Yes, I can see where the language is confusing. She is physically present. She knows where she is and what she is doing. She has a plan and is following it. So, in that way she is present.
Awareness and feelings about what she needs, how she feels, what she cares about are missing. She is in the midst of a binge.
During a bulimic binge on food, a person will devour massive quantities of food and purge them out. She can have the experience of looking for the bag of cookies or chips to binge on following a purge only to discover she already ate them and vomited them up. She loses track of time and may continue her episode until she is exhausted or in pain or both. The pain itself can be a relief because it floods her with sensation that distracts her or blocks her from her desperate anxiety
While she binges on food we can say that she is not present. She's in the room. She's eating. She knows who she is and she feels a desperate need to devour her binge foods until her bingeing and purging bring her the relief she craves.
She can do that with a man too.
Intense stimulation can create body sensations and raise emotions. But the circumstances I'm describing in this episode are an attempt to flood the person, body, mind and emotion so that she doesn't feel who she is or who he is, for that matter. The goal is to get relief from a kind of existential agony by flooding her system with sensation. And sometimes it works. It certainly works enough for her to seek out this remedy again and again.
So, going back to your last question, the intense stimulation is a blocker when it works. It's a sedative if she's exhausted from the effort and can maintain fantasies about her experience. If she doesn't get relief she will feel disapointed, unloved, unlovable, terribly flawed as a woman and may be disgusted and frightened about the situation she's in.
But that won't stop her from attempting this again. She believes it didn't work because of her mistakes in not behaving the way she should have or being enough of a woman. Once in a while she will think she chose the wrong man, but usually she will blame herself for being unworthy.
Thank you for your questions. I appreciate the opportunity to attempt to clarify this complex experience.
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Yes, I can see where the language is confusing. She is physically present. She knows where she is and what she is doing. She has a plan and is following it. So, in that way she is present.
Awareness and feelings about what she needs, how she feels, what she cares about are missing. She is in the midst of a binge.
During a bulimic binge on food, a person will devour massive quantities of food and purge them out. She can have the experience of looking for the bag of cookies or chips to binge on following a purge only to discover she already ate them and vomited them up. She loses track of time and may continue her episode until she is exhausted or in pain or both. The pain itself can be a relief because it floods her with sensation that distracts her or blocks her from her desperate anxiety
While she binges on food we can say that she is not present. She's in the room. She's eating. She knows who she is and she feels a desperate need to devour her binge foods until her bingeing and purging bring her the relief she craves.
She can do that with a man too.
Intense stimulation can create body sensations and raise emotions. But the circumstances I'm describing in this episode are an attempt to flood the person, body, mind and emotion so that she doesn't feel who she is or who he is, for that matter. The goal is to get relief from a kind of existential agony by flooding her system with sensation. And sometimes it works. It certainly works enough for her to seek out this remedy again and again.
So, going back to your last question, the intense stimulation is a blocker when it works. It's a sedative if she's exhausted from the effort and can maintain fantasies about her experience. If she doesn't get relief she will feel disapointed, unloved, unlovable, terribly flawed as a woman and may be disgusted and frightened about the situation she's in.
But that won't stop her from attempting this again. She believes it didn't work because of her mistakes in not behaving the way she should have or being enough of a woman. Once in a while she will think she chose the wrong man, but usually she will blame herself for being unworthy.
Thank you for your questions. I appreciate the opportunity to attempt to clarify this complex experience.
warm regards,
Joanna
July 7, 2009 - 12:50amThis Comment
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