Who flips that switch?

“You think he's gone? He's not gone. That's the whole point! He's never gone!” Dr. Leo Marvin speaking of his patient, Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?”

Lately I’ve been observing what’s behind that switch. You know the one. Maybe. For me, it connects to two things, blind rage or compulsive eating. There’s a match made in hell, eh?

The overwhelmingly tired soap opera about this phenomenon stars me as myself, whomever that is at the moment, usually a woman on the outside but a disgruntled toddler within. I look as if I’m going about my life doing ‘the next right thing.’ Could be something quite mundane, like catching a nap, even.

My experience is that I go from whatever to waking up in this overwhelming urge to yell my head off or, less belligerently toward passers by, eat anything not nailed down (“Katy bar the door,” as my father might say.) All reason goes flying out the window, and in the case of overeating, I can’t honestly recall at those times why I ever wanted to do anything but eat my way through my kitchen, my neighborhood, my country, and this planet (and not necessarily in that order, either).

In OA, some say this is all the proof we need of Step 1, that we are powerless over food and our lives are unmanageable, if not in and of itself, then as a result. In Zen, we speak of these moments as the experience of becoming identified with a regressed part of ourselves, sometimes referred to as a subpersonality.

For me, it’s the real reason I stick out any self-improvement program. I’ve been haunted by this feeling my whole life and at times I feel like it owns me. Because I get there and see only all the food I can possibly eat my way through along with this unstoppable feeling that I must eat it.

I can buy into the notion that it’s a small, needy part of me confused as to what’s needed to feel taken care of. But not when I’m under its spell. Then it’s just me needing to eat and eat and eat until she’s done. I can blame some tangible things like making my hunger wait too long, or eating a triggering food like wheat thins with just enough of a hint of sweetness to feel an overeating switch inside engage. But there are other factors to, before it comes on, completely unknown to me except for what I infer by how I feel when I’m done overeating.

In Zen we meditate to that we can cultivate the mind of sitting still and seeing without judgment what arises. This compulsion is so perfect for this kind of observation, I know, although I feel blindsided every single time. It is a very counter-intuitive process of in essence waiting for the disturbance to happen so you can watch how it comes about. By disturbance I mean that which takes place mentally and extremely discreetly, to result in a landslide of emotion that did not exist but 5 minutes or 5 seconds before.

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." Henry David Thoreau

Someone Like Me

“Guess what? I have flaws. What are they? Oh I donno, I sing in the shower? Sometimes I spend too much time volunteering. Occasionally I'll hit somebody with my car. So sue me-- no, don't sue me. That is opposite the point I'm trying to make.” Michael Scott, “The Office”

In our sangha, we speak of ‘conditioning backlash’ whereby your ‘reward’ for a sought after experience that frees you from an unwanted freedom or behavior is nothing other than an apparent redoubling of effort to seize your sensibilities. That’s what happened following my ability to wait out an overwhelming craving in my last writing.

It wasn’t until several days and binges later, yesterday, in fact that I could ‘catch’ my mind wanting to wander down the alley of what I can only describe as an internal debate over whether to eat something more at the conclusion of dinner and how dreadful I’d feel to just ‘stop’ for ‘the whole evening’. Though it was like averting eyes from a roadside accident I could feel an internal pulling away and some intuitive assurance that I’d be better off if I did. Sure enough, I went on about my evening and had the most peaceful ‘food day’ among other things, I have had in a month—since I decided it would be OK to have a piece of my brother’s graduation cake to be exact.

That experience is my internalization of what is referred to as mastery, although I have no idea if I’ll be able to repeat it at will. That is the point we reach when we really ‘know’ the internal conversations are just that—voices in the head borne from a conditioned past extending who knows how far back—and though powerful and convincing and causing us to identify strongly with its/their pleas—are not us, but simply housed by us. When we really know that to be true, is when we all of a sudden have available to us the choice to turn away and behave differently.

Of course there are no end of spiritual traditions that espouse that reality. In the 12-step program, that experience can be thought of as surrendering to power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity as stated in Step 2. Grace is a lovely way to hear it described as well. Most recently I have heard it described as being blown from the belly of the whale, JUST at the point at which we give up all hope (another way, maybe of describing surrender). In any case, I came, I saw, I let go and eating, along with the rest of life, is more peaceful today.

“You must know that you can swim through every change of

“Won't you help me sing my song

From the dark end of the street

To the bright side of the road” Van Morrison

A Job for Howard

“It's a terrible feeling, isn't it — the self-will run riot? Here you long to inwardly resemble the Dalai Lama humming to himself, or Therese of Liseux at dawn Christmas morning in prayer.”-Anne Lamott

I snapped! Well, some "I" did. I hate hanging in there to watch it, too. That’s worse than the snappage. To date, I have lost about 18 pounds (I strive to weigh myself once monthly only) and I had the sense I underate at lunch yesterday. A few hours after when John was snacking on blue chips a part of me ‘went wild’ and just ‘had’ to have chips and cheese together. That I did and that was that but I felt rebellious after and really not happy after dinner was over. 

That was of course yesterday, not necessarily related to what happened this day. Yet today I did have enough at lunch but I still went for a bread/cheese snack and not in the way it’s recommended either, at least by my sponsor. I’m having a hard time knowing what is right for me, separating it from what I feel I should be doing according to my sponsor, even though my sponsor says there is no wrong way.

I like her a lot. She is younger than me—but that barely comes up. Her background is highly resonant with my own -- most especially when it comes to spiritual beliefs. She has defined her higher power as a guiding force of connection through us all, and that very much is how I've come to think of 'my' higher power. She’ll refer to God and that suits me fine, as it’s rather cumbersome to refer to praying to "my inner guiding feeling of human connection".

Whatever the definition, I am struggling with lining my eating up with my inner sense of what makes sense for me, my higher power, or my mentor, as it’s sometimes called in my Zen practice. I feel myself lining up instead with an inner rebellious child who is hopping mad that she’s being forced to do what she doesn’t want to do. She has her system of control, flawed as it is, in place and tolerates the horrid inconsistencies around her by paying close attention to her food kingdom, reveling in the knowledge that there she lords over her ‘loyal’ but inanimate subjects of chocolate kisses, chocolate chip cookies, and an array of warm, buttery comfort food. She isn’t going down with a fight on this one.

I know she’s not after food. She’s after reassurance that there are steady, dependable things available just for her. The toleration of her as only one part of me after so many years of thinking I am the part she comandeered is in and of itself a huge undertaking. I can. I will. I want to—I know that, how? Ah…. Looks like a job for the mentor.

“I like to think that some even turned to Howard, who can be kind of a generic god for agnostics, a big warm caring galoot of divine presence — Howard, as in, "Our father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name."—Anne Lamott

Moment by Moment

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen

The horrible for me is realizing I could stand to lose at least 50-70 pounds and the miserable is standing on the scale after an eternity of what feels like the worst deprivation ever, lasting 1 month total, to find out I'd shed exactly seven of those unneeded pounds. The only reason I'm not flooded with self-hating thoughts regarding what a failure I both feel like and no doubt will turn out to be as I try to quench a tsunami like desire to over eat, is that I'm so busy remembering to phone my sponsor and figure out what vegetable or how much salad I need to make to fill half my plate that I don't have inordinate amounts of time left over for anything else. That and I lie down to go to sleep and become riddled with anxiety that even without the excess poundage, I'll somehow starve between dinner and breakfast (this I have come to learn is a common fear amongst overeaters!).

All in all, I am getting through, one day, one meal at a time as the encouragement often. goes. What I'm seeing is how very much free access to food and a perceived need to eat throughout the day, pervades my identity. So  many times I've reached for something I wasn't hungry for and even stopped to ask myself why I think I'm doing 'this'. The answer quite often was 'It's who I am. It's what I do."

I just completed a food history, something it never occurred to me to do in easily 25 years of making concerted constructive efforts to reduce the need to overeat. I don't know why I find it surprising how important I've made eating but it has infused every ordinary and extraordinary breath I've taken as long as I can remember.

I love knowing this and really seeing this as I work at not needing to eat when I'm not the slightest bit hungry, yet I am well aware of this appalled aspect of myself that is horrified the extent to which what I think I need is so different from the fact of the matter. In addition to the revelatory knowledge that very little starving takes place between those who get a nutritive dinner and breakfast the next morning, it has also come as a shock that one can subsist on 3 moderate meals and that if a snack is in order, the traditional apple, banana or other type of fruit can suffice, even satisfy any biological hunger that might arise. You couldn't provide me more shocking data if you told me not only is Elvis alive, but I am he. (And by the way, can you prove I'm not?)

"The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it." Emerson