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Rate This Contest Entry: Contest: June 30th, 2005 Author: Liz Pongia She’s tired. Always so tired, she says to me. Tired of fighting with herself, with her thoughts. “The mirror shouldn’t be my enemy,” she screams at me. “I shouldn’t be just a number.” Why is she so scared of a number? She’s not just a number, and the mirror doesn’t define who she is. “Why can’t I forget everything I’ve learned? It was so much easier when I didn’t know how to challenge this thinking.” Yes, her thinking is tearing her apart, I can see that. I remember the beginning. The absolute determination I saw in her eyes. She was lost to me then, completely consumed by her thinking, by her disorder. But I know her, I know she knows how to change. She’s proven it to me before. I’ve watched her fight and seen how she can challenge the thinking. Its not about the food, it’s the feelings beneath them. It’s the, “You’re getting a bit of a stomach there, you need to start working out,” from her father. The determination is fueled by the feelings of inadequacy and the lack of control she feels over her own life. “The false feelings of control and the fleeting momentary feelings of success make the disorder worth it,” she explains. “But I hate it.” Is it possible to want to hold on to something that you hate? It has to be, she does. I remembered those high feelings of success she told me about after reaching a set goal. But I also remember those “horribly imperfect depressive feelings” as she called them when she “deviated from her set plan.” And the fear, the fear of the inevitable feelings of failure, despite her hardest efforts, made her hate the thing she held on to the hardest. I never really understood why she put herself in triggering situations. She’d sift through magazine upon magazine looking at pictures of models who she believed to be thinner than her. She called them her “thinspiration.” She’d cut their pictures out and paste them on her mirror or on her closet door. So many times I wanted to reach out and shake her, “That Calvin Klein model is not you and will never be you! You are perfect just the way you are, let it go!” But I knew she would never listen. She became addicted to “Ana” (short for anorexia) and “Mia” (short but bulimia) websites. She’d spend hours talking to the other girls, trading restriction tips and other methods for rapid weight loss. She said they understood her. She said they knew why she didn’t want to stop and they encouraged her not to. Her father had an overabundance of his own issues with himself to work on; I knew that she knew better than to give in to his negative reflections. Yet she did. Time and time again. “You are not defined by him, don’t give him that power!” I’d say to her, but she’d just look at me sadly through big blue helpless eyes. I knew she had the power to change her thinking. I knew she had the ability to challenge the negative thoughts, she knew how; there was no question about that. We were both psychology majors, and I’d encourage her to use the A-B-C method. Antecedent (the environmental trigger) = family, society, feelings of self worth. Behavior (the behavioral response to the environmental trigger) = accepting negative feelings of self worth and falling into unhealthy coping skills. Consequence (feelings underneath behavior) = feelings of inadequacy, poor sense of self worth, negative thought processes. She needs to attack the consequences of the triggers. I tell her to contradict her feelings of inadequacy by listing to me the qualities she had rather than the qualities she felt she did not have. I refused to let her deny or minimalize the seriousness of the behavior by reminding her of the dangers and the consequences of unhealthy coping skills. I remind her to identify and replace the irrational beliefs, and to do it constantly. Constantly, and she’d have the power to change the behavior. She’s standing in front of the mirror now, tears welling up in her eyes. I ask her what the worst part of her body is, and she says, “I don’t know, I just can’t stand any of it.” I ask her why and she sighs and says, “It’s not about the food; it’s not about the fat or the calories, the problem is how I feel about myself. I’m 118 pounds now, and that’s “healthy” for my height. The only thing I’m going to try to control now is staying healthy.” Slowly, she reaches her hand out to the full length mirror she has propped up against the wall and turns it around, and suddenly I feel the cool smoothness of glass as I prop up the wall facing mirror. Rate This Entry! Warning: fopen(/home/writingc/public_html/entries/b3_rating/b3r_data/.txt) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/writingc/public_html/entries/b3_rating/b3_rating.php on line 69 Error opening file. Use browser's back button and try again people have rated it so far. 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