Act Acting » Method Acting » Re-Ros and "Hello"

Re-Ros and "Hello"

Question:

Hi everyone! I’m new here and I want to introduce myself properly very soon, but I hope it’s OK meantime just to leap in with some comments. I really empathized with Ros’s post about being re-seduced by ED thoughts just when her appetite had been lost through illness. I’m sort of going thru the same thing right now, but am trying an experiment which may possibly help her or others. I’m trying to entertain the ED thoughts without acting on them. At the end of each day I "agree" to starve and I feel all the protection and comfort and sense of purpose and control that (curiously) comes from that, but come the morning I see sense and eat, or don’t see sense, but make myself eat anyway – i.e. separating the thoughts from the behaviour.  I guess the real solution would be finding something else less destructive to produce those feelings.  So far I’m not doing too badly – I’m restricting a bit, but not eating as little as possible.  Hope this makes some kind of sense… Happy New Year from Pam

Response:

Hi Pam, I think agree with Rosie on this one, at least in terms of where I am in my own recovery. I think entertaining ED thoughts without acting on them would be a risky thing to try if you’re not also receiving some kind of therapy to monitor your progress. I can see how such an experiment might work for some people, but it would be only too easy for me to let the e.d. thoughts take over since I’m not having my thoughts regulated by anyone right now. I also think my e.d. twisted thinking would view this as ‘failure’, the deciding to restrict and then not achieving this. I know this is warped thinking, but I fear that the repercussions might be a purge, if I feel like I have indulged in binge behaviour which I have not anticipated (even if what I consider to be a binge might be regarded as normal eating for some people). However I see the benefits of the method as being: you ‘hear’ the e.d. thoughts, acknowledge them and then choose not to act upon them. Firstly if this is combined with therapy I think this method could work very well, secondly this brings to mind Grace’s ‘The Deadly Diet’ post, concerned with acknowledging ‘The Voice’ and then ACTIVELY fighting it. Some of these methods sounded more positive than merely hearing the voice and then ‘letting go’. Marion also suggested a journal where one side is devoted to ‘ED/lies/negative thoughts’ and the other side ‘Positive/truth/logic’ is used to present a contradictory argument. It is a method I am planning to employ, since I keep a journal anyway, but in the past I have used it to reinforce my negative thoughts by writing pages and pages of e.d. thoughts and then refusing to acknowledge their illogicality. Anyway if it works for you then that’s good. I just think that this method should be used with caution, and perhaps in conjunction with therapy/Deadly Diet-type thinking/positive journaling as well. Hope to hear more from you soon Pam! love Ros

Response:

silly question – what does YMMV stand for? Ber

Response:

Related Posts

Leave a Reply