Back in 2006, my mom, Doris was suffering from a severe case of depression. She had recently returned home from a stay at a Psychiatric Hospital in Florida. I knew when I heard the story of how she bit the police officer that she needed mental care. I remember the weeks preceding the event. I was talking to mommy on the phone every day in an effort to support her. But in reality I was standing by, on the other end of the telephone, nearly 1300 miles away, feeling completely helpless. Each day I would call her and try to use all my skills as a coach in an effort to ‘fix’ my mom. I would sit for hours speaking to her, listening to her babbles, and mindless chatter. talking about all the food she was planning to prepare, money she spent and things she purchased. I listened to all her stories marking her transition phase from the mania and craziness of overspending and and then soon after slide into the abyss of depression.
Nearly 20 years earlier, just about the time her mom, my Grammie passsed away, Mommy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My mother and I haven’t been very close for most of my life. I love her very much, but have never understood or respected her because she chose to remain living with my step father, Jorge after she learned how he sexually abused me. That event in our lives tore our family apart. Until the day Jorge died in 2011, mom remained living with him and allowed a very mentally ill and disturbed man to control her life.
The enormous grief and loss I feel over watching my mother give up her life and her children to be with an abusive man has been powered my passion to empower women to love themselves more. For years I blamed my mother for Jorge’s abuse. Over time I learned to recognize that my mother was as much of a victim as me. He took advantage of her mental incapacity and complete lack of awareness and presence because in retrospect it was so obvious.
It’s been one of my biggest regrets to have not been able to help her through her illness. She had been neglecting to take her medication and consequently, her system went on overload.
Today on our coaching call, she shared with me her thoughts and feelings about how she had come to feel out of touch with herself and her needs. In a sober moment of realization, she recognized that she was responsible for her own care and not necessarily the wellbeing of others.
Like so many women in the midst of change, my client thought that what she needed to do was to speed up, do more for others, and make up for lost time. According to her, there were phone calls that needed to be made, people with expectations to fulfill, children to chauffeur, boo boos to kiss and a list of to dos that were completely overwhelming to her.
I asked her what she learned from her stay in the hospital. She told me that she noticed that everything was much slower and more deliberate, the people were kind and the pace was gentle. Every day was filled with space. For her, it was an opportunity that provided her a place and a time to unfold and just be.
In our frenetic efforts to get things done and be productive, do you recognize the importance of having space and time in which you can choose to do things for yourself? Are you taking time to relax and revitalize. Can you say “No to demands that are unreasonable and unfair? Sometimes that might mean that you have to set clearer boundaries to help other people realize that you consider yourself a priority and they should also. We teach people how to treat us.
Do you sometimes feel like your sanity is hanging by a thread? What is the cost if you stop caring for yourself? My client had a core belief that her worth and sense of value was tied up with her ability to do for others, make people happy.
As women, we often think that it’s always our job to take care of and nurture others. At the end of a long hard day of making everyone else more important than us, we may think that we’re rewarding ourselves with food, but is eating excess food really a reward? Do we really deserve to overeat and eventually become ill?
If your justification for overeating is “because I deserve it”, you might want to seek out other ways of taking care of yourself.