Call it what it is.....

Have you ever caught yourself stuck in a ‘vain repetition’ as far as prayer is concerned? Have you ever caught yourself praying for the same thing over and over again? I know that we have been cautioned about sending prayers up repetitiously. What do we do when that is how our heart truly feels? What do we do when those are our heart sincere desires? I don’t think I’ve prayed for anything more than for Heaven’s help to help me endure the day, overcome the demons in those impossible moments…..the number one thing I hear myself saying? “Heavenly Father, PLEASE help me to do this…..”  regardless of what the “this” may be.

Have you seen one of the newest videos put out by the church to help educate children on the dangers of pornography? We have reviewed in our home. It gives a three step process on what to do when they are confronted with it. The first step is to call it what it is. The second step is to turn it off and to turn away. Or in other words……to stop it. The third step? They teach kids to talk to a trusted adult. 

When I first saw this video, I thought it was very smart of the church to present it with kids talking and very helpful for me of knowing how to approach the subject with my kids. As far as I can remember, we only reviewed it one time for FHE a while ago. However, it has come to my mind many times in the last few weeks as I’ve identified my relapse. I feel ‘nudged’ from Heavenly Father to use these same steps in MY process. (Perhaps it's not necessary for you, but THANK YOU for letting my share my perspective! ! ! )

First of all, I need to call it what it is. Relapse. That is what it is. If I shirk around with an ill-defined concept of my current location, I will not be able to gauge where to go from here. In my reading of eating disorder literature during this last week, I remember an article that gave the suggestion that not defining your current state can leave one in denial; the same general premise that our secrets keep us sick. Then moving on to step two is to turn away. From any other addiction I can think of, this is true. Of eating disorders, it is the abstaining that is the problem. Step three? Talk with a trusted adult. Therapist, trusted friend, support group, sponsor, accountability partners……whoever it may be. This I find insightful as I am still evaluating the suggestion that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but rather connection.

I only hope that perhaps these three steps in this perspective may be of benefit to someone else out there.

No matter how hopeless or broken we might feel.

According to the dictionary:

     lapse → is a temporary failure of concentration, memory or judgement (noun)
     lapse → to pass gradually into an inferior state or condition (verb)

     Its origin in Latin is labi, which means to slip or fall.


According to the dictionary:

     relapse →(of someone suffering from a disease) suffer deterioration after a period of improvement.




I'm not sure why I get caught up on semantics so often. I have this internal debate with myself about how its important to define where I am, so as to find direction an move on from there.....vs.....recognizing that there might be a problem and just jumping in to fix it without analyzing everything to pieces.  
I had the honor to go to Haiti earlier this month as a nurse, spending time in remote villages and orphanages doing some medical work. I was gone for a week. It was truly a remarkable time. I'm so thankful I had the chance to go & I really hope that I can go again. 

Something happened after that trip that I didn't foresee, or even have on my radar as I returned home. I had a much greater sense of culture shock coming home than I did going to Haiti. My demons were waiting for me here back in the states. I was not prepared for them.

This is where it gets confusing to me. 

On one hand, I sense that I might have a problem. I am restricting. I've lost weight in the last 3 weeks that I've been home. (I will not list numbers or specifics so I don't trigger anyone else who may read this.) I find myself immersing myself in Anorexia/Bulimia literature. I exercise as much as I can push myself to......strictly as a means 'purging' although I use the excuse that I have a 5K/10K/Half Marathon coming up that my son and I are running in. But here is some of the most concerning red flags: My thinking is so confused that I'm not sure which character in my brain is saying what. Is the ED in my head thinking of this stuff or is it truly me!?! That person in the mirror hasn't changed in size, but she is a lot less tolerant and a lot more irritable. 

So my other hand tell me that everything is fine. I have nothing to worry about......that I have everything under control. I gained a fair amount of weight over the last couple of years, so I still have a decent amount to loose before I even get to the 'target weight' I was given while in treatment. 

I had to work today. Because my ward didn't start until 1pm and I had to be to work by 10am, I stopped at our ward building and sat out in the foyer, (in my athletic shoes and scrubs) so I could partake of the sacrament of the 9am ward. I had the tender mercy of seeing a dear friend who goes to that ward. She gave me a hug and expressed sincere concern as she inquired as to how everything was going. I almost broke down in tears as I expressed my discouragement. As the Sacrament hymn began to play, I encouraged her to join her husband and I sat back down. As it thought about yesterday, what a challenging and nearly impossible day it had been. I make some frustrating mistakes and was beyond irritated with myself for those choices. I began to hear in my head, what a mistake it was for me to be there, to partake of the Sacrament, that because of such poor choices, that I wasn't worthy to renew my baptismal covenants, not to mention being forgiven as it is taught to us in D&C. But as I sat there, listening to the Sacrament hymn, I had the clear sense that Heavenly Father did want me to partake of the Sacrament. I wish I could adequately describe how that helped me. It was as though he was trying to teach me that that is what the Sacrament is about, what his Atonement is for. For when we make mistakes, that there is a way to repair them with his help! ! !  It reminded me of attending ARP meetings. I cannot express adequate gratitude for the intense sense of the spirit that can reside there. It is so comforting to know that those of us who attend ARP meetings, who willingly admit they struggle with some form of addiction, can also have an amazing amount of the spirit join us, no matter how hopeless or broken we might feel.

It is so hard to learn the correct truth.

Have you ever had a day, where you cannot help but wonder if someone is trying to tell you something? And if that really is the case, can you help but wonder what message they are trying to get across, and who ‘THEY’ are?

Today was like that for me. I’m in school. I’m working on getting my RN. In today’s classes, the same point was brought up in each of them, although they each had a different take on it. Can you guess?

Yep…….Eating Disorders. 

I almost laughed during the first one because she taught the stereo-typical information that most everyone believes. It wasn’t entirely correct, but I wasn’t about to raise my hand to tell her the things she had missed the mark on. Plus, I figured that she was teaching what would be on our NCLEX, when it came time to get licensed with our national boards test. 

The second class? Not so funny……not at all. She showed a YouTube video of grossly emaciated girls who looked like the skeleton hanging in the Anatomy & Physiology lab. To say the YouTube video was triggering would be a gross understatement. 

{And just now, I checked my word processor’s synonym file, for a different word for the word ‘gross’ (since I used the root of that word twice in the last paragraph) and do you know what one of the words were? Overweight.}

By no means to I intend to promote the following, but rather this is used to educate. There are websites, forums, chat-rooms and ‘how-to’ information on the internet that promote the ‘lifestyle’ of Eating Disorders. They are commonly referred to as Pro-Ana (as in Anorexia) and Pro-Mia (as in Bulimia) sites. In my less than professional opinion, they are just as dangerous, (if not more so) than pornography websites. Yes, some of their pictures, depicting the extremes that the human body can be pushed to, can be paralleled to pornography by the nature of how much skin is shown. It is so much more than that. It glorifies, promotes, endorses and blatantly encourages weight loss extremes……as if to tell you how much space you shouldn’t take up. It is the paradoxical lie that ED teaches, that the less the number, the more worth you have. 

That is what I heard ED say to me all day. I need to be less in order to be more. I need to eat less, talk less, weigh less in order to be cared about more, to be loved more, to be worth more. And as logical as I know this is not, that is the feeling I’ve lived with for over 25 years. 

It is so hard to learn the correct truth.