Emotional Healing on Retreat and Possible Support Group Topics

I attended on OA retreat this past weekend and experienced great emotional healing and recovery there. It started at the workshop on self-sabotage and fear of success. I know I self-sabotage. I shared:   The wall of fat around me served a purpose in my life. It was a form of protection. It was a buffer between the world and me. Without my wall of fat, I feel unprotected. In OA, I often use my daughter as a shield or buffer, putting her in front of me. Talk to her. She’s amazing, beautiful, sweet, kind, successful -- all the things I am not. Don’t look at me. This allows me to keep you away from me, which is where I want you.   The day goes on. I have some quiet time, time of reflection, prayer time, and I am struck by something. I share further at the next workshop.   I recognize that I put up a wall of fat to keep people away from me. In the last workshop I said, “Because that’s where I want you -- away from me." The truth is that I want to let people in, but I don’t have a clue how to do that. I touched on the fact that there is sexual abuse in my history and that I find it extraordinarily difficult to be physical with people. I can accept hugs, but rarely, if ever, will I approach someone to give a hug or kiss.    More time passes and I am speaking to people but still feel that disconnect. I’ve learned to accept that I just do not connect to people on a deep level. I am shallow, unaffectionate, afraid.   Saturday night, there is a meeting for incest survivors in one room, and a dance class in the other. I choose dance, of course, but when I get there, I immediately feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. I decide to leave there and join the first group, even though my story is nowhere near as serious as the stories of others. But it is in that workshop that deep emotions come up, and I share about how ever since the incident with my father I have been unable to be affectionate. When I was a little girl, I was extremely affectionate. At every family gathering, I was the one who would go around the room and kiss and hug everyone. I sat in my uncles’ laps. I craved affection. At my wedding shower, my mother brought it to my attention that I hugged and kissed no one. She didn’t understand it. It was so “off" for me. In that moment, I recognized that I was incapable of being openly affectionate. I knew why, but had absolutely no desire to change at that time. At the workshop, there is talk of intimacy issues that ring a bell with me. There are a lot of tears.  I feel the shame again -- or maybe I really feel it for the first time, as I am not under the influence of drugs, alcohol or sugar.   Even though the people in the meeting were wonderfully understanding and encouraging, following the meeting, I feel raw, tender, and vulnerable. I choked down a banana while crying in the break room. My roommate saw me and asked if I needed to hug, to which I abruptly and all too enthusiastically declared, “NO!" Then I went into my room and cried myself to sleep.   At 3:00 a.m. I was woken up by Something Greater than Myself and instructed to pick up my journal and start writing. I don’t have exactly what I wrote with me, so this is paraphrasing. Back in 2005, I began working a 12-step program. I received a lot of emotional healing at that time, which led me to the decision to have bariatric surgery, after which God delivered me of 155 pounds. I now think of it as layers. There was an emotional/layer on top of the layer of fat. That emotion was dealt with and released before surgery. Then, the physical layer of fat was released. Underneath that, however, lay another emotional/spiritual layer. Instead of returning to my 12-step program and continuing the good work God had begun in me, I instead aligned myself with a weight loss surgery support group.   My emotions were exposed since the physical layer of protection was removed. I had not developed a new way of dealing with those emotions, so I started to rebuild the wall. I picked up compulsive eating and began to regain weight. Due to my poor spiritual condition at the time, I believe God allowed me to develop alcoholism. That led me back to a 12-step program; which led me to Overeaters Anonymous, which forced me to once again begin the emotional and spiritual work associated with recovery from addiction. I was ready when I got to retreat, even though I didn’t even know there was such a road to be traveled in my journey.   I can now pick up the tools of recovery, put down the food, and come further down the path toward emotional healing, joy and happiness.    That night, God gave me a vision. He allowed me to see myself practicing affection in the safe haven of OA. I saw myself going around the room, hugging people. And I thought, that’s nice. Maybe in a year or so, I’ll be able to do that. And the next morning, I came out of my room and kissed and hugged every woman sitting in the break room. It was so funny, because none of those women had been in the abuse meeting. None of them knew the significance of what I had just done. They only knew that this extraordinarily happy woman was greeting them the way they were used to being greeted in OA. None but me realized that it was something I had never done before.    My issues around intimacy are becoming clearer. I was talking about how my relationship with Bill works because we rarely see each other. I say it as kind of a joke, but the truth is that it does work for me, because it involves no true emotional intimacy. I keep Bill at a distance, and do not share my innermost thoughts or feelings with him. I am beginning to understand that this is a trust issue based on fear coming out of the betrayal by my father. It, of course, has nothing to do with the person Bill is.   In fact, because Bill is so understanding, compassionate and “there" for me, I find myself panicking when we have a lot of alone time together. I don’t know how to “be" with him. I can connect physically, but keep myself emotionally distant most of the time. If the sex isn’t awesome or he’s not in the mood, I feel scared, because if he doesn’t want me for sex, what else could there possibly be to keep him with me??? I realized that one of my drinking relapses occurred when I was on vacation with Bill. Also, the last time I ate sugar was on our last vacation. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me at the time. I was able to share that with someone at the retreat, having told absolutely no one that I had lost my abstinence before then.   In the light of what has been revealed to me this past weekend, I understand that I had intimacy issues in my marriage as well. Regardless of Mark’s behavior, I kept myself at a distance, never sharing my whole self with him. I probably “chose" to marry him, because he was emotionally unavailable and I would never have to truly even try to connect with him.    And the final chapter that God closed for me that night has to do with my weight loss surgery support group I had gotten involved in. When the fat came off, and the emotional layer was on the surface, I attended a pilgrimage with the support group. It was not a spiritual retreat, but rather involved heavy partying and what seemed to me to be dangerous behavior. When I vocalized my opinion publicly, I was ostracized from the “cool group." It was a devastating event for me that threw me off kilter. It was the point where I started to slip and slide. I didn’t understand why, and I didn’t know how to fix it.    I see a couple of things more clearly now. At first, when the physical barrier was stripped away, I felt empowered and bold (you can read proud and vain here). I wanted to try new things. I wanted to exert my new-found power. I had been making an attempt to voice my opinion, which I was not used to doing and did not have a lot of practice at. When I got shot down, I wanted to immediately retreat. It was too new an experience for me to appreciate that I could let it go and not take it personally. I left the support group altogether, figured out I was still unlovable, and began to rebuild the wall of protection in whatever way I could.    I had aligned myself with a group of people who were “physical." The focus was on weight and size. Had I aligned myself with a spiritual group, returning to Celebrate Recovery or another 12-step program, I would have avoided some pain and experienced some growth sooner. I have been able to attend those support group meetings again, with some different people involved, but continue to connect with the spiritual groups more frequently and carry the spiritual with me into the physical world wherever I go. I couldn’t get over this experience until I could see it clearly for what it was. I couldn’t move on until I could see my part in it.    Phew! That was a lot of revelation and healing for one weekend!  God showed me some things that He will be helping me work on in the near future: Grieving the loss of my marriage; and grieving the loss of my fat. I will continue practicing affection and connection with my OA group. I will wait patiently for God to show me how to allow myself to become more intimate with Bill. Maybe by the time he retires, I’ll be ready.   Thanks for letting me share. I know it was a lot!!!

Jill i remember when you had that experience and voiced your opinion about the pilgrimage. If you will remember I defended you. You were absolutely right, it was  drunken, unhealthy weekend of behaviors that were not therapeutic. Those who let you have it so to speak, were unwilling to look at their behaviors and ever growing cross addictive behaviors. I dont know if they were the cool grou*****t. But I do know that, THAT kind of pilgrimage never happened again, It went on to be a therapeutic, health and wellness weeekend and a weekend that the developers and attendees truly benefited from , I am sorry that you did not get to see that.

It is not often we have disention on this board, but I do remember that very well. Honey all you did was hold up a mirror and some did not like what they saw. I myself was turned off by that experience as well I remember Jason and I came up for the day of one of the events, and few of the workshops took place and we could not visit with some of the friends we came to see because they were hung over in their rooms too sick to come out. . I am glad you are getting some healing I wish I could go to one of those retreats sounds wonderful.

I would venture to say alot of those " cool kids" have faded into their own issues, and I dont see many of them here constantly trying to improve, and heal their lives like you do. I could be wrong maybe that have it all figured out and their absence is due to them having got it right and moving on. Who knows. I guess it is all part of your journey, and that is all you need to be bothered with, Hugs to you and thanks for sharing

I am very happy to hear there were other, more therapeutic pilgrimages!  I know there were people who felt the same way I did back then, but I couldn't "hear" their support.  I could only experience the negativity.  I guess that was where I was in my personal journey.  Thanks for your continued encouragement and support.  I am VERY glad you are part of my recovery journey!
 

 Jill, I am so in awe of you and the things you are finding out about yourself as you go through your journey.  I was not at the Pilgrimage, as that was before my time here.  But, at the OH conferences, there is always a group of people who go out together.  I go for the comraderie and the dancing, but many go to get drunk out of their minds.  I can't comprehend how that makes anyone feel better, but I'm sure it is the numbing properties of it.  

I wish I could get to the bottom of my food addiction.  Maybe one day I can get there. 

Wow , WOW and WOW is what I can say. . .  Jill so much good stuff came and everything you have experienced had a value, the value is who you are today, hope you see your worth, because it is immeasurable!!! 

I for one missed you and like Nic, I also stood up for what I thought of as an unsupportive attack on someone sharing their perception and as I remember the situation well, you took full responsibility in that you admitted to the fact that you joined in, trying to be a part of.  It made me angry and it made me wary of some and not everyone liked what I had to say, but then again, I'm used to that, I still speak up when I feel it necessary and always will, because like you shared, one of my issues with being obese had to do with not having my voice when I needed to.  Today, sometimes you just need to tell me to shut up. . .(lol) 

I am also happy that you came out of the woodwork and returned to the support group because you bring with you a wealth of experience and an openness about yourself that truly can benefit anyone with an open enough mind to see it.