The Unit
Hello and welcome. I feel privileged that you are able to take this short walk with me as I work my way through my journey to heal from abuse. And don’t forget to stay for the gem of positivity at the end.
This time I’m going to talk about what I will only refer to as The Unit. As a response to some some of the traumatic abuse in my life, I developed an eating disorder. To be specific, I became anorexic. The Unit was an eating disorder unit in a mental health facility.
Firstly, the rules. The staff didn’t tell me what the rules were, so how could I possibly be “good” and follow them? The only times a rule was talked about, was when I was being chastised for breaking it. Then the visiting hours. There were two hours a night on both Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if we were very “good” we could have up to six hours out on the weekend, sometimes even both days. However, being good was linked to whether we had gained weight, lost it, or just stayed the same. It always struck me as odd, in that each patient was in The Unit for our obsession with weight, and the staff also obsessed about our weight.
Even using the phone, we were allowed 15 minutes on a call and that was it. Needless to say, the other people in The Unit thought of ourselves as inmates; our punishment a life sentence. And we were prisoners. The nurses treated us more like animals than actual people. We were rewarded or punished by our weight. I remember when the second-in-command nurse took it upon herself to inform me, in the middle of The Unit, that I was a “no-good, selfish bit of worthlessness”. My crime? I’d broken the 15 minute phone call rule — by five minutes. We even had compulsory bed rest times: half an hour after every breakfast and dinner, and a whole hour after lunch.
If we inmates failed in any small way, we were punished. No phone calls. No visitors. When any one of us failed, we were put in solitary confinement to all intensive purposes. And the only way to be discharged from The Unit? Gain enough weight to suit the “powers that be”. Well, if the nurses were going to treat us like despicable prisoners who had done a heinous crime, they could have it. This meant war. We learned to make small actions of defiance.
However, despite the cruelty of The Unit, I could have coped with that. But there was one exception. Unfortunately, friendships between inmates were strongly “discouraged”. We weren’t even supposed to keep in contact after leaving The Unit. But there were three inmates who developed a strong friendship — Chris, Karly and I. Three days after my 21st birthday, “celebrated” in The Unit, Karly was moved to another unit. It distressed both Chris and I immensely. To cut a long story short, both Chris and Karly gave me letters when they were leaving The Unit. They both told me that I was such a person of worth, I deserved to get better and live. Both letters touched me deeply, as if they had written them together (they were in separate units at the time).
And now? I’m on my journey towards healing, something that didn’t start until seven years AFTER I left The Unit. The only coping skills I learned from The Unit, are ones that both my psychiatrist and psychotherapist call “maladaptive”. I now have to unlearn these skills; the burning, the cutting, the punching of myself until I am black and blue, the skipping of meals, the throwing up of what I do eat, the eating of pet food to punish myself, the denial of sleep, even my negative self talk. However the point of this story is that sometimes other people can see your value as a worthy human being, before you can even catch a glimpse of yourself. Both Karly and Chris could see my intrinsic value. I just wish I had been able to show them that they were valuable too.
This time, the gem is a quote that is attributed to Joseph Smith, Jr:
If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself
Despite the fact my friends are no longer around me, they wanted me to know that my life had been of value to them. Therefore it is of value to myself. That value is in healing. And it is in healing that I am showing the value in the lives of my friends.
Thank you for walking this short time with me. Don’t forget to leave a comment about what you value in others — it will show you your own value. And until next time, breathe - and believe.
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