense of control. One of the things I could control is what and how much I choose to eat. I realized by continuing to abuse food I was allowing one of the worst people in my life to maintain control of my actions and my life. The abuse happened when I was ten years old. I went to therapy between the ages of forty-five and fifty. I began to regain control of my eating when I was sixty. I am still considered overweight by some standards, but my achievement is being able to maintain an eighty-pound weight loss for the past ten years.
To me, my success has been in releasing the control that man had over me for all those years. It has been measured by the stability of my weight but more importantly, knowing my life is truly mine. Sometimes it's a long road to "knowing", but the one worth taking.
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