Peace from Anxiety by Hala Khouri

Author:Hala Khouri [Khouri, Hala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Being with Suffering

Being in a conscious relationship with suffering is necessary if we want to be whole and at peace. As Brené Brown says, “Because we have lost our ability to feel pain and discomfort we have transformed it into anger and hate.”1 When this is directed outward, the world feels like our enemy. When this anger is directed inward, we become our own worst enemy. If we want to heal, we have to feel the source of our suffering, not the pain associated with denying it. Lanie’s story is a good example of this.

Lanie struggled with an eating disorder her whole life. When she came to me at age fifty, she was still in a cycle of dieting and binging that had begun at age eight. For the first few months of therapy, it was hard for me to get her to talk about anything other than food plans and exercise regimes. She had such a deep hatred of her body, and her whole existence was oriented around her cruel inner voice that constantly told her that she was disgusting. She knew that as a young girl she’d used food to mask her feelings of grief over the death of her father. Her mother and sister had died while Lanie was in her twenties, and this had taken her eating disorder to a new level. Through some deep work in therapy exploring what was beneath the eating disorder, Lanie realized that not only did she use food to numb her grief, but also her grief had been transformed into self-hate, and that fueled her behavior. As painful as it was to struggle with her weight and self-esteem, on some level this was easier than dealing with her grief. Only when she finally let herself feel her grief was she able to find the compassion for herself to feel that she deserved to live and be happy. Her preoccupation with food and her weight was a distraction from the deeper issues that she was avoiding.

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