My therapist asked me to read the letter that I wrote to my mom, not with the attention of sending it. She gave me an assignment to do. If you want to read my initial letter to Mom, I posted it under the title “Going to Be Brave.” My subscribers might have already seen it, but if you are not subscribed to my blog, you can go to my homepage and look for the letter.

My assignment is to pick three thoughts that I have with having reread the letter, and three feelings that come up because of those thoughts.

The first thought I had when I read the letter again was, “How could I say that?” What I mean is, how come I am willing to risk my life for her approval? Nobody, even family, should be worth giving up your life for. Although one thought that just came to my mind when I just said that is, “Well, the bible says there is no greater love than a person who will give up their life for another.” So, the feeling that just came up when I wrote that, is guilt. Would I be sinning if I wasn’t willing to give up my life for another? I know that giving up my life due to an eating disorder is not what Jesus meant when he said that. I think there are certain times when one should be willing to sacrifice his life for another, like maybe to stand in the way of a bullet headed for someone who you love, but I doubt sacrificing my life for someone’s approval is what Jesus meant. In fact, I know it isn’t what he meant. So, the other feeling that comes with the thought, “How could I say that?” is anger. Because I feel sometimes like Mom expects me to make her happy no matter the cost.

I think in another post, I explained what I did. I did take the ipecac, and it almost killed me. I won’t explain the whole story again, because you can go read my post, I think, with the title, “My Body is My Own Continued Thoughts.” But truly did almost sacrifice my life for her approval, and that makes me feel both ashamed of myself and angry.

The second thought I had was, “How could Mom not know that her anorexia when I was a child would not teach me unhealthy beliefs about my own body?” She has never gotten help for it. In fact, when Dad was alive, he even encouraged it, which then reinforced the unhealthy belief that I was getting.

The feeling that I get from that thought is anger, but mostly anger towards my dad. He didn’t encourage her to get help at all. He was pleased and content with my mom’s body, and that she was starving herself. He completely ignored the issue, which told me that behavior was normal. I have a lot of anger at my dad for a number of reasons, but appearance meant everything to him. When I started gaining wait, he treated me like I was less than, like I was ugly, and a pig. He hated me because I was overweight. He hated me for a lot of reasons, just like my brother did. He called me “mentally ill” and maybe I was, and am, but does that mean I am less than. I know these feeling probably should be the feelings that come up towards my mom, but dad encouraged this. I blame him more than I blame my mom for the beliefs I learned about myself.

I am trying to think about a third thought that I had when I reread that letter and I think I talked about then with my second thought. Mom now knows I have an eating disorder, too, and I told her what I did with the ipecac. Now all of a sudden, she isn’t necessarily praising me for the weight that I have lost. In fact, my target weight of 115, she now says would be too skinny for me. She still isn’t acknowledging where I learned these things from, and she is only 96 pounds, so I don’t think she has room to talk about what is too thin for me or not. The feeling that comes up with all of these thoughts is confusion. I am totally confused about what to believe about myself. She did say that she has always loved me and not cared about how much I weighed, but her behavior, and dad’s behavior, proves that to be a lie. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions said that appearance was all that mattered.

I am not sure if I did this assignment correctly, or if there even is a correct way to do it, but those are my thoughts and feelings that came up for me when I reread the letter to mom.

I really want to write a letter to my dad as well. For some reason I think I already did that, but I have no memory of it. But there is so much that I would like to say to my dad that I wish I could have said to him before he died. So maybe that is what I will do next.

Kelly