I
read this book recently for a library book club, and it's awful when it comes to
abuse. I told the book club, she needs to learn more about abuse and should
be warning about sociopaths and narcissists, and I was upset that she
left nieces and nephews with a severe abuser with nary a word [as far as the reader is told]. People
nodded and agreed with me. Sure she is to be congratulated on getting out and taking the steps to better her life, but I didn't like the messages about abuse and life that this book had to tell. Maybe it hit too close to home, maybe something about the book struck me as not truthful.
The general theme is the same, down and out person, in this case with physical and mental abuse added to the poverty, escapes and rises up the ladder of success. It's part of the perseverance porn genre. These books always seem to have a conservative political "up by the bootstraps" theme. It's very strong here. Tara manages to teach herself trigonometry and to get into college even not knowing what the Holocaust was. Tara takes the education world by storm and goes to college after being poorly homeschooled, and goes on to earn a Master's degree. Just like JD Vance, she gets a few lucky breaks along the way that are understated, in this case a professor-mentor takes her under his wing.
She definitely worked hard and I liked the part of the book describing her pursuits of knowledge and education. Homeschooling is definitely a problem and is something I believe should be made illegal. It's a tool of too many abusive parents among the few homeschooling parents that may offer anything resembling a real education. Tara was kept at home to be her father's mule in the scrap-yard with plenty of injuries waiting to be had.
However a lot of the book seemed "untrue" and this beyond outraged family members calling a would be escaped scapegoat a liar. Some reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere question the book, how did her badly educated and functioning mother and father suddenly become multimillionaires from a holistic health company that made essential oils, salves and homeopathic remedies? Was she really that isolated when she was allowed to sing and act in community plays? How did one relative survive a hole to his brain as described in her book, and others a slew of severe burns--in one instance she claims her father's face burns so badly it appears to melt, car accidents and more without modern medical care and survive? How did her mother survive a severe brain injury with no modern intervention and then have the health and mental ability to run a large business?
I joked at the book club maybe the whole book was an ad for her mother's miraculous salves behind the scenes. I saw enough of the holistic health world to know homeopathy and herbs grown on the side of the mountain are not equivalent to the modern medical world. I definitely tried different remedies when I was with the fundamentalists myself. More then one tried to convince me to give up modern medicine and evil "sorcery" named "pharmacology", but I knew it would mean death in my case.
What gets me is she keeps
returning to a very abusive family and in the end still yearns for their
love and wants to be with them instead of any real recovery, so the book
bothered me greatly. It also gets annoying how much love is pushed, as if all of us should love abusers in one of the lesser offensive quotes of the book, stated above by Oprah. "You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye." Here recall my last post about emotional repression, part of the messages of society is you must love family [god/etc] no matter what they do to you. Ponder the messages of this book and why it was written. It's her right to express her emotions, but I realize something is very wrong here, as the focus is "loving abusers" between her and Oprah.
Her odd words that "I knew my father always loved me" are strange indeed as in the book, she tells tales of her father directly endangering her life from the work he had her do, and directly endangering the life of her brothers where at least two are severely injured. I think in some places this would be known as a "double bind" message, someone writes a book where someone does everything to destroy them, allows a brother to beat her to the point of almost being maimed for life, sets them up for severe injuries, denies them medical care and an education and uses them as a slave for years and goes up on a national stage and tells us how much this person loved her.
Her sociopathic brother keeps beating the literal
snot out of her, puts her head in toilets and even once commits
an extreme bloody horrific crime against an animal, and none of it is reported. Her parents know about all this and do absolutely nothing. There is one scene where he is beating the shit out of her at a bar, but instead of her protesting or yelling for help, she pretends it's all a joke so others don't intervene.
This book was triggering to me, though I did not tell the group that
part, and I remember how I had to fist fight like a boy to protect
myself from my abusive brother [father was too]. I wrote about this on my going no contact with my brother, but a lot of my childhood and teens was dodging his fists, pinches, slaps, and threats of physical harm. Unlike her psycho brother who was farther on the spectrum of evil, while I had some fun times with my brother, when we were younger, there was the very "dark" side of things too. This book was hard to read, and I almost quit, because reading scenes of her getting knocked down, kicked about, slapped and threatened brought back some of my own abuse.
In my case, I was
large and could dish it out like a boy and did when I had to, once
giving brother a bloody nose and also tossing him into a dishwasher breaking
the door off but I spent my childhood and teens, having brother hit me, wrestle me, kick me and under constant physical duress
from him. Remember the example he was given in terms of treating me. I believe things would have been far worse if I had not been so big in size and close to him in age. He did not touch me when I was over 18, knowing I'd call the
cops on him but the threat of violence was always there, if that makes
sense. I was nearly 50 in 2018, with a slight tinge of worry over his misspelled words about wishing he could come over to my house to slap me.
Sometimes I wonder about "popular" books like this that
give very bad messages about abuse. This book, was the extreme of someone sitting there and taking it. She never fought back until she ran away to go to school. Even after her no contact, she never questioned the system she came out of. I don't know if she is someone who will progress or not, but these seem to be issues that impact her book negatively. The love stuff with Oprah doesn't shock me as the societal theme of family at all cost even with one that has left, Tara has no interest in questioning the myths of religion or family, that all parents "love" their children no matter how they treat them. How many remain in abuse now, being told Mom or Dad "really love" you? No "bootstrap" book that sells success to the masses will ever question family as the bastion of love, no matter how toxic that family is.
I understand people being at earlier steps of abuse recovery or even the time when you just don't know. That applied to me. So with all of Tara's "education" and contact with academics and celebrities, how come there is no warnings about narcissism or sociopathy in this book? Why are there so many limited and missing messages about abuse and CPTSD? Where is her concern for the younger family members left behind in the grips of the family? If the book is more about her success in education and "educating herself", then her lack of education about abuse or wanting to find out more, is glaring. Something feels sugar-coated to me. One interesting thing about the Dad was that he was a hard core conspiracy theorist, which is now common among fundamentalist Christians of all types, this type being Mormon.
She is not in recovery at all, kept
going back for more--her brother beat her even when she was 18 and long out of
the house and she never called the cops on him. She still pines away for
her psychopathic religious family at the end of the book going on about
forgiveness, does not protect the younger generation as far as the readers know--her psychopathic
brother who is the animal murderer and beater of women has a huge family. Tara also refuses to criticize the extreme fundamentalism and religion that imprisoned her and
denied her an education. Watching her in the videos, something about her rubs me the wrong way.
From a book review on Amazon: "Tara is unlikeable
and unrelatable. You'd think that after having studied at Cambridge
and Oxford, she'd call the cops after finding out that her crazy older
brother Shawn had stabbed a pet to death, or any of the other times
when he threatened to kill her or has gone as far as to physically maim
her. You'd also think that she'd stop going home (every single
semester) since every time she goes back, she endures more abuse. You'd
think she'd either call the cops or just cut contact with her crazy
family once and for all."
From the video above: "Our emotions play a huge part in our ability to navigate daily life,and the distorted emotional responses drilled into us by relentless rehearsal in the abusive environment
can disrupt our functioning at the most subtle levels"
All my life every emotion was invalidated except by very few. Every ACON knows the results of being made into a narc puppet where you are trained to shut down all "unacceptable" emotions" and how this pans out in one's life leaving you as a target to new narcissists and dividing you from yourself. Narcissistic parents shout, "I will give you something to cry about!" and "Why are you laughing like that?" They tell us how to feel, aka smile at Mommy and Daddy's work party and pretend like life is great or else!
Theramin Tree compares high control religion groups with dictatorial gods that mandate certain emotions and love and how they operate the exact same as narcissistic families, that shut down emotional honesty and put compliance and conformity first.
As I age, I have been dealing with serious problems regarding emotional repression. There's few places to express any and trying to seek after authentic ways of being are difficult. This area is so reticient to the max. Think "Minnesota Nice" married to extreme Midwestern reservation. I haven't even seen an argument in public in 15 years. There was no getting used to this.
You never know if someone is really mad at you or not. The other day online, with an online support group of understanding people, I wrote, "I wish I had friends to cuss with!" Well I do with Mr. Peep, but there was something that overtook me, where the cloaking from Aspergers and survival fear, made me more of a repressed reserved person to the extreme. It's like I am two people, around him I will joke and cuss, and am loud and talkative, but in public and social situations, I feel like I am measuring words with teaspoons, and it has gotten worse as I got older. Also the going deaf does not help.
Some of this is happened because I didn't want narcissists to feed. Vulnerability in too many cases meant the predators came in, but now I feel so shut down.
Some people tell me "find your tribe" but whoever they are, they aren't talking and emoting around here.
Tribes are found far easier online. Some ACONs may find that learning to feel their emotions outside of the mandates of negative religions and families is a process. We also realize the lessons missed in expressing emotions around regular people to the point it's even hard to show positive ones. At least we start listening to ourselves and our "inner voice" instead of those who tell us to shut up constantly.
Those who deconvert, realize how much their religion gave them an image of a "good Christian" they were supposed to follow and how this was tied into emotional repression. The demanded constant "thought policing" of Christianity now pisses me off. Prayer even seems to be a demanding "numbing" ritual that focuses on thoughts instead of actually "doing" something. It upset me how I was trained to control my own thoughts as "not being good enough". "Don't be mad at mother, be forgiving!" "You shouldn't have negative thoughts about others, it's wrong!" even if said negative thoughts are sounding the warning cry! "Give people the benefit of the doubt" and so forth.
Then as we are told to shut down other emotions, the demands to produce fake emotions is constantly there.
For Christians, this is centered around being nice, and kind and "gentle" especially for women who are told that meek, mild and "having a servant's heart" is the way to go. If you are a brash, loud, more aggressive person, this is like being shoved into a box that is too tight.
The one demanded emotion is love. In Christianity we are told to "love" everyone. Thinking about this while some people are lovable, and add great things to your life, I thought about how I was told to love people who treated me like crap. Love itself gets degraded when it's expected to be shared with everyone.
Speaking up for yourself was considered "sin", so much was centered around being a doormat. Often, I felt guilt inside because I did not love everyone, I felt neutral towards most, loving towards friends or kind strangers or cute children, but there were people who did not bring out feelings of affection. Even yelling at someone who almost drove into you, was considered "sin". Somehow I was supposed to manufacture this new "persona" of loving benevolence towards all, the problem is that it was fake. The "love everyone" stuff puts toxics in charge and makes doormats of others when one is told to shut down their own thinking about how they truly feel about someone. If you think about this, teaching people to have no preferences breaks down alliances between them and gives a church organization far more control.
One thing mentioned in the video is how we are told to love God, and there is this idea of producing an emotion for what I believe now is an imaginary being, that never takes the time to interact with us. Somehow we are supposed to drum up intense feelings of affection for Mr. Silent Treatment. What does this do to the human psyche to drum up intense feelings for a Being that simply refuses to talk back? Here too, we have entered the realm of manufactured emotions. How can you truly love and know someone outside an imaginary sense if they offer no personality or words back?
Like life with narcissists, you are told to love your mother and father no matter what they do to you, and the same applies to God, "Though he may slay me, I will trust in him" Job says. That is the epitome of what we are told to all say when it comes to our abusers. God can do anything to you, let your life become a bombed out crater, betray, remain silent, indifferent, show no love or response to you [since it does not exist the way they say it does] and you are to remain a smiling cipher singing songs of praise at your evangelical or fundamentalist church. So Theramin Trees brings up great points about how our emotions are repressed in both toxic religion and in toxic families.
"People who've been subjected to different kinds of abusive environments often show highly convergent themes in their descriptions of their experiences. Years ago, when I began talking in depth with people who'd been recruited by religious and pseudoscientific high-control groups,
hearing them recount their experiences was like hearing a gigantic tuning fork resonating at my own pitch.
Their observations about life inside a high-control group echoed private observations I'd made about my life inside a narcissistic family.was the same divisiveness, where loyalty to the dictatorship came before any personal relationship between other members;
the same social isolation tactics, trying to sabotage external relationships with friends or lovers,
the same attempts to maintain child-like dependence.
Parallels have repeatedly been noticed between scriptural
tales of vengeful, dictatorial gods and abusive relationships, noting the same threat of dehumanising brutality, the same capriciousness generating erratic, inconsistent demands. the same sense of all-pervading invasion into every aspect of the target's life, with no boundaries and no privacy. The details of abuse vary from situation to situation, with different levels of intensity or sadism.
but the essential underlying mechanics merge.
At their core, all abusive environments are about gaining coercive control over others.
So, it's not surprising that abusive individuals and groups of all kinds -religious, political, academic, familial, romantic -converge on the same manipulative tactics to get people to sacrifice their autonomy and authenticity, and submit to fixed roles."
I've realized with age, I have been dealing with serious problems regarding emotional repression. It may be the area I live in, it is so reticient here, it drives me nuts. The other day online, with an online support group of understanding people, I wrote something like I wish I had friends to cuss with! Well I do with Mr. Peep, but there was something that overtook me, where the cloaking from Aspergers and survival fear, made me more of a repressed reserved person to the extreme. It's like I am two people, around him I will joke and cuss, and am loud and talkative, but in public and social situations, I feel like I am measuring words with teaspoons, it gotten worse as I got older. Also the going deaf does not help.
Is it just me or do people seem more like closed books? It's harder to get to know people, openness is long gone. I've dealt with some awful stuff in some circles, where classism seems to rule, and some of these folks don't believe in emotions or openness. In fact their first instinct is to shut me down and this can be over the most mild of opinions and I am not yelling or showing anger. I've had two recent instances of people shutting me down, like I was invisible. One lady who was an ally at one group I was at, came to me to talk to me how both I and her were shut down at a political book discussion we both went to. She was upset. I told her I wondered if the community book discussion group on a political topic was actually being held and financed by a conservative group. I mentioned the phrase "economic inequality" and the consensus people came running to shut me up. It was nice to be validated though by someone else who saw the manipulations going on.
In the second case, I was at another discussion group in my community, there was a wealthier high status boomer going after me, talking to me like I was ten years old. She was new to that discussion group, and was issuing edicts and rules on us all. Everyone's heads were bent down and I knew I'd have to fight back.
Sadly like what happens too often the leader of that group, was bending to a would be narcissists demands and throwing the rest of us under the bus. Later I would be told by the group leader referring to herself, "I didn't enforce the rules properly" so the narcissist's shaming methods worked. A group that previously had no problems was thrown into chaos by a would be narcissist.
She played overly diplomatic and seemed to take the side of the other
person. I even said at one point, "Don't you think they were even a bit
overbearing?" She said she didn't enforce the crosstalk rules enough,
and I responded "Why do things have to be so rigid and controlled for
such a small group, well for future people you need to make it more
clear you are following the AA like no cross talk rules." She said
something was in the "Covenant" of the group and that's part of the
program. [One odd thing is during the original argument, I said, that
was the ideal, and I know the only time I interrupted was to ask someone
to speak up]
She conceded to me, that you have to do what is
right for you, and keep your boundaries. I said I will and for her to
be careful of toxic personalities. I said, "I am not
going to take disrespect from anyone, and do not regret walking out."
Husband backed me up and said "this lady took things to the extreme, she
was spending 100,000 to make a 10 dollar point and would not let
up." I left the room and tried to redirect the conversation
multiple times.
Oddly she then claimed that others had complained
about the "crosstalk in the group" and that they had been interrupted
too often and did "not feel safe". I never saw this. My husband who was there said, "I
never saw that happen." I said something about how conversation flows
can be hard for Aspies, but I never interrupted anyone's turn to talk,
and knew I had to waited my turn and did and with my hearing have to focus
on words anyhow. At this point I said the group is "too rigid" then for
me. I think she wants us out of the group. I said at this point, "Maybe the group is too structured for me, and
it's not for me." I told her these extreme rules destroy connection. She
then suggested other activities.
The extreme rigidity in this community is taking a toll. The toxic person gained control. The group leader wants to please the
people with power. Toxic people will use rules to wrap people up, and
claim they are breaking rules to get others to dissuade them. I notice
people go running to to please personalities like this.
I ended up walking out of the room and have no regrets in doing so. The me of yesterday would have sat there and taken it, trying to please but the me of today knows there was reasons for my anger.
There seems few places now in American society where you can "be yourself". I feel uncomfortable in some higher class circles where they seem to want a higher level of control. It's horrible around here, especially among the corporate "professional" and wealthy people. Formal registers of speech are shoved down my throat. My personality does not fit among their circles. The endless rules and formality are stifling as hell. The pecking orders and competition do not allow for honest sharing.
It is a mine field for an Aspie too. I think here I need to listen to myself more on the type of people I am trying to communicate with and have made the decision to limit some of the socializing, why go out time and time just to get hurt again?
Some here have chided me for my negative view of boomers, but I am sorry to say, while there are some allies and good boomers, I have noticed it is mostly women who are 15-20 years older who are invalidating me, treating me like I am 10 years old and practicing unrestrained classism and ableism. Around here, the majority of the boomers I am talking about are very religious and politically conservative. There's others that would fit the neo-liberal label too. I don't think I am imagining this and I have seen differences in Silent Generation people who sadly are now growing very aged and millennials in how I am treated.
The "OK Boomer" meme exists for a reason. Some people I think got tired of being lectured to, and sadly too many of them feel they have the right to tell you to be silent and to invalidate you. I am learning to avoid people like this. Around here, their numbers are legion too. They are people that can make one feel extraordinarily lonely and silenced.
There's unwritten rules some types follow where emotional repression is the name of the game, don't act too boisterous, or tell jokes, or get too pedantic, stick to business only and everything must be conformist or emotionally flat. There's a lot of people wanting to repress you emotionally now and using a variety of tools to do so. There's this feeling inside that my fire burns too hot, and just by opening my mouth I'm burning them. I refused to submit to the one making demands and walked out of the group and the room when they wouldn't leave me alone. The Cluster B scent is strong, and I'm running for the hills.
There is huge disconnection being forced in people where we are always to be striving fitting in and jumping endless goalposts and hoops. Rules of communication I have noticed are very severe in higher class circles, and that seems part of the emotional repression to me too. That too works to deaden emotions and where people are taught to wear masks and to not have real connections.
Many people who deconvert too, talk about how in their churches, emotions were policed, being too sad, or upset was not acceptable. Once at a church I said I was upset over being sick, and was chided over not having "trust in God". Everything there the message was to close down all emotions, and conform. Depression, anxiety, angst, anger were all seen as "sins" and against God. The "holy" Christian was always happy, eager, smiling and joyful.
I thought more about that "commanded to love" video above. Theramin Trees nailed the whole process of love being forced and producing emotions at command. Natural emotions are shut down for produced ones. Often I struggle with the idea that people want me to be someone else then who I am. My emotions were controlled at narcissistic demand, and I was told they were wrong, they never were accepted, this would continue until I walked away.
My abusive childhood taught me to suppress emotions and then add the layer that I had to learn to "cloak" massively to fit into society being on the autism spectrum. One therapist told me I was intelligent enough to figure out the code so to speak. I am trying to figure out still feelings that are about emotional disconnection.
Society had few answers for instance with someone with severe rare illness that deformed their body too. I am learning to listen to myself more but it's scary what I am seeing, I blocked out a lot in how I was seen and treated. ACONs as they are trained to "go to sleep" emotionally to offer narcissistic supply, may find the waking up process to be kind of scary, especially if they exist in a lower status position in American society. Socially I may struggle the rest of my life, others are telling me they are encountering the same thing, where they feel silenced everywhere.
I have learned to protect myself more but I am realizing as I have aged society has gotten far more closed down, there is far less emotional closeness and openness. The social "rules" have become far more oppressive. I don't feel very safe in a lot of places anymore. This worries me for my future. So wonder people are becoming more lonely and mentally ill in America.
Fundamentalism too was all about emotional repression. Repression is a word that I thought of as I deconverted. I felt REPRESSED. When I threw off the yoke of abusers and went no contact and walked away from so many, deconversion was bound to happen.The two are tied together. I was told to be this certain type of person among the Christians and told to be a certain type of person among the narcissists. I never measured up. I never was allowed to BE MYSELF.
I had to get honest about the emotional repression of Christianity, that told me to be this certain type of person. One thing I think about is how Christianity pushes this fake persona on people, and I know I wasted years now, trying to be something I was not. It also taught me like the abusive family to only display certain emotions and invalidated true feelings and thoughts.
As time went on, I realized I was "not fitting in", I left all churches a few years even before my full deconvert, tired of the forced cheerfulness, tired of being told NOT TO FEEL, or that all feelings were SINS. We were given not only THOUGHT control but FEELING control. The religionists and narcissists all joined together to tell us what was proper to feel and what we had to close down.
Intuition and our connection to ourselves got closed down from their prison for the soul.
I had to get real even about how I felt about their God. I didn't like it anymore. I realized I did not love God anymore, leaving the religion was like a divorce from a cruel persona that betrayed me over and over, with it's silence and indifference. Instead of loving the "dictator", or shaming myself to do a fake smile anymore and "force" myself to love it and believe, I was done.
One thing I had to do as I recovered, was listen to my OWN feelings, and stop letting people tell me what to feel and think. Learning to own your own emotions and processing these things can be a process. We have to throw away these dictators of the soul to be our authentic selves. Don't ever let anyone tell you what to feel or what not to feel. I'm no longer a puppet being told to love something and someone who never talked back and being told to love people who treated me like a piece of garbage. Listen too and pay attention to those who are out to control your words and your emotions, they are people to be avoided.
I've been getting into this stamp collector's channel called Exploring Stamps. I have been busy with my stamp collection. This fall, I got some rides to a large stamp club in a bigger city and joined this group. Winter I may not be able to make it so much but hope to return in the spring. Trading for stamps was fun. Stamp collecting is a rare hobby now, some say it is dying. I'm the youngest in the stamp group by far and one of the few women but I enjoy it and don't care that I am the exception. Overseas it does seem more vibrant then in the United States.
My stamp collection is different, and includes countries and stamps I like such as Iceland, Malaysia, and Togo. There's a lot of African stamps in my collection and a bird collection. Being on a fixed income, my stamp collection is not a big bucks collection done for investment, but I have stamps worth a little I found for cheap. There was this one man who recently died in the stamp club, they told me his collection was sold for $7,000 dollars but he bought stamps for mere pennies, so his collection "together" became of worth.
Unusual stamps are interesting, I don't own any of these but I have gold foil coin stamps from Burundi and some 3D stamps from Bhutan.
I thought when I found the Lipedema community it would be a place of support, but while I have found some support, friends and answers there's a lot of disappointment. The fat hatred in the Lipedema world on Facebook is so immense, I can't take it. It began a drain on my self esteem. All they care about is diets. The toxicity especially for supersized people is actually worse then any I've encountered in any previous mainstream diet program.
I'm done with the online boards. I'll leave them up for any discussion of compression etc, that may be of interest for practical health purposes but there's no support there, just weight loss competitions. This country is so brainwashed about a variety of issues. Things are worsening for fat people.
Even though Lipedema is known not to be caused by overeating, the whole Lipedema world is obsessed with weight loss, to the point, I believe it is delaying a real cure, for our failing lymphatic systems. Some play the mind game of telling us we must do everything possible to lose our "non-lepidemic fat". They play games telling us that fasting is not dieting. Some seemed to believe that if you stop eating after dinner, you will automatically lose weight, every diabetic on earth with any interest in controlling blood sugars, does not eat after dinner. On top of that many of the things they say will "help" Lipedema are things that are accessible only to the middle class and beyond. like yoga classes and special foods. Maybe this is because it is a woman's disease. I have had to distance myself from Lipedema boards because the constant drum of diets, fat hatred and more led me to more despondency, and depression rather then support and hope.
Watching a huge litany of smaller lower stage Lipedema women post photos of their starvation induced weight losses affected me very negatively. The showing off never ends. Most would lose some fat weight while their legs stayed big but everything was focused on getting smaller. I noticed with time, most stage 4 ultra fat people like me weren't posting pictures anymore. Why would they? We are so beyond the pale no one wants to know. We would be lectured to go starve ourselves. After Lipedema crosses the fibrosis line, weight loss because even more of a pipe dream. I noticed on several Lipedema boards, that most people over a certain weight disappeared. They noticed they weren't welcome and probably they got tired of being made to feel like "nothing" and sick of the fat hatred like me too. One irony is one board admin, wrote that laughing and reducing stress would help Lipedema. I have no argument with that, but how will that happen when life is nothing but a list of goal posts we never can meet?
One medical professional who has not seen me in a year, said "Wow you have lost weight!" but then I found out I had gained 5lbs in the last 6 months. I believe I HAVE lost weight on top, but due to the swelling it's not showing in the weight numbers. I would weigh a 1000lbs if there was no Flexitouch or compression in my life. Now my weight due to fluids can differ up to 20-30lbs so I try not to get bent out of shape over weight that can come from a day's bloating, and try to keep it to a baseline, but I weighed 525lbs and was 520lbs 6 months ago. I was 534 a year ago.
I still go to the gym. I like the gym though at times my mind seems to enjoy it more then my body. A cold can throw me off too. Late last week I was there, coughing my brains out, and my lungs sometimes fight me too much. I am still going and will be there tomorrow and I have had to buckle down on food for a variety of other medical reasons, but weight remains scary and a problem for me. Just to keep diabetes and thrush at bay means forgoing all sugar, and I don't mean just giving up desserts, but giving up juice, or even cereals or yogurt with too much sugar in it. I had to give up beef completely all beef even lean beef. My diet is already extreme to stay alive. But in the "nothing's ever good enough" world we live in, I am supposed to get all these magic results. I ate a baked chicken breast and salad for dinner. [blood sugar 116 this morning]Well no magic is happening. The false promises of the diet world are like religion.
I was really busy last week, for me. My body bloated and hurt like hell yesterday. The pain is not doing good things to my mind. Every time I am "active" or play the part of the good fatty who is "not lazy", the pain wall can be immense. They won't give me pain killers citing my severe COPD and telling me most would put me into respiratory failure.
Other times I just want to "have a life" and go DO things, because I want a life outside of bed and illness. Chronic fatigue is there too, playing it's part. There's times I am so exhausted, just to do basics, it's like I am going insane. I am shutting down into weird stoic like states, I notice with the hearing and more, it's like I can barely keep up. If I was not married without a husband's help there's no way I could even manage in life. It's like living in a punishment factory.
There's times I feel like crying from pain, but a certain emotional numbness is taking over. Today I am in bed. I have noticed every time I do a lot for me in a week. My UCTD skin sores and rest go nuts. My mouth breaks out in ulcers. I learned to hide pain and not complain in real life, to keep narcissists from feeding on me, but it's doing weird stuff to my personality. So I have a bad Lipedema day, my husband got me to the gym last week, I sold some 50/50 donated art work at a church rummage sale, I had to do something household related, I went to my scholarship art class I take every fall, and well I collapse into bed after nebulizing my lungs, wrapping my legs like I always do and spending time in my Flexitouch, and read these Lipedema boards that tell me "nothing I do is ever enough".
Now instead of Weight Watchers or Atkins, we are all supposed to only eat one meal a day, or go days without water--dangerous, or eat no carbs with imagined fantasies of ketosis, and go on extreme diets. To please who? Our corporate masters? I can tell 99.9 percent of the Lipedema world has never heard of fat liberation or size acceptance. Thinner people rule in a status level with the stage ones holding court over the stage fours like me. Our exit from the health support boards does not surprise me. I was banned from more then a couple of the boards for questioning the diets, and other insanities. Too many are ready to make profit, off suffering people. On one board for severe stage Lipedema, my arguments with a woman selling "shakeology" got me banished a few years ago that diet I guess has already fallen off the fad list. The voicelessness of anyone on these boards who tries to talk about supersized realities, is immense. You are either doing extreme things to take weight off, or you simply don't matter.
With my malnutrition, anemia and hunger levels, all the people giving me the constant litany to "eat less and you will lose weight" can go fuck off. It doesn't work in this body. I am pissed off, that things like intermittent fasting and those horrible diets I wrote about the other week are being pushed so heavily. That's what they got? Haven't obesity researchers proven dieting fails most people? So what, Lipedema people are supposed to play the 95% losing roulette wheel too? You see all the ones in their early heady days of weight loss, but how many drop off when the metabolisms drop? I wrote to one true believer, that I used to be MIDSIZED TOO in my 20s too. I weighed 200 and something pounds and worked and walked for three miles for fun. Then the HUGE weight gain came. Some of them probably will stay mild, they won't become severe, but the lack of validation is immense. I used to be young too, thinking life would turn out differently, and that I could "diet" all my weight off too.
I find myself wondering did I lose fat weight on top but the stuff on the bottom stayed? My MLD even told me by measurements I took a liter off one leg and the other one was smaller? She told me everything was doing great. Measurements seem more accurate then weight does in my book. Was that from an extra water pill that day? I kept myself wrapped and never missed Flexitouch. Yesterday I was sitting up for a volunteer thing, I had to go crash in bed by 4pm, and while my legs stayed down from compression, my stomach and hips grew so huge, I could watch them grow, just from sitting up. That stuff seems to be worsening. I swear I would weigh a thousand pounds if I did not have a Flexitouch machine to take it down every night.
Was the scale even accurate? So much of this confuses me as you know. I went on another scale around 4 months ago that said I was still over 500. I had other people tell me I looked smaller on top too not just the medical professional.
Most of the Lipedema world remains entrenched in the weight loss advice of the year 1980. Yeah that's when Atkins was big and supposedly Atkins-aka Keto will save us all from the misery of our body. This is hard to take. There are times where I wonder if I will go mad knowing the more I do, means the more pain, swelling and fatigue. I want a damn life too, and how would you feel if every time you tried to be a normal person and did things, that meant pain and fatigue so scary you thought you were going to die? Add to my mental health list, that my body was used against me by a hateful family that rejected me to the core of my being. It occurs to me that if I was thin, diagnosed with chronic fatigue, I would not be judged for having to be in bed or lectured on how inactivity worsens weight gain. My doctor means well, he knows and admits I have extreme issues but I know he sees bed-bound fat people everyday being a housecall doctor and probably knows the cusp of mobility and immobility at these great weights is a fine line. I have been told bluntly I am the most mobile one at this size. Even when I am housebound I track the weather to make sure to go out on the days I can, so I do not lose mobility or stamina and it can go fast.
And then on top of it, I see these health support boards, that tell me I am "not doing enough".You are still fat, we don't care that you cooked cauliflower the other day or are eating apples or gave up all sugar, everything is about weight loss and that number on the scale. It's like religion, all the false promises, heaven on earth, do these steps and your body will supposedly get smaller and you can join the thin minions? You are promised deliverance for your compliance. Everything is about being thin and smaller and fitting in. Their invalidation of my experiences and talking about how my body operates is harmful to my life, so I am going to walk from their boards and go to a read-only status which I have been mostly on for months.
Years ago on this blog I wrote against NAAFA and wrote about my concerns about size acceptance, since my deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity some of my attitudes have changed about facets of size acceptance I disagreed with. I am RETURNING to full blown fat liberation.How do I write, I "get it now". Even Marilyn Wann doesn't annoy me so much anymore. Supersized fat people have the right to be happy too. Maybe some believe our lives should be nothing but austerity and suffering but forget that!
I regret how fundamentalist Christianity gave me so much confusion about fat rights. At this point in life, I know I am never going to be thin. The diet queens and judgers just make me miserable. I got to get out of the few years of life what I have left supersized or not. The diet dreams died for me long ago. I wish that I was not silenced by so many at least I have my own blog as a platform. I will still go to the gym because I like it and it helped me breathe a bit better, and cook and eat vegetables--I'm adding more vegan items to the monthly menu, but at this point the fat haters can go jump in the lake. I am sick of their crap, sick of their false promises and sick of their judgment.
I got to get away from these people, they are harming me. I have no voice in these circles, I figured that out. If I learned anything as a recovery ex-scapegoat and ACON, get the hell away from people who make you feel like shit. Don't try to change their minds. I write this article for the fellow Lipedemics who like me realize something is very wrong in the Lipedema world. Surely there are stage 4 people reading those Facebook "support" diet sell-a-thon" Lipedema boards, who may even weigh more then I do, or who have lost their mobility or who are laying in a nursing home right now. If mobile on walker me, felt so bad, how bad did they feel?
People are getting fatter and that it is due to toxins in our earth and society which are growing and worsening the adulteration of food is still a problem. The hatred of fat is about authoritarianism, imposed false beliefs and the expectation everyone conform and comply and lies about how all bodies work the same. How many of us with severe Lipedema suffered for years while being undiagnosed and told that diets would save us? While health is touted, I realized no one really cares about health, when the focus is weight loss and techniques that have been known to fail for over 40 years. There is an utter feeling of betrayal that so many in the Lipedema world are invested in selling diets that are doomed to fail. People should pay attention to eating healthy, but Lipedema is an illness. It did stuff to my body I DID NOT CHOOSE. We are being held back from real answers by all the fat bigots and profiteers in the diet industry complex.
There's a lot of paths that led me there, it was hinted at all the time, I wasn't like my family nor did I looked like them. There was also the issue of the extreme DNA, leading to the 1 in 5 million body that took me to 700lbs and diseases like Lipedema and near deafness. Of course epigenetics would be a part of this too.
I always thought my name was "wrong", this may surprise you but I was RIGHT and I'll explain why.......
Intuition for me has always been a funny thing, in me it is strong, whatever foundation it has. The Christians taught me it was evil, and knowing things before they happened or dreaming about things, was from Satan so I shut some of that stuff done. I don't consider myself psychic but friends have witnessed weird things, like me telling them I dreamed about something and then it would happen that day or I guessed at things I wasn't supposed to know.
I got an Ancestry account and DNA test, a generous kind friend helped with this, and since I was no contact, there was no asking narcissists, minions or flying monkeys what the truth of my origins was. I used second and third cousins to deduce my genetic ties. There was even a few obscure and distant relatives whose name's I recognized. I built a family tree up to 1300 people, it definitely was going to give me answers and did.
Sadly I ended up having the narcissists be my egg and sperm donors. I was saddened by this. My disappointment took some time to process and get over. My childhood was odd, I realize it is not usual for a child to be sent to relatives to live for a periods of months. This happened with two different set of relatives in two different states. Of course this only advanced my theory I was adopted or something else was funny about my origins. I lived away from home around age 5-6 with the loving aunt, and around age 4 with the adoptive/step-grandfather I believed to be my real grandfather, grandmother and their household.
Ancestry is good for finding out family secrets. I found out my father was the product of an affair or other happening [rape?] where my grandmother who had been married for 10 years gave birth to my father, but he was not that man's son. I don't even know if my father knew. Sometimes I think Aunt Confused knew, just the funny way she treated me. Maybe she always knew I was not a full niece. This is explains why I never saw any relative outside my father's immediate family growing up.
If some relatives find my public family tree they may be in shock, but I don't care. Most narcissists don't care about the past and have no interest in delving into it so I consider the risks low.
I wrote in the notes that this information is backed up via DNA. I had multiple cousins pop up from this 'new" side of the family based on my Ancestry DNA test. I could not figure out who the exact biological grandfather was. I narrowed it down to three brothers and made notes to that fact.
I was related to several of their descendants including one person who grew up in foster homes and never knew who their father was. She was labeled as a first to second cousin.
My adoptive/step-grandfather's family did know the real grandfather's family and all attended the same church. There was even one news article from the 1930s where brothers from both families all got arrested together. I did find some strains of criminality that backed up the talk from one aunt about how several relatives were most likely "mob involved". One odd thing was noticing that Aunt Confused's son followed in the same exact vocational footsteps of many of the biological family's footsteps. I don't know if he knows either.
There was always this feeling that there were so many lies. My father told me tales of his grandfather being a multimillionaire and his father [the adoptive one] being disinherited. I found no evidence of either of the families being that wealthy, one would move up in a certain career field, but that was a generation later. My father even sent me an email in 1997 telling me these tales. I still have a paper copy. That email was so off the ranch, I spent months trying to build the family tree off misinformation. He was wrong about his adoptive father and his real father. Most were hard working people and far more economically stable then myself, but they were far from millionaires.
My name was not the "correct" one but it's my legal name so maybe those odd feelings had reason to exist. Did intuition tell me, I did not have a "legitimate" last name nor did I look like the ethnic group it strongly hinted at? I found out I am not half of one ethnic group, I thought I was life long. I did learn I am half German and took those family lines back to the 1400s--a few second cousins were really into genealogy too, and half Hungarian.
Some may consider it odd, that someone childless is so into geneaology, but I was into it beyond trying to dig up facts about my own life. I know a man in my community who is the last of his family line who has complied his family history. Maybe it's a way to connect with and preserve the past. Maybe it's the history or trying to figure out where I came from. I did look for fat people. One great grandfather in 1911 was very fat, and upwards of 400lbs. I found his picture. There was information that he had very bad legs. The biological paternal family of my father had some very large members, I found some pictures. The pictures backed up what the DNA told me. One descendant looked just like my brother. I did get cut off from one member of the "new family" who I think got freaked out that "great-grandfather" had other children. It's funny, I was looking 3 generations back and people still got upset, but I didn't impose or make announcements about affairs, I guess they just figured it out. So genetically I got it from more then just one line.
There were other family secret discoveries too, I was told one uncle was murdered viciously my entire life and told he died at the hands of a jealous husband of another race. I found newspaper articles about what happened to him, he was found dead and they didn't know the cause of death, but no murder was investigated. The first thought I had was that he had committed suicide [the second would be suicide in my mother's immediate family besides the aunt that drove into a tree at a high rate of speed] and they just wrote it as inconclusive to spare the family feelings, and having someone denied burial in the Catholic graveyard like my aunt almost was. This uncle died only 3 weeks before I was born, and I have considered that this is one way I became a family wide scapegoat. The timing of my birth simply meant I was never welcomed. Genetics proved he was not my father, as I was related to the known maternal line of my father and of course the new paternal line from the same distant community.
In other religions, people try to contact their ancestors. This is important to a variety of world religions. There were harsh faced relatives like my grandfather's grandmother or my second great grandmother and others who looked nicer. I had some weird moments such as finding one ancestor that looked like me so much that when I put her picture up on Facebook, friends were shocked. She was like a thin version of me. Funny thing was this particular daughter of my great-grandfather, never married or had children. She was a life-long school teacher who lived independently. As a child I saw her one room school house, she taught at in the fields on the way to my grandmother's house. If there is an after world at all, I can picture myself going to find some of these other relatives, asking what was it like and what happened? I was reaching so far into the past. Maybe outcast status in one's own family worsened as time modernized.
One thing I noticed is families lived far closer knit in the same communities, on both sides I was doing research in a particular town they lived in for the majority of relatives. Yes there was the line where people left the old country, but even in America, families stayed close by. This ended with the boomers and the new economic nomadism that took over the country. I got the feeling that others grew up with a wide variety of relatives as the norm until my mother's generation changed this. It also occurred to me on one side of the family, I was the first to leave the family church, it's hold remained over generations and generations. That was a strange idea to think about.
I was glad to find out if I was adopted or not even if the results were disappointing. Maybe I had hope for more explanations, but some of us must face sometimes we were birthed to people who were not real parents to us. I also realized there was a lot of weirdness in my childhood where there was little bonding and ambivalence and wonder how much appearances meant I never got to grow up in a relatives home where I may have blossomed. Life in the adoptive/step-father's, grandmother's home was not pleasant either but life certainly was with my aunt.
Some may get angry thinking how dare someone go and dig through family secrets, there's people out there who hate places like Ancestry because they are exposing a lot of family lies. Some people are finding out they were adopted. It is better to know the truth either way things go.
"“But what if the
local church is more a holdout for some deeply regressive ideas about
gender and sexuality mixed in with some beautiful relationships and
lovely music and a side of toxic shame? What
if Jesus was more of a Jewish rabbi with some good ideas about the
dignity of sex workers and the unrelenting hypocrisy of religious
leaders? What if converting my neighbor into my image turns out to be
the most self-absorbed sort of idolatry I’ve ever participated in? What
if a deity who threatens hell can never be in a healthy relationship
with anyone? What if being obedient leads to emotional deadness,
intellectual numbness, and a moral Nuremberg defense?”
“C.S.
Lewis would urge me to work through his Liar, Lunatic, Lord equation.
Pascal would have me work through his wager. But both offer a myopic
lens for exploring all of this. What about Islam? What about atheists?
What about Buddha? If I wanted to crunch a modernist math equation about
whether Christ / Church / God is true, I would have to account for an
infinite number of variables.”
“I’m no more responsible for calculating whether Christianity is true than I am for calculating whether Zeus is real.”
“Leaving
the Church has allowed us to better love our neighbors, better care for
our souls, more sincerely pursue truth, more authentically receive and
offer grace.”
He at least admitted their failure to act to stand against their mother's abuse and rejection of Tiffany.
In his book Calypso, which I am reading now for a library book club, in an essay titled "A House Divided", David talks more about Tiffany, and says the family did not know about her mental illnesses and could have had more understanding for her if they had known. I understand why Tiffany did not disclose.
One thing realized in ACON studies is that for scapegoats, the family can be a very different place of being. I had to face facts even myself, that my cousins, brother and sister had positive memories of my narcissists and family life. They were treated far better and had times of connection and happiness. It was hard for me to hear my cousins lovingly use my mother's name, but then they did not have the same person to deal with. They had love and respect even if faked from her after all. Some people via different challenges end up in a far worse position in a family. Tiffany had her struggles with mental illness and others that put her more at risk of being placed in the scapegoating position.
David Sedaris in his writings speaks of easier conversations with his mother, he definitely was close to her. His father is more distant but is overall respectful and includes David. All children in narcissistic families suffer to a degree but Tiffany definitely did not have the same experiences as her siblings being the scapegoat.
There is another admission in this essay in this most recent book. Could David have seen online what others had to say about his family and the realities of narcissism and how it was obvious that his sister was scapegoated? It is rare for family members within a narcissistic system to wake up, but at times it is possible for the few who are capable of any growth and are not too far along or on the narcissistic spectrum themselves While this often comes too late and decades later, they may question the system and what was done to their sibling who was the scapegoat. While David admits some faults of his parents, he may need to re-examine the depths of what they did to his sister.
Maybe he has come into more understanding now about what has happened to his sister. Maybe he has realized that the family which was a crucible of connection, closeness and happy memories along with some troubled ones for him was anything but for his sister. This statement does make clear, that he understands, that the treatment by the Sedaris family had something to do with her suicide.
This comment in his essay, makes it seem so.
In this essay, they talk about how Tiffany killed herself, and the method she used. She took pills and used a plastic bag to asphyxiate herself. "Did Lisa by any chance tell you about Tiffany, I asked.
"The plastic bag, you mean?" Gretchen nodded. "She told me on the phone last week. I try not to think of it but it's pretty much all I can think about. Our own sister ending up that way." I walked to the window and looked at the sky, which had now gone from bruise-colored to black. "Someone told me," I said, "that in Japan, if you commit suicide by throwing yourself in front of a train, your family gets fined the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars for all the inconvenience you caused."
From behind me, I could hear Gretchen slicing more apples.
"Of course," I continued, "if your family was the whole reason you were killing yourself, I supposed it would be just an added incentive."
I hope his sisters have come into more insight too but sadly it is too late for Tiffany. Lives are damaged and ended by scapegoating. That's the tragedy.
This article kind of connects to my last article questioning the dominance of the nuclear family. Nuclear families in American culture especially are split between winners and losers where internal cooperation is not developed but competition at all costs even to the point that some family members are crushed. One person who is the scapegoat is often deemed the family loser and reject. One could argue this created Tiffany's mental illness instead of her mental illness being the reason the family rejected her. That's one thing to think about. How many are made mentally ill from the abuse? Tiffany showed many signs of CPTSD. Scapegoating is soul murder at the crux of it, and some don't win the battle for their physical lives.
Later in the book, while one sees some flashes of insight in David, things get complex, there is reference to troubled consciences, but sadly, the family system reverts to the same message about the scapegoat. How many scapegoats are written off, as "you know how they can be". A would be narcissistic family system can break down a scapegoat, and some do become mentally ill. My conjecture is that many scapegoats are made that way from the process of scapegoating.
Sadly the resultant emotions and problems is just added on to the list for the rejection that got the whole ball rolling. This reminds me on a lesser level when one of my cousins told me once, "your emotions bother people in the family". What is ironic in my situation after I became a Christian years before I later deconverted, I was grey rocking myself to death, being nice, kind, pleasant, "not a bother" and making presents for the family and being quiet and meek on visits, hoping for love and acceptance that would never come. I buffed all the edges of my personality. I hid negative emotions. That didn't work.
What is sad, when a scapegoat gets the resultant PTSD effects, anxiety disorders, inability to function in the world like Tiffany if the mental abuse becomes severe, that can be used as more of a reason for rejection from the family. You don't fit, you aren't "pleasant" and "engaging" enough. My depression when I was younger while I never had to make the psych ward circuit, putting myself in counseling by age 18, was reason enough for my own family to justify the treatment they gave me. "She's not that easy to be around!". "She has a bad personality". Some of that came back to me. Sadly while Tiffany's mental disorders may have been far more severe, one can see that happened to her too in the family system.
One sister Amy sees a psychic who claims to contact Tiffany and her mother and claims that they are getting along. If this really had happened it seemed more insight would have been passed on from the spirit world then "She and Mom are finally getting along," Amy continued. "She mainly wanted to let you know that she has no hard feelings. The psychic said Tiffany's been trying to tell you this herself and asked if you've had a lot of problems with your phone lately."
Amy to me shows some conscience here, in that she wants hope from the psychic, that Tiffany would want to forgive them all one day but sadly in my belief, none of these messages were real. Amy wants Tiffany to have "no hard feelings" towards the mother that scapegoated her. Why isn't the mother in this afterlife scenario apologizing? Amy admits the trouble with Mom to the psychic and easy answers are given that now in the afterlife, that two personalities that didn't get along now do. It is interesting to me, that Tiffany's "hard feelings" are the focus here, instead of atonement on the behalf of the mother.
David then talks more about Tiffany's mental health problems in the same chapter called "Spirit World" about that day he had the door shut on her, during a show. David admits he never saw or spoke to her again. He mentions her mental health problems referring to a suicide attempt and hospitalization, a rape and an eviction and then says
"She was, I told myself, someone else's problem. I couldn't deal with her anymore. Well, the rest of the family said, it was Tiffany. Don't be too hard on yourself. We all know how she can be.
Perhaps like the psychic, they were just telling me what I needed to hear to ease my conscience and make me feel that underneath it all I'm no different from anyone else. They've always done that for me, my family. It's what keeps me coming back"
David's conscience is bothered, and that's a good sign, but sadly narcissistic families, will justify the treatment of the scapegoat forever. The family system can't admit what was done to the scapegoat. Yes mental illness can be troubling. People who face difficulties are not easy to deal with. It's hard to explain the depths of pain for a scapegoat, who is told in various ways "you are not right" or "we know how you can be". They are blamed sadly for what the family in many cases made them become. For David, his family is a place of solace, and easing of conscience but you see, would be narcissistic families are not good influences on consciences.
One comment by [Ky Ya Ya] on the video on the Vice Interview below sums things up: "The family narrative is pervasive & powerful. Even when reality
intrudes, the narrative holds strong. It's a habit of thought,
operationalised in family roles that stigmatise & problematise the
"scapegoat". This narrative is modelled, reinforced & rewarded by
toxic parents. You get good at what you practice, this includes negative
thinking, toxic family narratives, victim-blaming, responsibility
avoidance & selfishness. Golden child siblings are literally blind
to the abuse, even though they SEE it. They are blind because they are
conditioned to think the scapegoat IS the problem, they are also blind
to the abuse of the scapegoat, because they don't see it as abuse. My
golden child sister has no clue our NM is abusive & manipulative,
she thinks she's a "good" person. My GC sister has no clue regarding her
own abusive behaviour!! They operate in a moral fog where their
evil/wrongdoing is justified, redescribed, minimised & denied."
I saw this quote today and it resonated with me. As some know, here I have done my own questioning of the nuclear family in the article "Family as a Sacred Cow".
The nuclear family is not a crucible of love and support for many people anymore. We definitely are questioning the entire system. Religion definitely has shoved "family-first" down our throats for eons. Anyhow I thought this was a great quote that described much of what I was talking about too.
Seen on Facebook from a "Douglas Frederick", where the group was discussing suicide....
"It is the failure of all these "loved ones," the collective of all us which are so busy with our own lives and so disconnected from and unaccountable to one another that lets people slip through the cracks, whether they hurt themselves or someone else. If we truly care about any such transgressors and lost ones, we'll have to get serious about reordering our priorities and shifting our values to recreate a society which tends to and loves each person in it. People committing suicide in our midst is testimony to something broken in the entire social structure. Blaming anyone is pointless. But, what are we willing to do to remedy it?
This reassessment includes our love affair with the nuclear family arrangement we are for some reason so attached to, despite how unhealthy and unnatural it is for a social species. Suicide, murder, and rape are typically unheard of in tribal type social groups. Children can be horribly abused, neglected, or indoctrinated behind closed doors hidden away from the group, treated as the private property of one or two adults who project themselves and all their unhealed shadow material onto the children. What might we consider doing differently, if we really care about people who grow up to be suicidal or transgressive?
This is the elephant in the room of -so- many social ills we contend with which no one even thinks to look at.
The Church worships the nuclear family as some kind of God-given sacrament that is utter perfection. Millennia of king-priests, kings, and priests setting our standards for society have sunk in deep so that even the secular world still clings to what is largely a religious arrangement, which once served to help hold a more tenuous kind of society together (at a cost), but I think is, like childhood strategies developed to cope with trauma, now become dysfunctional for us as we continue to grow up.
This is the sacred cow very few are willing to challenge, but it's all so obvious.
So, all this points to the desperate need for our society to deeply reconnect on the community level, to revalue the human being more than corporations, banks, the military, profit, property, and privilege. I think we are heading in this direction. People are sick, sad, and exhausted by business as usual.
When collective values shift, entire paradigms and eras shift. It is time for another Renaissance, one based on the essential restoring of human value, including so many women and people of whichever ethnicities, which have been undervalued and devalued in the world, squandering our greatest natural resource: each other."
I often think of the squandered potential and lives of people who are in families that do not appreciate or love them and where they emotionally and otherwise do not belong. How many are suppressed just being born or adopted into the wrong group of people? Suicide I believe is increasing because love and connection in the nuclear family is lacking for many.
In our consumerist society, families have become all about competition too, where the "winners" are worthy of love and care, and the "losers" are ostracized. I have seen this all over, my situation is extreme but know for a child not to be a "success" that often the relationship with the family is not a positive one. Our families have become nothing but competition clubs, who will win is top priority for too many out there.
What is sad, is in America, the nuclear family is gaining precedence. One of my old IFB churches prided itself on being "family first" and that made me feel left out from the day I started there, because I did not have a family. In conservative circles, they push isolation and fear for the children, with homeschooling, so some kids are cut even more off from community or other people to give them information about the world. They can't have the kids knowing too much because then they may question the religion or the family system.
He is right that children have become more private property then people in themselves. There's so many places now, where people have turned their children into trophies where they are to be a reflection unto a family rather then people in their own right. How many young people can even manage to find themselves or who they are meant to be in a society that tells them their role is to be defined by their nuclear family forever more. My family hated me and made me the scapegoat but they also were a barrier to my desire to become an artist. I was mocked and told art was a waste of time. My intellectual and other interests were not respected. Conformity was the greatest good in my family.
I see 60-70 plus years old stuck in the roles and lives laid out by their families. What will the family think? Families can be like religions in themselves where people are told the world is this way, and don't dare question. I questioned my family like religion. Maybe I thought life should be more then breeding, I couldn't have children anyway. Maybe I thought life should not just be an exercise in conformity, misery and measuring up to narcissists where nothing was good enough anyway. I see young people being more and more crushed by their families, for the ones who are not 'good enough" trophies, mental illness and depression are growing. People are lonely out there and the nuclear family is not enough.
To carry this metaphor forth properly I would not put a nice piece of furniture, but a pile of busted up firewood, you thought would end up as a good piece of furniture.
Many deconvert realizing only a sociopath would send people to burn in hell for eternity. In the early 2010s, I had loved friends die who were not of the "right' religion according to the evangelical and Christian rules regarding heaven. That haunted me for years until I decided to push through the fear and face facts in questioning such toxic beliefs.
I got myself into another internet argument. I am probably wasting my time, people can do what they want with their lives. Go starve yourself if that will make you happy. The no water diet is going to a new level of insanity and some are playing with death though. Some of us watching this are very afraid for the people including the lady above signing up.
This is what I wrote to 500lb Fasting Lady who is attempting these diets:
"Fat people can starve in that mal-nutrition is a problem for many overweight people especially those with severe Lipedema. In fact scientists have proven mal-nutrition is common in obese people. I believe people take in more calories then they need because the body is hungering for real nutrition that is lacking in our adulterated food.
If you read my blog I questioned some of size acceptance for years, but this stuff you are signing up for is just more of the usual crash diets that destroy health. Fat phobia and hate is why you literally believe you don't even deserve water. Man that diet, blew my mind. Even prisoners used to get bread AND water for heaven's sake. You are putting your kidneys at risk with that. If you want to suffer go for it. I am not masochist I guess enough for this sick society.
Women with severe Lipedema take enough fat phobia and abuse for a life time. You are young and have internalized your own fat oppression. Sure starve yourself but your body will suffer for it.
Really you look thin on top, your face could be on a 200lb woman, find out if YOU have Lipedema though your legs look kind of thinner. Look into sleep apnea, thyroid and other conditions that put on weight. If you did have an eating disorder seek to solve it, and eat three regular meals a day.
Oh they told me I would die at 28, I turned 51, so be careful of having the doom and gloomers screw with your mind. Maybe my life span won't be as long being fat but I know I'd be dead a hell of a lot sooner on crazy ass diets. Go to a gym too, Planet Fitness is cheap. I still go to mine. I found out I had severe autoimmune problems and severe Lipedema after a life time of being beaten up for being fat.
I have had my fill of false promises in the diet world as well religion. Funny how they overlap. So is the gist now that fat people are so hideous, they must literally starve themselves and go without water. Screw that! I was laughing at the guy who called his diet the Snake Diet, like SNAKE OIL!
I was going to write about the state of size acceptance soon. Some of my mind has changed about it. I still have some misgivings that as Americans especially are fattened up by a toxic society, that these thing are ignored. Increased CO2 levels have been linked to increased obesity by scientists,
With size acceptance, I still have some of my health worries regarding size acceptance.
Society seems to be slipping into something psychotic regarding fat, the crash diets and other extreme measures seem to be worsening and becoming more extreme. Some of these people claim they all have science behind them.
I told 500lb Fasting Lady, I have gone without eating, from illness. In 2013, when I believed I was dying but it was dozens of kidney stones going through my system at once, I would go upwards of three days with NO FOOD at all. If I tried to drink juice it would be puked up. It was DRY HEAVING because food disappeared pretty fast. I didn't have weight loss miracles or 28lbs lost from no food for a few days. I find those claims odd. Later illnesses have also suppressed eating. I know what it is like to be too sick to eat for days. It did not bring me improved health.
There's a lot of people who want fat people to suffer even risk DEATH not to be fat anymore. Why should us fat people buy into all the claims? I never have seen a supersized person become a thin person before in my entire life, and I've known a lot of fat people. Some who get to extreme weights and get medical care, can get a 200lb chunk off like I did, that happens. The yo-yo diet brigade kept it up for years around me. All believe in the special diet that will rescue them. It's like a religion and like the promises of religion says heaven will come if you suffer enough or follow the directions of the priest/trainer or diet salesman. Maybe next fat people will walk down the street on 100 mile walks, oops that's already happened like the fat guy claiming he would lose weight bicycling across America.
Fat people need to be done with proving themselves to others. The mea culpa suffering has reached new heights. Maybe to these people I am a hedonistic bitch who won't give up food, but I don't want their life of suffering and pain either. I was young and tried starvation too. Starvation just messed me up. I was so poor I went without food all the time, and it just made me fatter. I'm struggling with mal-nutrition from my health problems, keeping enough vitamins coming in is not easy. The anemia is scary. I can't eat beef without getting sick. Even small amounts of sugar are dangerous to me like in a glass of orange juice because of thrush. .
People can judge me. No one questions why are these fat people having to starve themselves to lose weight in the first place? Does this mean something is wrong with their bodies and they aren't processing food correctly? Do thin people go days and days without eating? I see thin women at my book clubs always go for a couple cookies I can't dare to touch.
For many fat people, the metabolism drops like a rock during starvation experiments. So these people tell them, you can starve your way into thinness, I'm done with being unhappy. Diets suck. Crazy crash diets suck even more and a diet forbidding you water is JUST INSANE.
Fat Hatred Brings Profit and Attention? The Snake Diet Guy Goes on an extreme Fat Hatred Spiel. Warning full of cuss words and hate. Is this someone anyone should take medical advice from? Just another sickening bigot. He sounds like one of those "red pill' people. Nauseating. Literally.
I can't stand Lipedema boards anymore on Facebook, it's diet central, and not just your run of a mill Weight Watchers diets. Some of them have now jumped on the bandwagon of Keto gone extreme, there's now a diet, where people eat nothing but meat. It's called the Carnivore Diet.
Some of the Keto fanatics have decided that carbs are so evil, that they should be done away with entirely. One woman announced to me that vegetables were bad for you. I am so mal-nutritioned, that doctors ordered nursing care for me three months ago, to get to the root, I had to show diet journals, on exactly what I was eating and more. They realized the cause wasn't what I was eating but medical.
I am having serious problems with anemia, that are scary. The anemia could be related to my connective tissue disorder. My red blood cells are often too small. It is coming and going. Sometimes it makes me break out in extreme sweats. I am re-adding some beef to the diet, trying to be cautious, due to the kidney stones. I am low on multiple vitamins. Yesterday's food included a hardboiled egg, some cooked turnips and carrots, pistachios, a peach, one chicken breast, an apple, a turkey sandwich, and some canned soup that had a little bit of spinach and carrots in it so I am attempting to have the diet be variable for nutrition and to hedge my bets on the nutritional and vitamin deficiencies. Today I had eggs and mushrooms and peppers for breakfast and will have cooked cauliflower with onions for a soup at lunch with a sandwich, and probably left over chicken with peppers, tomatoes, probably cooked in some type of burrito dish or casserole.
I think people who think they can be healthy eating all meat are insane. I would be doubled over with the bowels checking out and it would be kidney stone city. I wonder if they will like scurvy? Are they promoting "functional anorexia" in some Lipedema circles so some women in less severe stages won't get so large? It makes me wonder. Fasting, and extreme diets are the name of the game. I find myself thinking, "Oh great, I have a rare fat woman's disease, where everyone just sees fat, and they have no interest in focusing on a real medical cure, they'd rather focus on starving us all so we comply-body wise".
I have given up on diets. Maybe it's size acceptance, maybe I am just too damn physically hungry all the time. Maybe I got sick of it all realizing it didn't work. Maybe I have to eat a certain way to avoid headaches, digestive hell, and to just stay alive. Maybe it's realizing severe dieting forced me on insulin or that the diabetes WORSENS when I have LESS food. I have noticed my blood sugars are far better when I eat what I want and when I want it--when hungry. Today's was 125. I know I will stay supersized for life. Diets brought me nothing but shame, blame, misery, and depression, and never worked on me anyway.
I don't want to eat some extreme nutso way, to have a normal body. One woman told me Carnevore is not a calorie restricted way of eating and that it was the opposite of starving and high in fat, and would keep hunger away. She told me carbohydrates cause hunger and to include offal to avoid nutritional deficiencies. I am allergic to liver and know that offal creates very high levels of uric acid so found this advice dubious as well. She told me, "We don't need any dietary carbohydrates." [what!!!?]
For my own sanity, I am going to avoid those boards. Too many women only care about how they look, and the judgment on a supersized person in those circles is too immense. They cry over being 210lbs so 500lbs would not be acceptable. Some do lose fat weight but their swollen legs and hips remain. Some are obsessed about weight to a degree that is psychologically harmful especially to someone like myself whose taken multiple decades of abuse over being overweight. It makes me upset that the central focus is on the fat weight and not on why our lymph systems have failed. It troubles me that there will be no real cure or help for this disease and people will keep dying, and blamed and shamed for "not losing enough weight."
I still go to the gym by the way, was there twice last week and this Saturday, can do 20 minutes on the arm bicycler, am doing the rope pull which I like to build stamina. I like the gym, just wish my overall fatigue was not so bad, to keep up with.
I have given up on weight loss dreams and find it all absurd and depressing. I made it to my 50s which I guess is something since everyone said I would be dead by 35 for being so fat. I hope I don't gain weight and need to maintain my mobility but there's no way I am going to sign on to any crazy diet that makes me feel like shit all day long.
There's a certain point where people's advice sucks. I wonder what is going on in the Lipedema world that these crazy diets are being advanced and I am disappointed as hell about it all. It often is not a supportive or good psychological place for a supersized woman to be. If I am feeling this way, how many other stage 4 people are feeling like I do or even worse because they may be immobile or bigger seeing their health communities betray them this way? I consider it a betrayal, having crazy diets shoved down my throat. Some seem to be true believers too, like their diet will bring the promised land. Well I know how often people push their false promises. If men, had Lipedema except a few rare ones, the answers wouldn't be more diets, more would be done.
