[Benjamin Fry]

What comes to mind for me is that you donít feel safe. If so then you would oscillate between two ways of showing it.

Firstly you would engage in the defensive behaviour you describe; you hide from men with your weight, you hide from your own feelings with drink, you play it safe at work and you remain distant from your family.

Secondly you simultaneously engage in destructive behaviour when you feel able to; you sabotage your finances, you use food and drink unhealthily and perhaps in other ways too.

These may sound similar, but one is running away from the fear, and the other is actually amplifying it. The point of being self-destructive is to see if someone will notice and therefore to find out if they are actually going to rescue you. This is born out of a deep longing for someone (likely to be your father and perhaps mother) to actually notice your needs and to be there for you unconditionally.

You will need to engage with the very difficult feelings of not being able to get from your family what you have always wanted. Then you can accept this as a reality, grieve the loss and move on, taking better care of yourself now that you are an adult.

[Benjamin Fry]

Good for you. You are taking really good care of yourself.

If you feel positively inclined towards psychotherapy then go for it. My best piece of advice however is to shop around, and this takes time. So the sooner you start the better. See if you can persuade a number of therapists to see you initially for one hour for free so that you can decide if you like them. Then when you have visited a few, go with your instincts about who feels right for you; or keep looking. This can be a bit exhausting so if you start before you are desperate for it, then that is ideal.

Indoor rock climbing would be good for you. The person holding the rope has your life in their hands, so safety, heights and trust are big issues. Try to go with someone with whom you would like to build a bond of trust. Or just follow your instincts. If you want to do something more outward bound then go for it.

Parents have an incredible power over us. This is mainly (I think) because we have vested in them all the power that used to be granted to some kind of god (male) and nature (female). In a modern, urban, secular society all the forces of fate and nourishment thus end up foisted on our parents, who then in turn always let us down because they are only human. I recommend visiting a church even for the atheistic, simply to absorb the sense that your own father is not necessarily where authority starts and stops. Also, you will eventually have to grieve the fact that your father is not perfect and will never change. Until you do so, every sign that this is the case punctures the fantasy that he might; this is also very upsetting.

[b_beth]

I have booked an appointment with you on 19th September and was going to send you an email privately of where I am at but I'm in such a distressed, bullish, all over the place sort of mood at the moment I thought what the hell I'll just send this. Might help someone else!
I hope you have a large box of kleenex at your consultations.

I haven't taken up psychotherapy or counselling as of yet. The issues are so complex I think they need unpackaging and if you have managed to train anyone in the north of England in your approach that may be the way to go. I tend to think issues to do with my childhood are more psychotherapy and a period of bullying and harrassment I went through 2 years ago (that was never acknowledged by my managers) needs to somehow be acknowledged through counselling maybe or just laid to rest.

Do things normally get more extreme the closer you get to what you fear? I'm feeling generally depressed at the moment. I'm still just going with it. I've gone back to a pattern I had when my mum was dying of driving off to somewhere quiet and having a good cry. I've got my own house but I still do this. I can't stand my job but am wary about doing anything too rash until we've had a chat as it may be about generally letting things out as much as not feeling stretched in my job.

I seem to be swinging more and more wildly but I'm aware of the level of safety I have also put in the picture. So whilst my spending is trying to head off on a logarithmic curve (Amazing how you can still use your chopped up credit card for internet shopping!) I have got almost as much in savings. I don't mind spending it on that but I would like to know I have cracked the patterns of behaviour first.

I started doing geneaology and this has kind of gone a bit mad in the last few weeks. Its like I'm manically searching for my issues back in the family's history or manically distracting myself.

I did follow your suggestions about my mother and father. I don't know about the church one, that felt a bit strange. I'm not really a churchy person. I suppose it did put my father in perspective but I thought the nature approach worked much better for me. I did a high ropes course in the Lakes. That was brilliant. The way they do the courses is brilliant because you've just done the course about 2 foot off the ground and then you do it 40ft up so you know its just a mind game. The comment everyone made about me was the incredible level of focus I had. I got through the whole thing by focusing on trees, aslong as I had a tree about 3 ft away I was fine. I look at trees in a whole new way now. Really that feeling is fading now, I need to recapture the feeling of being brilliant.

What I've come to realise in about the last six months was how uncomfortable I was when I was growing up. On Spendaholics (I need that programme on a loop on my TV) you talk so often about people who have lost part of themselves. I think to some extent I lost the ability to relax and to feel comfortable at home. My father was such an angry volatile person that I now feel like nobody else was allowed to be angry. Whilst my mother and middle brother were always like Dylan off the Magic Roundabout and didn't actually hear my father, I know my eldest brother felt worthless in his teens and I suppressed my anger with food. About 6 months ago I was talking to my friend about this and she told me she was always frightened of my father. That was always my strongest emotion towards him.

I was also much less dexterous than my family. Everything I have done has taken longer to learn; swimming, riding a bike, learning to drive. By the time I learnt to ride a motorbike 8 years ago I had just accepted this and took my time about it. Looking back, I can't see any reason for this other than me having measles at 6 months old. My father did regularly call me clumsy though and sometimes useless. It was when I went to university that I noticed I wasn't really clumsy away from home, it was like a self fulfilling prophesy.

One final area I have noticed which you cover in Spendaholics but you don't necessarily find out in consultations is clutter. I live in a three storey house and the level of clutter seems to vary with the amount the room is seen by other people. My bedroom is by far the most cluttered room in the house. The other thing I have noticed is that I have decorated all the rooms in the house but with the exception of the living room none of them is what you would call finished. It may be something small, like requiring a wall clock, or the ceiling painted but they are all unfinished.

Just wanted to try and give you the whole picture Benjamin. I'm hoping we can crack it in two hours, or you can wave your magic wand and sort it.
Yes, don't answer that!

[im4it]

Hi Beth

Great to hear you are going to see Benjamin and I would love to hear what you 'unpack' at the meeting. I had a meeting with Benjamin in May 07 and I found it really helped. I am still having issues tackling things head on for fear of what my emotions will bring up and fear of what others will think of me. Plus also my partner was not very understanding about the whole thing and we havent talked about the meeting since. Isent her an email telling her what happened, even though we live in the same house as she was not bothered at all about finding out what was said. I can wholeheartedly relate to all the things you mention like, fear of father, heights, the overdrinking, and generally not looking after oneself, along with the clutter and unfinished jobs around the house and garden. Which again just feels like discontentment with 'ones lot'. Even to the similarities to the fact you had issues when growing up and the fact that you feel a part of you has gone and wanting to feel brilliant again. I think if you have become discnnected from friends, workmates, partners you do feel lonely. I did find some answers in my discussions with Benjamin but there is a lot more work to do after that, but you need a good support network as otherwise things continue to fester if you can't release them or dont folloe through. I have taken a career break to try and figure some stuff out as I hated my job but needed the job to pay off my debts and pay for the lifestyle I always say 'I am renting' as I certainly don't enjoy my lifestyle of scraping by. I think my biggest issue is that I don't know me. But I also think if you fear your mother or father as a youngster it causes you to be a bit repressed as you get older.It also doesn't allow you to be yourself or express yourself very well when you are growing up for fear of what your parents say. With regard to feeling worthless as a child I remember being told by my Dad once that I was not good enough which I can still remember to this day! I think I hold on to the anger and frustration of those words and have always felt my sister was the golden child. I also remember not feeling comfortable at home or school. So you are not alone in your conerns and issues, but if you do unlock anything of interest for others please pass it on. The more I read and the more I think about things the more frustrated I get, but I do know there is no magic wand only a journey to undertake. I can recommend a good book which is called 'your best year yet' by Jinny Ditzler. there iare two section in there under questions 4 & 5 about personal values and limiting ones self. They are certainly a very interesting read. But I have to say page 95 is the biggest revelation to any spendaholic. (I wont put it onto here in case I get done for copyright infringement!) I have certyainly read loads of self help books and I can say that we are all looking to buy the answers but they are not in there, they are in us! These books just challenge us by asking questions. But I have to say Benjamins book and the book mentioned above are the only ones worthy of purchase in my opinion.

I hope your meeting goes well with Benjamin and I am eagerly awaiting your post after the meeting.
Best
IM

[b_beth]

Hi,

You are right. Going to see Benjamin is a starting point and a very good one, but you need to further develop from there.

The reason for going to see him as we established in the session was that I had an issue with expressing myself honestly, particularly in relation to anger or sadness. The reason I had trecked half way across the country to see him in particular was because he had already demonstrated with his previous responses that he was very insightful and in all the episodes of Spendaholics he had never reacted adversely to anyone who was on the show. As we established my issue of not being able to express myself honestly is all to do with the reaction I get. I tend to censor my responses to my audience. So even with him when you know he is not going to say 'f*** o**' or tell you that you are stupid or over-reacting I still had trouble with his question 'Is there anything about today that has made you angry'. He recognised that I could think of things but that I was censoring my responses.

One of the key things that Benjamin said to me was about the 'Elephant in the Room'. I don't know whether you have heard of this expression. If you imagine Anger is like a giant elephant in the room in my childhood, everyone is aware of it, everyone is delicately stepping round it but nobody directly confronts it or acknowledges it. Basically my dad was a very angry man and everyone adapted to try to not confront the anger. Some adapted better than others - my mum and my middle brother could just block my dad out like white noise, as soon as they tuned in to his critical voice they switched off. The problem with living with an angry person and in fear of them, particularly if they are responsible for looking after you is that you have to adapt to survive. You squash part of yourself down to survive. One of the most reassuring things Benjamin said was that they will all have lost something as a result. Everyone suffers from having to supress part of themselves.

One thing I have noticed with my dad was that he verbally lashes out. He doesn't think before he speaks and he just says things in what appears to be frustration. He regularly labelled me in childhood as 'stupid, useless, clumsy and fat'. But if I went back to him half an hour later and repeated the word back to him he would claim he would never say that. It was like it was an instant response because I had pressed some trigger from his childhood, he had no recollection of the journey it made from his brain to his mouth.

So I had a lot of supressed anger which was expressing itself in drinking, spending and various eating disorders. There was also an issue about sadness which had emerged in the last few years following my mothers death. I knew I had a problem because I had no photo's of my mum in the house and I had to leave the house to go and have a good cry about her death. Benjamin has recently worked with a girl called Roxanne on Spendaholics. He suggested she was angry with her mother for dying which she found very hard to agree with, my reaction was much the same when he suggested it to me. My mother was amazing and universally adored, and that is no exaggeration. Its when I went away from the session and thought about it that it all became clear. My mum, like the rest of the family, had adapted to my dad's anger. Her adaptation was to block it out. Very effective, but unfortunately meant she didn't hear or see how he was treating his children. Unfortunately she had had a couple of incidents with me where the reality of the situation had been spelt out to her - a brief daliance with anorexia in my teens, and me screaming at her when I was at college about how worthless I felt. When my eldest brother had two daughters and my dad started to shout at them I can remember she had to start to hear it and respond in order to protect the girls. This was a revelation to me as it meant I was angry with her for not protecting me but she had recognised her mistake.

Bizarrely I have found geneaology very useful for forgiveness. In talking about relatives gone you find patterns of behaviour that repeat and repeat and repeat. I find it quite difficult to blame my dad for criticising us and never praising us. When researching his father him and his siblings have all spoken about how they were constantly criticised. Its just a repeating pattern and you have to ask yourself how far back you want to take it.

I have two favorite books; Benjamin's and The Money Saving Diet by Martin Lewis. I also have virtually all the Spendaholics episodes on tape and use the more relevent ones with journalling to make me think.

Benjamin suggested I focus on a number of actions related to areas that needed attention so;

Exercise to deal with focusing and using the anger - Tai Chi and my favorite, boxing
Journalling and meditation to deal help with calmness
A shrine to my mother to help me deal with sadness

The top tips from me;
Have a place where you can talk to those you miss (As I used to go places in the car and cry about my mother I have a laminated photo of her that I stick up in the car and talk to)
If it feels uncomfortable do it (going to see Benjamin, doing a high wire course, being honest with someone, going for a job)
And my favorite quote 'IF YOU BUY WHAT YOU DON'T NEED YOU STEAL FROM YOURSELF'.

Take care,
Beth