My Therapist is Learning

In October of last year, I started therapy with a new psychiatrist and psychologist.  My psychologist is a DBT therapist.  DBT stands for Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.  This is a description:

The components of DBT typically consist of individual therapy sessions, skills-training sessions (usually done in a group therapy setting) and telephone consultations as needed (available 24 hours a day).

The skills-training component of DBT consists of four modules:

• Core Mindfulness Skills
• Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills
• Emotion Regulation Skills:
• Distress Tolerance Skills:

Each skill is taught in a session and then throughout the following days or weeks clients keep track of situations in which they were able to practice each skill. Using diary cards, clients keep a record of urges, such as urges to use alcohol or drugs; urges to harm themselves; urges to restrict, exercise, binge and/or purge. In a telephone consultation, a therapist prompts the client to use a specific skill in the situation as needed.

Anyway, he is not an ED expert so it has been a learning process for us both.   Today he said he had been thinking about me over the week.  He said he was beginning to maybe better understand why I was having trouble with adding more food.  I had been telling him, and he thought he understood, but he know realized he wasn't actually understanding it "correctly" so to speak.  He said he now realized my difficulties arose because eating more food meant that this would lead to weight gain.  Gaining weight terrifies me because it means I have a body that causes me so much panic and anxiety that I want to tear it off so that I can escape the overwhelming anxiety and fear.  And it also leads me to intense feelings of wanting to self harm at times so I can get some sort of relief even if it is only for brief moments.  I often feel desperate and trapped with no where to turn or to find peace.  For me, it is hard to understand why my struggles don't seem clear.  It makes me realize just how difficult it is for people without EDs to truly comprehend the struggles many of us face.  What is to me a simple fact:  more food leads to weight gain leads to extemem anxiety and fear, to him is just not that straightforward.  His thoughts also makes me feel lucky - I have a really good therapist.  Here is an intelligent, competent therapist with good abilities and a lot of knowledge and yet he is still willing to listen closely and to be open to learning more about me and letting that affect what he thinks he already knows and to then be willing to change his thinking of what my reality truly is!