Tonight's session was quite intense. It went from ok to awful to really good, and we wound up going over. Like way over.

I came in looking to talk about some of my food rules/obsessions - I'd gotten caught up in an obsession over the weekend at the supermarket & it had been sort of an ah-ha moment to me... a "this isn't normal" moment. I emailed C about it late at night & we talked via email a bit this morning too... I wound up confessing to him that there are parts that desperately want him (my daddy) to tell me to eat... to not just tell me, actually, because that felt like a trick...but to genuinely want me to eat. I went into our session feeling very close to him, but things went south quickly.

I was telling C about how my nutritionist/dietician wants to push me towards intuitive eating. C expressed skepticism over this method, and wound up saying he wasn't the one who wanted me to go to a dietician (to which I said 'uhhh...you were all for it...encouraged it even...'), and that he thought the dietician would put me on an eating plan..would tell me what to eat. I brought up, in the context of my own skepticism over intuitive eating, how I was afraid of gaining all my weight back/getting fat again, and C agreed that that was something I should be concerned about. That, statistically speaking, because I've been obese before, it's something I have to worry about...unlike someone who has always been thin, slipped into anorexia, and then was in recovery and "really shouldn't worry about ever getting fat." (My words.)

For whatever reason, this really sent me spinning - this whole notion of him saying "yes, you should be concerned about not gaining a bunch of weight." I felt SO fat in that moment and like never eating again...which I told him...and we back and forthed, he got angry even... said that I was upset because he wasn't saying what I wanted to hear... compared this to when I told him that, because he'd had cancer before, he was at a higher risk of getting cancer again (which I said was totally different, but I don't think he understood where I was coming from in the moment...though I kept trying to explain it).

It got really bad. I told him it was obvious that I just couldn't talk to him about this stuff...because he's always saying stuff that makes it worse. But, then, somewhere in my rambling I wound up going down the path of telling him what I wanted him to say... (He told me to tell him, said "give me a script," and I guess I was just so upset that I couldn't argue anymore).

I wound up in tears telling him how I just wanted to be so thin that everyone, that HE wouldn't say anything about worry over gaining weight back. He said that he'd just be worried about my getting too thin, to which I said "That would be so...so much better."

He asked me why and said it would "be the same to him."

I said "because nobody looks at a thin person and thinks she's weak. Because getting that thin takes a tremendous amount of discipline and pain."

He asked what people think when they see someone who is very overweight, and I said "weakness, laziness, lack of control."

The conversation took this turn for a bit until, somehow, I wound up saying how I look at my anorexic brother...and I see how PROUD my dad is when he sits down and eats a big amount of food. And then I started falling completely apart... because I realized that I've never even thought about this before, but it's been there all along... how my dad wants my brothers to eat, how he's always wanted them to eat, and I've always been the fat girl who he doesn't want to eat...who isn't supposed to eat.

And then I blurted out how I'd never even been given a chance...how, when I was 1.5-2 years old, my mom fed me french fries, and my dad got horribly angry at her and yelled at her "why are you feeding her that? You're just going to make her fat like you!" ... how I never even had a chance...

He already didn't want me to eat when I was just a baby.

I started crying how I just wanted my dad to want me to eat...not to just say it, I want to be so thin that he actually WANTS me to eat... but, when I was nearing underweight, even then, all he said was how good I looked. I said that I know if I went to him and said "Dad, I want you to want me to eat," he would say "well of course I want you to eat," ...and C asked "would he mean it?" And I said that he probably would...

And then I said that it was too late... even if my dad does truly, genuinely want me to eat, it will never be enough to make up for all of the times that he didn't.

...

I am so spent after today's session. I'm still in so so much pain, but I pulled myself together pretty quickly because it was overwhelming to be crying in that room with C. He asked me to let him see my face while I was crying, but I couldn't. I blurted out "I'm too ugly," to which he said I wasn't ugly to him, but, that's another message from my dad and ex-stepmom, you know... "you're ugly when you cry." ... when I did finally look up, he deliberately turned the clock around so I couldn't see it, indicating that he didn't want me to worry about going over...that he wanted to go over. I appreciated that, but of course felt antsy about it too.

Something else I wound up saying somewhere in there... "I want to be taken care of... isn't this one of the fundamental needs? You feed your children."

Tonight, I am just in deep deep grief. I don't know how to cope with or overcome this. I told C I didn't know what to "do" with it, but we both know there's nothing to do with it... there's nothing to be done.

I really wish I could just go live with C right now. I never wanted to leave.