SIX
Transforming Vulnerabilities into Strengths
JUST THINKING ABOUT the social, psychological, and biological forces pushing women toward the toxic triangle may be enough to make you depressed, want to drink, or binge eat! Indeed, most women find themselves some distance down the road to the toxic triangle over the course of their lives. So now it is time for the good news for women, and for the people who love them and want to help them.
We can transform our vulnerabilities into strengths because we have the tools to change the way we cope with stressful circumstances. Be it exploitative relationships or the expectations of others—these stresses don’t need to damage our bodies and send us into the toxic triangle. Each of us can change the ways we think about ourselves, so that instead of living our lives to please other people, we live them to the fullest.
Women are good at self-focused coping because we are highly attuned to our own emotions and the emotions of others. The rich emotional lives that women enjoy include thinking about our feelings, talking about them with others, and caring about other people’s feelings, but these abilities can also get us into trouble. When our emotional sensitivities and tendencies to contemplate go too far, we fall into overthinking and can become overwhelmed by our own emotions. Excessively concerned about our relationships, we can behave in ways that suit others’ best interests rather than our own.
But we can turn our emotional sensitivities, ability to think deeply, and empathy for others on their heads and use them to our advantage. We can use our self-awareness to recognize and tolerate our problems and our painful emotions rather than running away from them through overeating or drinking. We can use our empathy for others to accept their faults, understand them, and influence our relationships. We can also use our concern for others as a motivator for our own positive change.
We need tools, however, to harness the good energy of our reflective and interpersonal skills, so that we can counter our tendency to self-focus or to be more concerned for others than we are for ourselves—both entry points into the toxic triangle. These tools break down into two categories. One category is those that allow us to step back from our thoughts and concerns, take stock of them, and realize how they are affecting our behavior. In this chapter, I will describe how these tools work, showing you how they can help you break free of troubling thoughts and unhealthy goals that rule you and drive you into depression, yo-yo eating, and heavy drinking.
The other category of tools, which I will detail in chapter 7, involves strategies to make choices about how we want to think about our world and ourselves. These will enable us to take positive action to carry out those choices and inoculate ourselves against the toxic triangle.
The Master and the Slave
If our sensitivities to our own emotions and the emotions of others, and our ability to think deeply about ourselves and others, are such assets, how do they drag us into the toxic triangle? This happens when our emotions and our concerns about others take on a life of their own and begin to rule us like a master rules a slave. We may talk about “my feelings” and “my worries about others,” but we really treat them as if they are a living, breathing demon that has seized control of our minds and bodies. When this demon demands our attention, we are compelled to give in to it, letting ourselves be consumed by the feelings and concerns it commands from us. We may feel overwhelmed and miserable, but still we attend to this demon because it is our master. We cannot ignore or dispute it, because it—not us—is in command.
Our behaviors, as well as our thoughts, can become slaves to our feelings. If we are consumed by sadness or regret, we shut down and close up, fully believing the horrible things our feelings are saying to us—that we are no good, that no one loves us, that everything is hopeless—because they are the master, and so must be right. We may try to escape, at least for a short time, by binge eating or drinking. But then the master has that much more to berate us for: “You weakling, you know you can control your drinking!” “You’re going to be fat as a pig eating like that!” We accept these thoughts as true and real. We should feel guilty and ashamed. We violated the rules that say you have to be completely in control, thin, and perfect in the eyes of others. We accept our punishment—self-loathing and despair—and redouble our efforts to follow the rules completely … until the next time we are driven to escape their tyranny by absorbing ourselves in drinking or eating.
The First Step to Freedom
The first step to freedom is to realize that the master is not real. It is a false god like those of ancient times. It is no more real than the statues that ancient peoples erected to portray those gods. The master exists only in our minds and so only we have the power to keep it alive.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the master has no force over us. Just as ancient peoples would sacrifice their lives for false gods, many women sacrifice their lives obeying the commands of their negative emotions and thoughts. They suffer the self-destruction of depression, they drink alcohol until their bodies disintegrate, they let their weight be the defining feature of who they are, they make decisions that are driven by what they think other people want of them.
But our false gods are no less an illusion. Once they are recognized for what they are, dismissed, or torn down, we can replace them with values and goals that we actively choose. Let me make this more concrete with the story of Anna, a thirty-seven-year-old homemaker who has been plagued by the toxic triangle since adolescence.
Anna is a woman ruled by “shoulds”:
“I should keep my house cleaner.”
“I should let my elderly parents move in with us.”
“I should be more active in my church.”
Anna’s “should” obsessions came in part from her relationship with her mother. Anna is of Italian descent, short, dark-skinned, and a fabulous cook. She loves whipping up elaborate Italian meals for her family, and they love eating them. But everyone in her family, including Anna, is quite a bit overweight. Still, when her parents were at Anna’s house for dinner, her mother scolded Anna for cooking too little food: “You’re trying to starve us!” So the next time around, when Anna was cooking for the extended family, she heard her mother’s voice in her ear, and cooked up much more than she knew her family would eat, or baked a rich, fattening dessert, in case anyone could eat more after the main courses were done.
One day, when Anna had been cooking for hours in preparation for a big family dinner, her daughter, Sophie, walked in and asked, “Ma, why do you cook so much? We can’t eat all that. We don’t want to eat all that!”
Anna replied, “Because I have to. It’s the way it’s done. My family shouldn’t go hungry.”
“But Ma, we never go hungry! Just ’cause Grandma says we should all eat like pigs doesn’t mean we have to! I don’t want Daddy to have a heart attack at the age of sixty, like Uncle Frank. I don’t want to have to starve myself all day long, like you do, so I can eat enough at dinnertime to please Grandma! Sheesh, Ma, get a life!”
Sophie had a tendency to be opinionated, so Anna was accustomed to her outbursts. But this one really caught her attention. Was she doing something she shouldn’t by cooking fancy meals for her family? But her mother said she should cook more. What should she be doing?
Then Sophie’s demand that she “get a life” rang in Anna’s head. Was Anna letting her mother, and other people, rule her life and make demands on her? What did she think was the right thing to do?
Anna set her knife down on her chopping board and sat on one of the stools at the kitchen island. She looked around the kitchen and first saw the cannolis she had made earlier in the day—fancy cream-filled Italian pastries that were a zillion calories each. She was surprised to hear her mother’s voice in her head saying, “You made them too small! They are barely one bite each for the men! You should have made them bigger, and sprinkled them with powdered sugar! Didn’t I teach you anything?”
Then she looked further around the kitchen and saw the television. She remembered earlier in the day watching a program in which a physician was talking about the rise in obesity in the United States and how it was leading to a dramatic increase in diabetes and stroke. An image of her husband, Giuseppe, eating a cannoli and then keeling over in his chair with a stroke flashed into her mind. In this image, Sophie ran up and yelled, “You killed him, Ma, you killed him!”
Anna put her head in her hands and started to weep. She was so tired. Tired of trying to please her mother. Tired of trying to do “what’s right.” Who knew what was right—her mother? The physician on TV? Sophie? All three of their voices echoed in her head, making her dizzy.
So Anna lifted her head, and as if speaking directly to the voices, said out loud, “I know what’s right. Keeping my family healthy is right. I love them too much to put them in their grave to please my mother.”
Anna walked over to the cannolis, picked up the tray, opened the lid on the trash can, and dumped them in. Then she picked up the phone and dialed her mother. “Ma,” she said, “I can’t cook dinner tonight. I’m sorry for such short notice, but you and Dad are going to have to eat on your own.” Before her mother could argue with her, Anna said she had to go, and hung up the phone. Then she picked up her jacket, walked out the door, and took a walk through the neighborhood to clear her head and think about how she wanted to take care of her family.
Anna had the critical benefit of Sophie’s outburst to help her recognize that she was letting her mother’s demands on her, and other “shoulds,” rule her behaviors and attitudes. Many of us don’t have family members or friends who are as perceptive as Sophie is in identifying our demons or who are brave enough to confront us with them. Indeed, for many of us, our problems lie in the relationships we have with others and the ways we let those relationships dictate how we feel about ourselves and how we behave.
So What Do We Do Instead?
Scientists have developed several different strategies for identifying the kinds of thoughts and feelings that contribute to symptoms of depression or anxiety, the tendency to overeat, or periods of binge drinking. These strategies are crucial first steps in the journey out of the toxic triangle and back to health and well-being. Some of these strategies will appeal to you more than others; try several of them and discover which ones fit your style. All of these strategies will help you identify the thoughts that run through your head—often without you consciously being aware of them—in times when you are feeling down or upset, or when you want to binge eat or drink.
Most negative thoughts are likely to share some core themes, which will probably be connected to the internal and external pressures on women we talked about in chapters 3 and 5. You may quickly recognize the themes reflecting the social pressures to be thin: “Everything would be okay if I could just lose a few more pounds.” Or “My weight is my biggest problem.” You may recognize themes that reflect the pressure for women to be excessively concerned about their relationships, in thoughts such as “I couldn’t live if he fell out of love with me.” Or “I can’t stand it if someone doesn’t like me.” Look also for signs of all-or-nothing thinking: “If I can’t lose all twenty pounds, I might as well give up!” Or “If I’m not completely abstinent, then I’m a drunk.” And listen for your own personal conditions of self-esteem in statements such as “In order to feel good about myself, I must…”
These are painful things to hear yourself saying, but the critical first step to a more fulfilling life is to identify your false gods and recognize how they are dragging you down emotionally and driving your unhealthy behaviors. It’s not always easy to hear or recognize the voices of our internal demons. Mindfulness techniques can be invaluable in quieting the din in our heads so we can tune in to these voices.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness techniques are a set of tools that are taking the field of psychology by storm. Although these specific tools are new to psychology, they are actually very old; they come from meditation practices developed by practitioners of Eastern philosophies and religions such as Buddhism. If you’ve taken yoga classes, or read any of the several popular books on meditation, you’ve been introduced to them.
Though it may sound a bit mystical, modern hard science is showing that meditation can be extremely helpful to people who are plagued by negative thoughts and feelings and out-of-control behaviors. Research has shown that mindfulness training can help people who have a long history of serious depression avoid future episodes.1 Other research has successfully used mindfulness techniques to help people who are addicted to alcohol or who binge eat gain control over their impulsive bingeing.2
In one study, people addicted to alcohol or drugs learned mindfulness techniques and found that they helped them control their alcohol and drug use and reduce their symptoms of anxiety and depression. In addition, those who learned mindfulness techniques were more optimistic about their future, were better able to cope with negative emotions and urges, and were more ready to make other positive changes in their lives.3
One of the things I like about mindfulness techniques is that they capitalize on the emotional and contemplative strengths of women. Mindfulness basically involves expanding our awareness of our internal thoughts and feelings, focusing our attention on the present moment, and becoming aware of our habitual patterns of responding to stressful circumstances.
But unlike the kind of ruminative overthinking that some of us fall into, mindfulness involves acknowledging these thoughts and feelings without judging or trying to get rid of them. One characteristic of overthinking is the sense of being in a hyperevaluative mode, analyzing every emotion we have: “What’s wrong with me that I’m feeling sad?” “I’m going to fall apart if I can’t stop feeling anxious!” We question our every thought and motive, and everything other people say: “How could he have said that to me?” “What does it mean that I’m not excited about this vacation?” And then we apply our rigid, perfectionistic rules for being a “good person” in order to judge ourselves as being out of control or a failure: “I’m such a loser because I haven’t lost weight (or been able to stop drinking).” “I should feel bad about myself because my angry outburst hurt someone else’s feelings!” These thoughts and feelings are so compelling that we believe they must be true—why else would we be having them if they weren’t?
Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and memories without immediately categorizing them as good or bad. We learn to be more compassionate toward ourselves, responding to our thoughts and feelings as a friend might, rather than as a slave to a master. By being able to step back and notice, rather than be overwhelmed or ruled by our feelings, we become better able to choose how we want to feel and act in difficult situations.
So that you can get a sense of what this practice is like, let’s try a mindfulness exercise developed by psychologists Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale.4 Do this exercise in a quiet room, alone, sitting in a comfortable chair.
• First, close your eyes and focus on your breathing for a couple of minutes. Notice how your breath travels into your body, through your body, and back out of your body. Notice what parts of your body move as you breathe.
Next, tune in to the thoughts that are going through your mind, much as you might to a radio playing in the background. Try to let the thoughts flow by, noting them, but not latching on to any one of them. It’s okay if they are critical (such as “This is a dumb exercise” or “How could this possibly help?”). If that’s what’s going through your mind, then that’s how it is. Just let yourself say, “Okay, that’s what I’m thinking right now.”
Note the way your body feels right now. Is there any sense of tension or discomfort? Rather than try to push these feelings away, acknowledge them, saying, “Okay, that’s how I’m feeling right now.” If you start to feel pulled in by your feelings or thoughts, imagine yourself as a trusted friend to them, acknowledging them compassionately, but staying outside and observing them.
You are now aware of what’s going on in your mind right at the moment. Now, turn your attention back to your breathing. Focus on the movements of your abdomen, the rise and fall of your breath. Spend a minute or two focusing on each breath as it moves in and out. Use your awareness of your breath to be completely present in the moment.
Now let your awareness expand to your whole body. Get a sense of your body as a whole, including any feelings of tenseness or fatigue. Follow your breath in and out as if your whole body was breathing. Notice your more spacious awareness of your whole body.
Then, when you are ready, allow your eyes to open.
What did you notice about yourself while you were doing this exercise? As you were doing it, was it difficult not to get caught up in your thoughts or feelings? This is very common when you first practice mindfulness. The habit of being consumed by certain negative thoughts and feelings is an old one that is strongly ingrained and takes some time to break. Also, mindfulness is a process. You don’t do it a right or a wrong way—you continually bring yourself back to a mindful stance each time thoughts and feelings pull you into negative territory.
One mindfulness technique specially designed for people who have cravings or urges to binge on alcohol or food is called urge surfing.5 Urges behave like waves—they start small, build to a crest, then break up and dissolve. When you urge surf, you ride the wave rather than fighting it; as a result, you are less likely to be pulled in and/or wiped out.
• There are three basic steps to urge surfing:
1. When you first notice a craving, sit in a comfortable chair with your feet flat on the floor and your hands in a comfortable position. Take a few deep breaths and focus your attention on your body. Notice where in your body you are experiencing the craving. For each area of your body that senses a craving, describe what it is like. For example, you might say, “I feel it in my stomach, it is like a gnawing.” Or “My mouth feels like it desperately wants a certain taste.”
2. Focus on one area in which you are experiencing the urge and notice exactly what you are sensing there. Are your muscles tense or relaxed? Is the area large, like an aching feeling all over your abdomen, or is it small? Track the changes that occur in the sensations: “At first I barely noticed a longing feeling in my bones, but now I feel it intensely.”
3. Repeat the process of intense focus on each of the areas of your body in which you are experiencing the urge, noticing how it ebbs and flows. Many people notice that after a few minutes, the urge subsides considerably. But if this doesn’t happen, just continue to ride it, noticing how it moves and changes, until it does diminish.
Let’s try another exercise, this one called Leaves Flowing in a Stream.6 The purpose of this exercise is to see how quickly thoughts can pull us away from our experience of the moment. What I want you to do is to think whatever thoughts come to mind, and allow them to flow, one after another. Notice when there is a shift from looking at your thoughts to looking from inside your thoughts.
• First, get comfortable, close your eyes, and spend a couple of minutes noticing your breath going in and out. Now, imagine that there are a bunch of leaves gathered by the bank of a peaceful, flowing stream. You are standing on the bank of the stream, watching as the current pulls the leaves gently down the stream. As the leaves flow by, let each thought you are having rest on the center of a leaf. If you have a hard time putting your thoughts into words, see the thoughts as images, and place each image in the center of a leaf.
Watch the leaves go by, your thoughts upon them, flowing along. At some point, you are likely to have the sense that the leaves have stopped flowing, or that you are in a stream with the leaves instead of on the hank watching them float by, or you might have lost the image of the stream altogether. When this happens, pause for a few seconds and notice what was going on right before the leaves stopped flowing. What thoughts were going through your mind? What might have distracted you? What feelings were you having? Did you want to stop the exercise?
Now go ahead and let your stream of thoughts, each on a leaf, start flowing again. And notice again when the flow stops or the image is lost, and see if you can catch what was happening this time. If you begin to tell yourself, “I can’t do this,” or “I’m not doing this right,” or “This isn’t working,” put those thoughts on a leaf and let them flow down the stream. After a few minutes, open your eyes and gently let go of the exercise.
People have lots of different reactions to exercises like the three just described. Some find them really hard to do. If that is your experience, it might be helpful to get a book that is devoted to helping you learn mindfulness exercises, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, or perhaps consider joining a class that teaches meditation techniques.
The point of mindfulness exercises is to give you tools to step back from your thoughts and feelings and break free of the grip they have on your mind and your body. Often you are not even aware that certain thoughts and feelings are flowing through you, but nevertheless they have a major effect on your body and your behaviors, dragging you down into the symptoms of depression and anxiety or motivating you to escape through binge eating or drinking. At other times, hyper-aware of them, you believe there is nothing you can do to stop them, and so you let yourself be consumed.
Mindfulness exercises teach you to tune in to those thoughts and feelings, which is different from accepting their rule over you. By taking an observer’s perspective, watching them float by, not judging or evaluating them, not panicking because you have them, you understand that your thoughts and feelings are something that happens in you, but they are not you. You are an individual who can stand apart from these thoughts and feelings. You can observe them and recognize their effect on you. Then you can decide which ones you want to have and which ones you don’t.
If you find it difficult to take this observer stance, try this technique, which capitalizes on your ability as a woman to empathize with others.
• Imagine that your own thoughts and feelings are not yours but belong to a close friend, someone you really care about. Imagine that she is telling you about them. You are listening intently, as a close friend does, but not saying anything—you are giving her the space to voice her concerns without giving any advice or feedback. You are just trying to hear what she has to say, compassionately, knowing that these are her concerns and not necessarily your own. Are there certain themes in what she says? Does anything alarm you? Can you understand why she feels the way she does? Are there different ways she might think about her problems?
Mindfulness techniques also teach you to be more aware of the present moment. Most of us spend much of our time embroiled in rehashing things that have happened in the past, or thinking about what might happen in the future. As a result, we are not very aware of what is going on right in front of our faces—our child’s smile, our boss’s frown, the tension in our own bodies. Our unhealthy and compulsive behaviors—like binge drinking and overeating—can serve as methods to escape the cacophony of thoughts, memories, and worries in our minds. Mindfulness practice helps us be more centered in the present so that we can appreciate the good things that reside there and, in contrast, recognize the people and situations that are triggering negative emotions and thoughts. By practicing “being with” our feelings and thoughts, we can become less frightened and overwhelmed by them, and thus less motivated to escape them with unhealthy behaviors. We can also learn a great deal about ourselves, particularly the ways we have internalized social pressures to cast ourselves in a certain light (for example, in terms of how much we weigh) or to behave in certain ways (such as always putting others’ needs before our own).
Jill, the woman we have been following throughout this book, didn’t realize until she joined a yoga class the extent to which her feelings about herself and her unhealthy eating and drinking were driven by concerns about how attractive she was. She was reluctant to join the class, but her friend Katie coaxed her into it. Jill was relieved when she saw that the flyer for the class said to come in loose baggy clothes, because she had imagined that class members were expected to wear those skimpy leotards that many women at health clubs wear, and the idea of anyone seeing her in such an outfit filled her with horror. She wasn’t really overweight—her self-starvation during the week more or less compensated for her binge eating on the weekend. But she felt dumpy and unattractive and avoided any situation in which other people would see her shape up close.
At first Jill found the class difficult. She wasn’t limber and she felt uncomfortable focusing on her body. But she enjoyed the breathing exercises and found herself much less tense after each class.
Jill started practicing yoga at home between classes and began to recognize how much more positive she felt about her body—as if she had gained a sense of ownership and the beginning of satisfaction, even pride, in it. This contrasted sharply with the sense of alienation she’d had before she began yoga.
Jill hadn’t been happy with how she looked since she went through puberty earlier than her girlfriends in fifth grade and gained a lot of weight. She felt big and lumpy and uncoordinated compared to the other girls. And, as we noted earlier, Jill’s father added to her concerns by teasing her and calling her “tub butt.” Jill didn’t date much in high school, and she attributed this to being heavier and less pretty than the other girls. Actually, it probably had more to do with the fact that Jill was extremely smart and the boys were intimidated by her.
As an adult, Jill attended a prestigious college and landed a job in the marketing division of a large company, where she excelled and quickly rose through the ranks. Now she was an executive vice president, in charge of the company’s western U.S. division and responsible for millions of dollars in business per year. Jill felt good about her accomplishments, but still, her sense of being unattractive diminished her self-esteem. She felt lonely and sad, and she continued to turn to drinking and binge eating to smother these feelings.
The more she practiced yoga and developed her ability to tune in to her own body, as well as her feelings about it, the more Jill recognized the extent to which she had accepted some unreasonable standard for how she should look. She was somewhat angry with herself for buying into that standard and letting it affect her self-esteem and social life so much.
Like Jill, we may berate ourselves when we recognize the kinds of negative thoughts or expectations we have of ourselves, or the unhealthy ways we try to escape from these thoughts. “I’m so stupid to let other people determine how I feel! I’m so weak to use alcohol to cover up my feelings! I’m pathetic for binge eating when I’m feeling upset!” As we practice mindfulness, it is critical to maintain a compassionate stance vis-à-vis ourselves. After all, we are simply trying to understand what thoughts and feelings are troubling us. We are not there to judge them or even to try to control them. Just as a trusted friend would listen compassionately to our deepest secrets and not think less of us for revealing them, we must listen with trust to our own deepest secrets and respond with love.
Women can be extremely good at doing this. But all of us have periods in which we lose track of what we really think or feel. We become so caught up in taking care of others that we don’t take care of ourselves, either by not listening to our body’s signals that our behavior is unhealthy or by ignoring our own values and desires in favor of pleasing other people. We let the norms of society define who we should be, rather than allowing us to conceive our own definitions. When we are on autopilot, doing and feeling but not noticing, we are especially likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like overeating or drinking—mindless, compulsive behaviors.7
That’s when we need to actively practice being mindful—listening to the self we’ve lost track of, and being gentle and loving toward that self: “No wonder you are stressed. No wonder you want to escape. So that’s what you’re feeling.…” Mindfulness makes you aware of the triggers that cause your craving. In addition, it allows you to identify the craving, accept that it is there, but step back from it instead of mindlessly acting on it. The more you practice a mindful response to your cravings and urges to binge, the more you will feel a sense of strength rather than powerlessness.
You may protest that you are painfully aware of your negative feelings and thoughts—that’s the problem after all! It’s certainly true that women who suffer from depression and anxiety are chronically aware of their symptoms of sadness or tension, as well as their worries or regrets. Women don’t usually take a mindful stance toward these symptoms, instead they feel consumed and overwhelmed by a litany of their complaints about themselves. The toxic triangle offers a false escape for them.
Mindfulness can teach us to be neither consumed by our feelings and thoughts nor ready to escape them through unhealthy behaviors. Instead we become aware of them in a way that breaks their grip on us and frees us to make better choices for ourselves.
The Diary Method
If mindfulness techniques don’t appeal to you, an alternative that I call the Diary Method also taps women’s self-reflective strengths. This method can be used in conjunction with mindfulness techniques as well.
The goal of the Diary Method is to keep an ongoing, written record of key events in your day and how you think and feel about them. By a key event, I mean any situation in which you find yourself having a significant urge to drink or binge eat, or one in which you feel yourself becoming blue, depressed, or anxious. There may be something specific that triggers these urges and feelings—a difficult interaction with another person, going by a restaurant, being alone at home. Or they may come from out of the blue. It doesn’t matter, just write down what is going on, and then get quiet for a moment and tune in to what is going through your head. What kinds of thoughts are you having? “I want a drink so badly!” “I’m just starved, I need to eat!” “It’s all hopeless, just hopeless!” Write down your feelings. Are they a mix of longing, anxiety, sadness, defeat? Does one feeling predominate? What’s happening around you? Who is there? What have they said to you? What have you said to them?
Instead of waiting until the end of the day to reflect on it, it’s best to keep this diary nearby and record key events as they occur so that you can tune in to your thoughts and feelings as they are happening, recording them accurately in your diary. This is the first step toward becoming aware of their presence in your life. If you wait until the end of the day, you may not remember some of your thoughts, or they may morph and change over the course of the day. That morphing and changing is interesting, too, and can be recorded later in the day. The specific thoughts and feelings that you capture as they unfold will help you begin to recognize the way in which they conspire to lead you into symptoms of the toxic triangle. Let’s meet Peggy, a thirty-two-year-old freelance writer, who uses the Diary Method to understand themes in her thoughts and how they lead her to drink and feel sad.
Peggy had spent the day working in her home office, but it hadn’t been pleasant. She had experienced an old-fashioned writer’s block most of the day, and by the time her husband, Lyle, came home, she was frustrated, tired, and disgusted with herself. As he did most nights, her husband poured himself a drink shortly after he got into the house. He asked Peggy if he could pour her one.
In the old days, Peggy would have always said yes, but she decided a few weeks ago that she wanted to cut back on her drinking. She had gained about ten pounds over the last year, and knew that when she drank, she tended to overeat. Plus, there were a lot of calories in the alcohol itself, so she thought cutting down on drinking would help her lose weight in a couple of ways. It was clear that the day after she drank quite a bit, she would be fatigued and have trouble concentrating, and she was concerned that this was reducing her productivity at writing.
Peggy had told Lyle that she wanted to cut back on her drinking, so she was annoyed at him when he asked her if he could make her a drink. On the other hand, the idea of a drink after such a frustrating day was so inviting!
Rather than answer Lyle’s question immediately, Peggy went into the bedroom to get some privacy. She sat on the bed, got quiet, and breathed in deeply for a couple of minutes. Then she tuned in to her thoughts. She heard herself saying, “I deserve this drink. I need this drink. I’ve been drinking for years and still writing. Why do I think I need to stop? Things go so much better with Lyle if we are both relaxing with a drink. He gets nervous when I don’t drink—thinks I’m changing the rules or something.”
Several important themes arise in Peggy’s thoughts, one of which is self-medication. She has been using alcohol to cope with feelings of frustration and questions about her competence as a writer for years, and to some extent she still believes she can get away with this. Another theme has to do with the role of alcohol in her marriage. Alcohol “smoothes the way” in her interactions with her husband, and it seems as if both Peggy and Lyle need to relax with alcohol in order to have a good conversation with each other. Also, her husband is putting pressure on her to drink, perhaps because if she abstains it raises questions in his own mind about why he needs to drink every night.
Research on drinking has shown that there are some common triggers for binges.8 With the benefit of a few days of diary entries, some themes may become evident:
1. Particular individuals are usually involved in the situation, and they are often drinking themselves.
2. There are certain places where you have drunk too much in the past, and certain places you find it hard not to drink in the present, such as parties or bars, after work at home, weekends.
3. You drink when you have certain emotions, such as frustration, fear, fatigue, stress, or tension. You drink in response to positive emotions, such as being excited or having feelings of accomplishment.
4. You have an urge to drink, and say to yourself things like, “I can’t stand this. This urge is going to get stronger until I blow up or drink something.”
Some of these same triggers apply to binge eating, which tends to begin in certain places or in response to certain emotions.9 A major trigger for binge eating is excessive dieting.10 We let ourselves get so hungry before we will eat anything that our bodies are screaming for fast calories; when we finally do eat something, we eat too quickly and go for high-calorie foods, where binges tend to be born.
It is likely that you may begin to recognize the theme of relationships or a certain relationship in your diary accounts. It may be your relationship with your spouse that often seems to be a trigger for negative feelings or unhealthy behaviors. It may be relationships with people in your workplace—you find yourself trying to “manage” everyone’s feelings or worry excessively about how they feel about you. There may be certain friends you tend to be with when you lapse into drinking too much. As you begin to recognize the role of key people in these difficult times, use your reflective abilities to consider what it is about them that contributes to your sad or anxious feelings, or to your desire to drink or eat. How do they make you feel about yourself? What kinds of pressures might they be putting on you—subtly or not—to behave in ways you later regret?
When you are binge drinking or eating, another question to ask yourself is “What is this behavior doing for me?” or “What am I getting out of this?” You keep engaging in bingeing, even when you believe you should stop, because drinking and eating are reinforcing—they are giving you something positive that you keep coming back for. Yes, they may feel good, at least in the short term. Eating and alcohol can also buy us rewards, even if we aren’t aware we’re getting them. They can buy us escape from nagging concerns about our self-worth or our relationships, for instance, or excuses for avoiding situations we are uncomfortable with, like going to work the next day. Alcohol can, as in Peggy’s case, smooth over problems in a relationship. And alcohol or eating can become a part of our identity—“I like drinking a lot, that’s just who I am.” Or “I am addicted to food.”
Your diary entries don’t all have to be about negative situations. It’s also important to recognize those situations and people that make you feel good, or make it easier to control your eating or your drinking. If you spend an evening with a friend and don’t even think about drinking or eating, write about this in your diary when you get home. What is it about that friend that makes you able to enjoy yourself without going overboard? How does this friend make you feel—valued and appreciated, listened to, intellectually invigorated? Were you in some place that helped you curb your urges? For example, perhaps you were in a restaurant where the food was so good you wanted to savor every bite rather than gobble down as much as you could. Positive situations such as these give you lots of information that you can use to develop new strategies for making yourself happier and taking better care of your body.
What Do I Do Now?
You’ve already taken the major step of learning ways to observe your habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and to identify their major themes and triggers. At this point, you may be thinking, “What do I do now? I can’t change all these things about my life and how I think and feel! It’s too much! I have no control!” It is this very sense of being overwhelmed and having no control that leads many women to step off the path that takes them into health, and move back onto the path that leads into the toxic triangle. Most women get to this crossroads at some point on their journey to well-being; some women must face the crossroads many times.
It is at this juncture that you should further call upon your interpersonal strengths as a woman for help. If you have someone in your life you trust and believe has your best interests at heart, consider confiding in this person about the themes and issues you’ve identified in your mindfulness or diary practices. Your goal or expectation shouldn’t be for this person to “fix” your problems. Rather, by sharing what you’ve discovered about yourself with someone who can validate your concerns, you may find out that she has been concerned about you as well. Enlist this person to accompany you as you begin to make positive changes in your life. Committing to changes with, or in front of, another person can greatly increase the odds that you’ll stick with the changes when the going gets tough. If you don’t have a friend or family member who fits the bill, you might consult someone you respect—a clergyperson, a professional counselor, or a self-help group.
Yet another way you can use your interpersonal strengths to move forward is to think about important people in your life for whom you want to change. Many women who spend time battling the toxic triangle say that they would rather be using that time in positive interactions with their children. Others want to be a better role model or caregiver to their children. Either of these goals can give women tremendous motivation and strength to make changes.
Your strengths at self-reflection can also be used to respond to feelings of “I can’t deal with this!” When you find yourself veering off the path to health, try this mini-mindfulness technique.
• Sit down, get quiet, shut your eyes, and let your thoughts and feelings flow. Step back from them and watch where they go. What do you notice? If you just observe them, do they grow bigger and bigger? Do they jump around from one concern to another? Or do they eventually fade out? How does your body feel? Tense? Weighed down? Full of urges to bolt and go eat or drink? What happens if you just ride those urges for a few minutes?
Try to respond to yourself with acceptance and compassion: “So that’s what I’m feeling. Okay, there’s where that thought is going. Hmm, there’s a lot in there.” Try to be the caring and wise friend you need right now, hearing your own thoughts and feelings nonjudgmentally. After a few minutes, slowly open your eyes.
You’ve just spent several minutes with thoughts and feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control. But they didn’t consume you. You didn’t get up and run to the refrigerator or liquor cabinet. And perhaps those thoughts seem a bit different to you now—a little more distant, less a part of you and more just “out there.”
You have come a long way. You have learned how to use your self-reflective powers to discover some of the forces pushing you into the toxic triangle. You have developed some strategies for getting back on the path to health when the traveling gets difficult. The next major step is to choose your new destination—where you want to be in your life—and then to begin to move toward that home, equipped with the tools you need to get you there.