302.
That was the number on the scale at the doctor’s office when I got weighed in 2016. 302 pounds. It was surreal to think that the number was even remotely correct. 302 pounds.
Over 120 pounds. That’s how much weight I had lost by early 2021. And that number is just as surreal to me. Over 120 pounds.
When I tell people that I lost that much weight they are in awe. “How inspiring!” they say, or “that’s amazing!”
Then the inevitable question is, “how did you do it?”
It’s true that of course I had to modify my nutrition and fitness habits to lose that much weight. And it’s true that I could probably write a book about my weight loss journey in the hopes of inspiring others who also struggle with being overweight.
But that’s not what this post is about.
This post isn’t about how I lost over 120 pounds. This is the story of how I got to over 300 pounds in the first place.
The bottom line is, up until a few years ago I was a man who hated himself. I thought I was the most worthless, useless, stupid, ungrateful, unattractive and unlikeable piece of garbage to ever walk the face of the earth. And that was on a good day.
Needless to say, with this mindset no “diet” or exercise plan was going to help me. What I really needed was to figure out why I thought this way about myself. I needed to understand what events in my life caused me to have so much self-hatred so that I could learn to heal and love myself. And that’s what this post is really about.
What I’m writing in this post includes some things that I have rarely if ever talked about outside of a therapist’s office. There are some chapters of my life that are incredibly painful, yet I think it’s important to share it. My journey to becoming healthy is about a lot more than numbers on a scale. It’s about recovering from horrific emotional and psychological abuse. And it’s about how I became conditioned to abuse myself.
Before you read further, I should probably include a trigger warning. What I’m about to share here deals with some really dark topics from my childhood. This isn’t going to be easy to write, and for many it probably will be equally difficult to read. I only share this because I know that I’m not alone in my suffering, and it’s important for me to externalize my trauma as part of my own healing process which is ever ongoing.
So here we go.
It’s not easy reflecting on what it felt like growing up with my parents. My father was an alcoholic, had a volatile temper, and would explode angrily at even the smallest thing no matter how benign it was. If I dropped a crumb of food on the floor he would erupt at me as if I had just set the house on fire. If I spilled a droplet of milk he would start yelling and screaming at me. Anything was an excuse to provoke his anger.
He had absolutely no respect for any boundaries. He had no issue at all coming into my room with no knock at the door. He regularly rifled through my belongings during the day when I was at school. He would also walk in on me unannounced even if I was in the bathroom. If I acted startled when he did this his reaction was always explosive anger at me.
There were many nights when my mother was working a night shift that I was left alone in the house with him, and I would sit in my room filled with mortal terror as I heard him yelling and screaming in a drunken rampage. On those many nights I was too afraid to fall asleep. To this day I still have nightmares about what that was like, especially at the fear that at any moment he could barge into my room and attack me for no reason.
Because of his temper I was afraid of spending any time with my father, so instead I clung to my mother. Unfortunately, my mother had her own issues that were just as damaging to me.
My mother had incredibly low self-esteem, and instead of working on improving on herself she regularly tore other people down. I was her primary target. She lived to criticize me and was delighted when I did something embarrassing as she would use it as ammunition to humiliate me.
Part of her motivation for putting me down, aside from her low self-esteem, is that the more insecure she made me feel around other people the more I clung to her. This led to her continuously finding any excuse to make me feel like nothing I could ever do was right and to abase me at every opportunity.
She also put the blame on me whenever my father would get upset. She regularly criticized me whenever my father overreacted to something I had done. When my father would explode at me unnecessarily, instead of blaming him she would blame me. If he yelled and screamed at me for dropping a crumb of food she’d say it was my fault for being so careless.
She also used to put guilt trips on me whenever they had to spend money on me that they didn’t want to, because she knew the extra expense would make my father upset. This included when I got sick and had to go to the doctor. She would complain to me about how expensive it was to pay for the doctor’s visit and how costly the prescription medications were, especially if I had a hard time taking them because they tasted so dreadful. It was as if getting sick and needing medication were unacceptable for me.
She did the same thing whenever I went to the dentist. Whenever I got a cavity and needed a filling she made me feel as if I had done something horribly wrong, because she knew that my father would get angry at spending the extra money needed to get the filling.
One time when I was about 11 years old she got upset with me because I was sick and it was too late in the day to go to the doctor’s office, so I had to go to the emergency room instead. She complained the entire car ride there and back about how much more expensive it was to take me to the ER and that I should have said something earlier in the day if I wasn’t feeling well. Her fear of my father’s anger over spending money superseded her concern for my well-being.
I distinctly remember being in middle school geometry class and I had misplaced my metal compass used for drawing arcs on angles. I needed the compass in order to pass the class, yet I felt like I was in a no-win situation. If I asked my mother to buy me another one I knew I’d never hear the end of it (even though they probably cost less than a dollar). Yet if I didn’t get a replacement I would get in trouble with the teacher. I just couldn’t win in these scenarios.
She also loved to criticize me and enjoyed humiliating me publicly. When I was very young I was a finicky eater, but then she started stuffing me full of junk food until I became overweight. Then she would criticize me for being fat. She had no issues at all making fun of me in public for being overweight and would do so frequently.
As my father was so unapproachable and scary to me she was my only close friend but also my worst enemy. She knew me better than anyone but this meant she knew exactly how to make me feel terrible about myself. It took a long time into adulthood before I realized that she didn’t want a child so much as a pet. She wanted someone who would unconditionally love her even if she didn’t return the favor.
It also was painfully clear that appeasing my father took priority over my well-being, which brings me to a particular event in my childhood which is difficult to share. When I was about 6 years old we were having a family picnic, and my father had gotten quite drunk even though it was still early in the afternoon. I was sitting on the hood of my uncle’s car next to my cousin, who was sitting precariously close to the edge. Next thing I knew she slipped off the hood and fell hard to the ground where she began crying.
Suddenly my father erupted at me because in his drunken state he thought I had shoved my cousin off of the car, even though she had just slipped off of the edge. I didn’t even have time to explain myself because he suddenly lunged at me. I ran as fast as I could, and next thing I knew he was chasing me through the house. I was filled with absolute terror as he was so unhinged I literally thought he was about to kill me. I just remember screaming for help, but no help ever came. I reached my bedroom and he caught up with me in mere seconds.
What happened next I honestly don’t remember. Perhaps I was too young to remember, or perhaps my brain won’t allow me to remember what he did to me because it was too painful and traumatizing. Even writing these words all of these years later is difficult and my fingers are trembling as I type this. Perhaps I don’t want to know what he did to me. But I unfortunately remember all too well what happened afterwards.
My mother came to check on me, but honestly it felt like she just wanted to make sure I was alive and didn’t particularly care if I was injured or even upset. After she inspected me she did something that honestly was far worse than whatever it was that my father had just done.
“You need to apologize to your father,” she said to me. “Just take the blame. Pretend it was all your fault and tell him you are sorry.”
Yes. That’s what she said to me. There was no concern over whether or not I was okay. It was more important that my father be appeased.
So, I had no choice but to apologize to the man who had just thrashed me and terrorized me to the point that I thought my life was in danger.
I learned a few difficult lessons that day. I learned that my well-being meant nothing, and that my existence was only meant to appease others. I learned that no one would ever come to my defense even if I had been terribly wronged or was in danger. And I learned that I was to blame for everything bad that ever happened no matter how little at fault I actually was.
Those were some very painful lessons for a 6 year old to learn.
There are few words that can describe the amount of betrayal I felt towards my mother at that time, but it was hardly an isolated incident. She really didn’t care whether or not I was okay. It was more important that my father was happy, not because she cared about him but only because she didn’t want to incur his wrath. It was all about self-protection for her, and my well-being wasn’t a priority.
If only that were the only issue that my mother had, but there were a lot of other problems too. She had delusional thinking and had a lot of mental health issues. She insisted that she and I were psychically linked and that she could read my thoughts. This was terrifying for me as a child, and since I didn’t know any better I began to think that if she could read my mind then everyone else could too. I became terrified of being out in public because I was afraid that any errant stray thought would be “picked up” by other people.
And one could only imagine what terror I felt in middle school when suddenly just as puberty started kicking in I began realizing that there was something “different” about me. It seemed that all of the other boys in class started talking about girls but I realized I was thinking about boys. I didn’t even know what being “gay” was, but all I did know is that I was different, and middle and high school became all the more frightening as I was convinced that everyone could read my mind and therefore everyone knew my dark secret.
This terror made me cling to my mother more, which is exactly what she wanted. She didn’t want me to have any independence as she didn’t really see me as an individual, but more as just an extension of herself. She was the only person I wasn’t afraid of being around, despite the fact that she could be so hurtful and cruel to me.
She accentuated this by telling me that, since she believed she could read other people’s thoughts, that she also knew when people were thinking terrible things about me. She would tell me that this person thought I was weird or strange, or that this other person thought I smelled bad or was fat and ugly. It wasn’t until I got much older that I realized she did this at select moments when I started exuding any type of “independent” behavior, and since she didn’t want me to be independent she would start telling me these hurtful things in order to fill me with dread so that I would cling to her.
There were some other incidents involving my mother that are difficult to write about, and it has to do with the fact that she like my father had no sense of respecting my boundaries. Unfortunately, this also led to her making disturbing comments to me about sexuality and about my body once I hit puberty. She would share intimate details about her sexual experiences with my father, which needless to say were highly inappropriate. She would also ask me personal questions about myself, about whether or not I was growing pubic hair and about how large my penis would get when aroused. She even took a shower with me when I was as old as 12. Even if she never physically molested me the emotional sexual molestation left me deeply traumatized.
There were so many other incidents with my parents that I would probably develop carpal tunnel syndrome if I attempted to type out even a fraction of them, but needless to say I was deeply scarred psychologically by being raised by these two people. It didn’t help matters that we also were quite strapped financially. After my father had filed for bankruptcy for the second time we were relegated to living in a single-wide trailer in a trailer park with an unpaved road. Our neighbors weren’t exactly Vanderbilts and Rockefellers.
Oddly enough, despite all of the trauma I was suffering at home I actually excelled at both school and in music. I regularly took honors-level classes and was a member of the National Honor Society. Yet my parents showed little interest in my academic achievements. In retrospect I believe they both resented my intelligence as both of them were limited intellectually. My father had flunked out of high school, and my mother had barely scraped out her GED. He was a part-time bus driver while she worked for a while as a nurse’s aide before working as a typist in a nursing office.
Adolescence was difficult for me as I felt like I was living in two different worlds and belonged to neither. I wasn’t like any of the other kids in my “neighborhood” as most of them were in danger of flunking out of school or getting into trouble with theft or drugs. Meanwhile I was taking honors classes with kids from upper-middle class homes, yet since I was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks I couldn’t relate to them either.
Then there was music. Music was something that always came very naturally to me. When I was just 4 years old an elderly neighbor of mine had a keyboard, and one day when I was at his house (which was a refuge when I needed to get away from mine), he decided to teach me how to play a few chords. Within less than 5 minutes I had mastered a simple three-chord progression and could play various songs.
I was too undisciplined at that age for private lessons, but when I was 10 I enrolled in a group violin class at the elementary school. At first I wasn’t particularly good, and in fact I was almost always sitting in the back of the section. The teacher though recognized my potential and kept telling me to ask my parents about getting private lessons.
I wanted to tell the teacher that I was too afraid to ask my parents for private lessons. My mother used to make me feel guilty for getting sick and paying for medicine. How in the world was I supposed to ask them for private lessons?
In middle school the music teacher was more adamant about getting me a private teacher, and finally I started with just a 30-minute weekly private lesson. Suddenly I was getting taught technique and learning how to play more advanced music, and this combination led to me skyrocketing in ability. Within just a couple of years my violin ability level soared to a place that was unimaginable, and next thing I knew I was getting accepted into high-end youth orchestras and competitive festivals.
It was at this point that the environment at home changed. Now that I was suddenly exceptional at playing the violin my parents started treating me differently. My developing adolescent brain didn’t know what to make of this. Up until then I felt as if nothing I ever did was good enough. Now I was being treated with respect.
However, I was only respected when I did well with music. Any time I was first chair or got into some competitive group I was touted by my parents. When I didn’t do well I reverted back to being the disappointing son.
This led to me drawing a dangerous conclusion. Since I thought the rest of the world saw me through the same toxic lens as my parents did, I concluded that the only way I would get even minimal acceptance from others is if I did something extraordinary, because anything short of that was not good enough for me to gain any sort of appreciation. Basically, I had to be a superhero in order to even get a baseline amount of acceptance from others.
Having learned this toxic lesson I began practicing music with a vengeance, but every success I achieved also came tinged with disappointments. Like in school, I felt like a complete outsider with the rest of the musicians as they all came from upper-middle class homes just like my classmates. Many of the other musicians had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or even investment bankers. Some of them had incredibly expensive instruments that I couldn’t begin to afford in my wildest dreams. And some of them even had the resources to get private instruction from music teachers at Juilliard.
It also became challenging as many of the kids had started private lessons much earlier than I had, so I was behind them in terms of my ability level. In high school orchestra I was always at the top of the group, but suddenly now I was competing against kids at a state and sometimes even a national level, and they were light-years ahead of me in terms of technique.
It was when I was in these situations where I felt completely worthless and a failure. I had developed this really damaging mindset that my value as a human being was entirely dependent on my success as a musician. If I didn’t audition well or if I didn’t get to sit up front in the violin section I was completely devastated.
By the time I was a junior in high school the pressure was getting to me. I loved playing music and couldn’t believe how rapidly I had progressed, yet every audition was terrifying as I felt that anything other than first chair was a complete failure. I became obsessed with sitting in the front of the violins because my entire value seemed dependent on what chair I was assigned in the orchestra.
It seems ridiculous to even write that, yet this is how toxic my mindset was back then. And it made no difference what I had achieved. I mean, here I was, a trailer-trash kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and I was performing in Vienna at age 16! At 17 I got a perfect score at the highest difficulty level at the all-state competition! Later that year I got into the prestigious Tanglewood institute! I had so much to be proud of, yet all I cared about was that I wasn’t first chair in any of these orchestras, so therefore none of my accomplishments meant anything.
After graduating from high school I started my first semester of music school in college, and from the instant I walked in the door I was deeply unhappy. There was no way I was going to be competitive against these kids as they were far and away more advanced than I was musically, so I felt like an abysmal failure.
I had also began to feel that, although I loved playing music, that I wanted to pursue a more academic major in something like mathematics. I had always loved math and it was my favorite course in high school. I loved using that part of my analytical mind.
My parents wouldn’t hear of it though. My mother would lay on the guilt trips about how much money they had spent on private lessons for me, and that I had an obligation to get this music degree.
In retrospect, I had often wondered why my parents had so much determination that I was to become a great musician, and after a lot of contemplation I think I finally have it figured out. Neither of my parents were successful nor bright, and I think they saw my budding musical ability as their way of riding my coattails to financial success. I hated to tell them that only the most exceptional world-class musicians ever reach a level of monetary success that they come anywhere close to being wealthy, and that I was never in my wildest dreams going to reach that particular level, but since neither of them were able to understand that I think they just blindly assumed that I was destined to become the next Itzhak Perlman.
Of course, neither of them actually cared about my happiness or what I wanted. It was all about them. They wanted to be the “proud parents” of the musical wunderkind. They wanted me to be obligated to them, so that when I made my inevitable millions of dollars (as if!) that they would become millionaires too.
So that’s all I really was to them. I was just a commodity, not a person.
Music school was a miserable existence. I absolutely hated myself for not being able to compete against the top musicians in the school. And my social anxiety from high school carried over into the collegiate experience. I was terrified to talk to anyone or befriend anyone. I eventually joined this church group in order to try to socialize, but they were just as abusive and toxic as my parents were.
Finally, I had sunk to such a low depression that I got sick and had to stop going to classes. I remember not even wanting to get out of bed. Part of me wished that the dorm would just cave in on itself and that I’d perish in the ruins. Anything would be easier than the life I was leading.
I felt like I had two impossible choices – either finish music school no matter how miserable I was, or quit and defy my parents.
Fortunately, I had enough self-determination to choose the latter. I quit music school (and that horribly abusive church group), found a place to live, and started taking classes on my own dime.
Honestly I don’t know how I was able to do any of this, especially defying the will of my parents. Perhaps living away from them was enough distance for me to release myself from their control and to start taking control of my life, or perhaps I had just reached the end of my tether and felt it was time to take drastic action. Either way I’m so glad I did it.
As I look back, I realize that this was the first step in freeing myself completely from my toxic family. The second step was coming out. It had become painfully clear to myself that any wishful thinking about “finding the right girl” was just not going to happen, and that it was time for me to come clean with myself and admit that I was a gay man.
Anyone who has ever had to come out knows what I’m about to say. There’s that moment when you acknowledge that while coming out will finally enable you to be your true authentic self, you also know that you will open yourself up to discrimination and bigotry. It’s the latter that tempts us to stay in the closet, but then you decide that your happiness is more important than what other people think of you.
I may not have realized it then, but deep in my subconscious I discovered that this statement was true for my family too. They had never been there to support me emotionally and only caused me damage and despair, yet every choice I made in life I would worry about what they would think of me for it. Coming out meant that I was done caring about what other people thought about me, including them. And that was the penultimate seed of thought that eventually led to me separating myself from my family forever.
But not just yet, because there was one more really dark corner that I had to turn.
Six months after coming out I fell into yet another deep depression. I had naively thought that coming out would solve all of my problems and resolve my emotional angst, but it didn’t. I felt more alone and was completely full of despair. And that’s when I started thinking about ending my life.
The sad thing is, had I gone through with it I would have died not knowing truly what had driven me to this decision. I had so much unresolved damage from my upbringing and yet I had no idea what was truly causing my anguish. I just felt that the pain I was carrying around was too painful to live with, and that life was no longer worth living.
Needless to say, since I’m typing these words nearly 20 years later, it’s not exactly a “spoiler alert” to say that I didn’t go through with killing myself. But it was close. I had the pills. I had the note. I had the plan. And scariest of all, I had the will to go through with it.
I honestly don’t know what stopped me. Maybe I was afraid of death. Maybe I was afraid that it wouldn’t work and I’d end up brain-damaged or a vegetable.
Or maybe there was that little bit of self-survival instinct that was telling me that the reason I felt this way wasn’t really my fault.
Somehow, I kept going and didn’t go through with it. It was just a few months later that I turned another major corner in my life when I cut ties with my family permanently.
My separating myself from my family wasn’t planned nor expected. I can hardly even remember the details of what pushed me over the edge. I just remember my mother putting yet ANOTHER needless guilt trip on me over something stupid, and suddenly I had finally had enough of this treatment. Just like that I told them that I was cutting all contact, and from that moment I ceased all communications with them.
It was helpful that I lived in a different state, so avoiding contact was simple. At first it felt very strange. I neither felt relieved nor angry, but more confused and uncertain. Was I really about to walk away from my family? Was this the right thing to do?
A few things changed with me when I made this decision. Up until then I had been a pushover, a doormat for everyone to step on and abuse. Now I became someone who would never be abused again or put up with toxic behavior.
While this sounded good in theory, in reality I took it way too far. One minute I was an open door, letting anyone inside to abuse me and treat me like garbage. Now suddenly I became like a medieval fortress, refusing to let anyone inside as no one could ever be trusted.
As I moved on with my life I slowly but surely started isolating myself from people. Eventually I had no friends or relationships. I felt lonely, yet I was too afraid to let anyone get close to me. Better to be safe than sorry, I’d say to myself.
But there was another reason for my isolation.
I didn’t know it then, but deep inside I felt like a horrible person for walking away from my family. I was carrying around deep shame and guilt for my actions. How could I let myself get close to anyone, as eventually they would find out my deepest and darkest secret – that I was a terrible and ungrateful son?
I was unaware of this, and likewise I was also unaware of how much unresolved trauma I was carrying around inside of me. I felt broken, defective, and disgusting. I sabotaged any attempt at relationships because I felt unworthy of being happy. Even though I had relative success in my career I still held myself back and undervalued myself professionally.
I had moved to New York to try playing classical music again. I had realized that I loved playing music despite the bitter memories of my teen years and the emotional baggage that came with it, and pursuing music without my family’s involvement was my way of starting to create my own musical memories under much healthier circumstances.
Within my first year in New York I had joined an orchestra, and just a couple of years later I won the concertmaster chair, which is first chair, first violin. Suddenly the world became my oyster. I was being given professional gigs, and even made my debut at Carnegie Hall. I was teaching private lessons and now had a booming student roster to the point where I actually had a waitlist as my schedule was completely full.
All of this was amazing, yet the entire time I was there I felt completely empty and deeply unhappy. None of the accomplishments seemed to mean anything, and even when I had big performances or grand musical moments I had no other friends with which to share those moments. I was in the most populous city in the country and was completely and utterly alone.
As the cost of living in New York eventually became too high to be tenable, after 9 years I started exploring other places to live, and eventually moved to Seattle. I felt that the change of scenery and improved quality-of-life would help me to some degree, which it did, but I was still deeply depressed and totally isolated. I didn’t make a single friend my first two years of arriving in the city.
On top of that, my weight had ballooned up. I didn’t have a scale for a while so I was oblivious to a degree as to where I was in terms of my weight. I had an assumption about where I was, so you could imagine my shock when I finally weighed myself and was about 50 pounds heavier than I had thought.
Needless to say I was horrified, but part of me didn’t care. I had no real desire to socialize or date, so it didn’t matter to me that I was so heavy. I used food as comfort, and my weight was my perfect excuse for not dating.
I knew somewhere deep inside of myself that there had to be more to life than just living this miserable, isolated existence. Yet I was terrified of going to therapy. What if the therapist tells me that the reason I’m miserable is because of the terrible thing I did to my family? What if they tell me that the only way for me to be healthier is to appease my family by apologizing to them for being such a terrible son?
This just gives you a sense of how toxic and messed up my thinking was at that time. Luckily, I still had an inkling that this thinking may be wrong, and finally I got up the courage to set up an appointment with a therapist.
Her office was just a couple of blocks away from my house, but as I walked there for the first time it felt like it was 100 miles. My legs were like lead and my hands were shaking. I was absolutely filled with terror. What will she say to me? Will she tell me I’m a terrible person? Am I making a mistake?
I sat in her waiting room for a few minutes that felt like an eternity. Finally, she came and brought me into her office. My voice was shaking as I started to talk, but she immediately put me at ease as I shared my story. Most of the time her therapy appointments were only supposed to go for about an hour, but for this first session she kept me for two hours.
As she listened to me talk she reassured me that she was there to help, and that enabled me to open up a bit about my family. Mind you it was impossible to squeeze in every single horrible incident from childhood into just one session, but as it was the first time I was talking to ANYONE about any of this it was still a very emotionally charged experience.
Yet she continued to listen, only interjecting occasionally to offer her support and comfort when needed. This allowed me to talk more, but little did I know that I was teetering on an emotional precipice. It continued to build as she offered more comforting and assuring words as I talked about my family separation. Her voice grew softer with each interaction, and I could feel something welling up inside of me that I couldn’t identify. She kept gently bringing me closer and closer to the emotional edge, all the while reassuring me that she was completely on my side.
And then it happened.
She knew exactly what to say, and exactly when to say it. Nearly an hour after listening to me talk about myself and my abusive family she let her voice go very soft, and with that she said something that I never expected.
In almost a low whisper she leaned towards me, and in the most loving, supportive way she said: “You know something…I’m glad you left your family.”
And that’s when I broke down.
I literally collapsed on the couch in a fit of uncontrollable weeping. Suddenly years and years of shame and guilt came pouring out of me in a torrent. I had absolutely no idea what hearing these words would do to me.
After a few moments I told her that I had honestly been afraid to talk about what I had done for fear that she’d judge me. She said she understood, but then comforted me and reassured me that she 100% felt that leaving my toxic family behind was absolutely the right decision.
It’s amazing what hearing those words did for me. While I still had a TON of unresolved trauma to process, it was the catharsis that I needed to really kick-start my healing process.
It’s also amazing to suddenly realize that this misguided shame and guilt that I had felt was the cause of so much self-destructive behavior. It’s like suddenly I went from being a condemned man to someone who was freeing himself from the shackles of self-abuse.
It was in our future sessions that I also learned that my guilt and shame weren’t just incidental.
“They groomed you to take responsibility for their abuse on you,” she said. “Like every time your mother would blame you for your father’s abuse. It was her way of absolving herself of any responsibility. In reality, a good parent would defend her child and blame the abuser, but instead your mother taught you to accept the blame for the abuse.”
This suddenly made sense to me. Both of my parents had abused me in various ways, and then like so many abusers do they blamed the victim, in this case being me. It was no different than a husband beating up his wife and then telling her the next day, “You know you shouldn’t make me mad when I’m drinking..”
Learning not to continue feeling guilty for protecting myself was an important step. As for socializing, that was VERY hard. For years I had lived in a virtual isolation, and socializing was very traumatizing for me at first. Eventually I got better when I realized that people could really be kind and friendly.
It was about six months after starting therapy that my weight loss journey started. Honestly though, I don’t even really think about my weight loss as a specific journey, but more as just another component to my overall journey to wellness. For a long time I hated myself, and therefore didn’t care about myself. Once I started learning to let go of the abusive toxic thinking patterns and started learning to love and care for myself then the weight loss came about somewhat naturally.
As always there have been bumps in the road. After I had initially lost about 75 pounds the weight loss stalled out. It wasn’t devastating – keep in mind that I used to be over 300! But I was still technically overweight.
And then I realized why I was still sabotaging my last bit of weight loss.
One thing I had been constantly doused in during my unfortunate childhood is the belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This belief was fed into me constantly by both of my parents. It was their way of justifying their abuse of me.
The problem was, I still believed it to a degree. When a child’s mind is taught this lesson it’s very difficult to “unlearn” it as an adult. There’s still that reflexive mindset that says there is still something wrong with you.
This is what I still thought, and was part of the reason I was struggling to lose the rest of the weight. It actually had to do with dating of all things. You see, being single meant that if I wanted to find a relationship I would need to start putting myself out there, and therefore would get rejected from time to time. Any time I was rejected though I was afraid that it was reinforcing that belief that there was something wrong with me. However, if I remained overweight I could always blame that for the cause of the rejection.
But what happens if I get rejected and I’m no longer overweight? Then my toxic mindset would think that this would mean that there surely must be something wrong with me after all, since they aren’t rejecting me for being overweight. And that’s why I was afraid to lose the last few pounds.
Working through that logic is what helped me overcome that obstacle. Now it’s been nearly two years since I lost the remainder of weight, and staying active and taking care of myself has helped me maintain a healthy physique and lifestyle.
More importantly, I’ve accepted that there is nothing wrong with me at all, though it is difficult to shut off the negative thinking at times. Therapy may not completely eliminate these negative thoughts or emotions, but it has helped me be able to navigate through them and to not let them ruin my life.
It’s still not easy, even nearly 6 years into therapy, to stay happy. There are days when the negative thoughts and feelings start to overwhelm me. There are times when I am tempted to revert into isolation. There are even times when even though I have many friends who openly tell me how much they love and care about me that my toxic brain tells me, “Nobody likes you. No one cares about you. You’re never going to find a life partner. You’re ugly and repulsive. Just give up.”
It’s difficult when these thoughts start to take over my mind, yet I know I’ve come too far to let them destroy my happiness. I remind myself that my friends do love and care about me, and that I will make someone a wonderful life partner someday.
So…sufficed to say this post has little to do with “how I lost x amount of pounds in x amount of days” or what kind of abdominal cruncher or thigh squeezer I use. The irony is that I eat and go to the gym now with little thought about how I look. Before I thought I had to be fit and skinny to be liked, but now I know that’s not true. I also used to think that being fit and skinny was all I needed to make me happy, but even at my healthiest physically and mentally I still have my dark and depressing days.
Yet I soldier on, because the transformation of my life over the past six years has taught me that there are no limits in life except for those that I set upon myself. I also learned that it’s better to have the “bad” emotional days than to have “non-existent” emotional days. For years I was completely emotionally shut down and checked out. Now I’m not.
I remember after therapy the first time I dated and subsequently got my heart broken. I was devastated, and spent one Friday evening listening to sad music and bawling my eyes out. Yet as painful as it was I still felt good in that I was allowing myself to feel. After so many years of being emotionally dead inside it felt good to feel, even if the feelings in this case were unpleasant.
As I continue my journey I realize I’m always going to be a work in progress. No matter how many friends I have I still have to battle the toxic thinking that no one really likes me. No matter how many guys want to date me I still have to resist catastrophizing every rejection by thinking that no one finds me attractive. No matter how many accomplishments I achieve with work I still have to prevent myself from thinking after I make a minor mistake that I’m stupid and incompetent.
These negative thoughts are pervasive, and were accentuated by the gaslighting I got from my mother which essentially confirmed this way of thinking. A child’s brain believes this completely, and even in adulthood years of therapy doesn’t make it completely go away.
But I keep healing, and learning, and trying to live a better life. To go from an obese hermit to a healthy sociable man with many friends is beyond anything I could have imagined a few years ago. And as I say, it wasn’t about finding the right diet or exercise equipment or trainer. It was finding emotional wellness and recovery from trauma.
And that’s the kind of music that I play to now.
2 thoughts on “My Story”