Up Again

Here I am at 1:00 in the morning, wide awake. At least I slept a few hours.

I don’t know why I can’t sleep. It’s definitely not caffeine. Anxiety?

Mind Prep is really getting interesting. She’s listing all the different ways children experience trauma through abuse or neglect, which can lead to obesity.

All these bells are going off in my head as she describes behaviors, symptoms, and characteristics. Yup, that’s me, I think to myself as I underline, circle, and star all kinds of information.

My mother suffered throughout her life with mental illness, and my brother and I were unwitting victims. I endured verbal abuse and neglect from my mother, who was emotionally unavailable due to her sickness.

I’ve been in therapy for my traumatic childhood for many years, but I haven’t ever really looked at the trauma through an obesity lens. Doing so might help prevent regain after surgery.

I believe in digging down to the root of a problem to eradicate it. Anything else is just a Band-Aid. Do I have unresolved issues in my past? Absolutely. Am I still angry with my mother for her unreasonable expectations? You bet.

I don’t want to delay my surgery. But I also don’t want to go through something so significant in so many ways, only to have it fail down the road because I wasn’t adequately prepared.

It might be worth the extra time, if that’s what they recommend, to deep dive into my past and come up with ways to correct my thinking about myself so I can be more successful in the long run.