Psycanics: A Science of Being and Life

Discreation of Bulimia

Explorer's Report:

This is the report of a 24 year old female, studying in Europe for MBA, who had been living with bulimia for four years. She was guided in CDT by Thomas Michael Powell in July 2007.

My story starts, of course, from the very beginning of my life, but I am going to take you directly to the how and why I came in contact with Psycanics. I had a very rough childhood, followed by a period of extreme weight gain in high school, and later, weight loss. In high school, I was rejected and ridiculed for being fat. Those years were miserable for me.

I later lost that weight but only with super self-control. The amount of self-discipline and control I had for two years which led me to lose over 45 lbs was also the reason I started allowing myself the reward of binging on my favorite foods and then puking them back up. I had this in control—or so I thought—until one day I realized my once-a-week habit had turned into a downward spiraling obsession. I began to do it for every meal—or rather every time when, after eating, I could get to a bathroom, even in public places.

Let me first explain what bulimia is, for those who have only heard "someone mention it" or "saw something about it on TV,". Bulimia is basically a binge of large amounts of food, followed by guilt feelings about the possibility of gaining weight, and then some form of action to counter the effect. This action can be in the form of extreme amounts of exercise, fasting, or as in my case, throwing up all the food I had eaten.

I had a severe case of bulimia for about four years. This means I ate vast amounts of food (i.e. enough for about 10 people) in one sitting, and then would go to the bathroom and purge it—vomit it—out. This only to go back and binge and purge again. The first 2.5 to 3 years were not as bad as the last, because I was not living alone and I would only binge and purge when I didn't’t think anyone would notice. I lived with my boyfriend at that time and I only told him about my problem after 1.5 years. He and only two of my closer friends knew about my problem. Being bulimic is easy to hide, because unlike anorexia (a similar and yet also very different eating disorder) our bodies do not show obvious outward signs of decay and abuse.

The severity of my bulimia increased ten-fold when I went to Frankfurt for a business internship as part of my MBA studies and found myself alone, away from friends, with only me, my apartment, my bird, and a TV (a bulimic's favorite feeding ground). My whole day, even at work, consisted of eating only to throw the food up again within minutes of eating it.

I purged more than 25 times a day. My daily routine was: go to work, binge and purge there (on a lesser scale than when I was at home), then on the way home, go to the grocery store, buy $75 worth of food, get home and spend the evening in front of the television binging and purging the rest of the evening. Needless to say, I could not concentrate on work at all because of all the binging and purging and trying, out of shame, to hide my addiction. I ended up having to shorten my contract at the company. Realizing I had a problem, I decided to enroll myself in an in-house clinic for my eating disorder.

The clinic helped a little, but their telling me that I might have to accept a weight gain was NOT a good way to help me stop the disorder (I was always in a panic about gaining weight due to my high school years). However, I decided I would be open to their ideas, as long as my body stayed within my BMI range. (The clinic's theory was that the body tells you—if you listen to it and not your emotions—what it wants, and it ultimately only wants what it needs to be in the correct BMI range).

However, on their system, I gained about 22 lbs in a month and when I got within one pound of being technically obese, I snapped back into bulimia. Although I had learned to control the bulimia a little better, I had not claimed my life back at all. I was still obsessed.

So there I was, back in my university town in the Netherlands, not able to study, concentrate on anything, ruining my teeth (the stomach acid dissolves them when you purge), my body and my relationships. (If you are interested in the details of bulimia, Google it; there is a vast amount of information).

My self-esteem suffered as well as everything else I had going for me. I was beating myself up mentally telling myself that I used to be so disciplined and now I was so weak and worthless. I had always been an over-achiever: 4.3 GPA, soccer fanatic, honor student, etc. I believed in self-discipline because it had always worked for me and helped me get out of the unbearable situation at home. Now, here I was, not able to work, study, all my savings depleted on binge food, and beating myself up so bad for being this person who could not control this thing in my life. This in turn made me feel worse—which increased my compulsion to binge even more, which meant purging even more. I was trapped in a seemingly endless cycle. Furthermore, I was so physically and emotionally tired and de-motivated, that seeking help seemed like the biggest chore.

At my wits end, I finally told my parents.

My mom came to the rescue and offered to give me her savings to pay for this really upscale treatment facility in Florida, USA. The plan was for me to give the clinic route another shot. The only problem was that this $30,000 a month clinic, supposedly one of the best, only had a 20-30% success rate. Clinics don’t mean cure. I felt guilty about the amount she would be dishing out, and she was beyond worried about whether it was going to do any good.

Then my mom heard about Psycanics and talked to Thomas Powell, the philosopher who discovered it. She told him the details of my situation and he told my mother that he could cure me with almost 100% certainty, and would give a complete guarantee: no cure, we don’t pay anything. My mother, being a natural skeptic, at first dismissed the idea. However, when I flew over to the US, and we fully realized the costs and unlikely success rate we were facing, we decided to give Psycanics a try. We had nothing to lose.

I was soon on my way to San Diego to spend a whole month with Thomas Powell and Psycanics, hoping he could help me patch my life back together.

The first evening, I was soon in shock with Thomas’ explanations about how life really works. Now, if you ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you what a grounded skeptic and cynic of anything spiritual, philosophical—anything not scientific. Even things like acupuncture and holistic healing were weak, ridiculous, "for the weak-minded," in my world. I had a lot of questions, of course, but I had to be more open to the answers. I was killing myself with this "disease," as the non-Psycanic world calls it.

The first thing that Thomas did that absolutely blew me away the first evening I was there was to help me realize that, literally, the power was in me. He sat me down and asked me what was the most horrible thing I could think of that I would hate to experience. Now, ever since I can remember, I have had a terrible aversion, abhorrence, intolerability to seeing, hearing or even thinking about anything to do with rape. He told me to close my eyes and go into the experience what that would feel like. What I felt was all the emotions you can imagine involved with experiencing something like this, but I also felt heat—energy. The type of heat you would feel when you get mad, or sad or whatever negative feeling comes to you when you are in situations that trigger these emotions. This is when I felt, for the first time, what he meant when he said this was a science dealing with energy. Psycanics is, in summary, and in factual and provable terms, how the body uses energy to make itself feel the way it does.

Now, this is important. Until you are able to get what I am going to say next, you won’t be able to understand anything and change anything in your life. This is the most fundamental concept you can have of your whole being and existence in this world as well as any world you include in your reality: you and only you are the creator of your happiness, and thus, your suffering.

You don’t believe me? Think about his: I stopped being bulimic approximately 1.5 weeks (10 days) after starting to take responsibility for my experiences and the creation of my realities.

Psycanics was and is the tool to everything. I mean EVERYTHING: being, feeling, living, reality, creation, the answer to life, and most important love/being truly happy. This may sound like a sales pitch, but you know what, my life was consumed by hate, pain, and suffering and I was physically killing myself. I was causing my heart extreme exhaustion and it was a matter of time before I was to have a heart attack. This ended with one week of learning about how to steer the power I have within myself. Real power, not self-discipline, the power to stop being the a person I was and to become the person I want to be. No one can tell me Psycanics is bull-shit. I lived it, I got my life back.

If you even experience an ounce of what I did as I began to discreate the negative energies within me that were causing my bulimia, you will never go back to being out of control and putting the responsibility of your life on anyone but yourself. You will start your journey of learning how to be content, happy and exhilarated all the time.

A most cynical and untrusting person I was, but Psycanics is testable, factual and scientific. I ate, gulped, and consumed the concepts. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, no religion, belief, or concept, has ever made me feel that it was so absolutely undisputable as the concepts and teachings of Psycanics. If you had known me before, you would never believe I would ever say anything like this. But again, like I said, you have to be it, experience it, before you can believe it.

So my whole time here consisted of lectures, reading and processing. It was and is amazing how Thomas had and has the answers to every question I could and did imagine. I still remember how I used to ask other family members (very devout Catholics) to explain why things like sex were so banned and limited, why this, and why that, and their answers never seemed to hit the nail on the head. I never felt completely at ease and just seemed to float along because it seemed like the right thing to do. I never had that feeling with my answers from Thomas. He was so nonjudgmental, truthful and completely knowledgeable on so many other topics, that no matter what angle I came at it from, he would still have me saying, "Ah ah!, now I get it!" Remember, I consider myself a die-hard skeptic.

After reading the basics concepts and starting to get a foothold on what Psycanics was all about, we started processing with CDT. The main idea was to go into every negative experience I was having or negative emotion and learn the source of it. That source is always something Psycanics calls "identities," and these are always our own creations, creations of self.

Once I had the concepts, we began my internal battle with my bulimia. At first, it was hard. I was so scared, panicky, of gaining weight. The first two days, having to keep that food in my stomach, knowing it was fattening me (in my mind), was so scary and difficult that I wanted to sabotage myself and the whole process by just giving up.

That’s the thing, you really have to be ready to face your “demons”, and worse, the responsibility that you created them. Everything “bad” you experience is unfortunately (or fortunately) your own creation. As a bulimic, one is terrorized by the thought of certain—or in my case—all foods in my stomach. I would panic, to say the least, and think, “Well, I have put a piece of bad food in my mouth so I might as well stuff myself to the brink of sickness." This is the first part: the binge. I would allow yourself the freedom to eat whatever I wanted and eat so much of it that I could barely stand up. I usually had to walk bent over because my stomach was so full and in pain. Then I would go to the bathroom and let it all go.

Thomas sent me full tilt and frontal into all of that. He would have me eat something I considered a "bad food" (i.e. fattening—which in my case was anything at all, even an apple) and then make me keep it down, to trigger my emotions. He would then ask me questions and give me instructions, applying CDT, an exact procedure that he explains in his books.

What we learned was that they are two different parts to bulimia, and both the binging and the purging have different triggers and different processing cycles. (I might note here, that I found out later that when Thomas said he could cure bulimia, he had only the vaguest idea of what bulimia is. However, he knew his procedures work on any human behavior.)

First, we discreated the purging compulsion. We processed my panic, fear, anger and everything to do with purging until they were all gone— discreated. This took about 3 sessions of processing. With Thomas’ permission, I did still puke once after the first CDT session, but that was the last time.

2 days and 4 sessions of processing (about 5 or 6 hours) is all that it took to end 4 years of a life-sucking, life-breaking, body-destroying, out-of-my-control compulsion to vomit after eating. During those 2 days, every time a urge came, either to binge or to purge, we sat down and I would process the ever dwindling feelings/identities away. By the end of the second day, I could eat a meal without going into utter panic, hysteria and purging.

The next thing we started processing (sometimes at the same time as the need to purge) was the binging urge. The urge to binge was so strong, I wanted to cry when I went out to a local grocery store (the first time in a couple of years since my last trip to the US.) In fact, I must say I am lucky to not have had bulimia in the US because I would have spent even more money on the plethora of food available here that is not available in Europe.

In two more days, the majority of my compulsion to binge was gone. We spend another six days cleaning out leftover twinges. My absolute panic of gaining weight was cured and my compulsion to binge and purge, all the bulimia, was gone within 10 days. I still had small triggers of binge and purge urges, but I could now control the actions which resulted from them and process the urges away before it actually came down to doing the binging or the purging.

Now, three weeks later, and I have not had a binge or purge urge or a absolute panic to weight gain. I have gained weight, but it has been a conscious control of what I eat. Even when I went to some all-you-can-eat restaurants (a Bulimics worst nightmare or utopia, depending on your point of view) I was in total control. Thomas had me start counting calories and learning (because I had screwed up my body’s natural metabolic system) at what point I would gain and lose weight.

So now I eat anything I want (even Butterfingers, my favorite candy bar) without flinching. This may not sound so amazing to the average reader, but ask any person with an eating disorder and they will cry out in disbelief. I still can’t believe it. When I first got here I would get so emotional about having inside of me half a cookie or a bite of bagel that, despite my lamentations and suffering and desire to quit bulimia and get my life back, I wanted to throw in the towel. I would rather have died, as my doctor had predicted was coming my way, than to have to deal with that panic of knowing that that food was in my stomach.

Now, writing this, I have become someone else. And it turns out, getting over bulimia was little more than a hiccup. I still have 2 weeks left on my planned stay time and I continued to work with Thomas on all areas of my life. I have been through so many other emotions and learned so many other things about myself that are bounds and leaps compared to dealing with the bulimia. My self-esteem and self-worth have changed drastically. On a scale of 1 to 10, I went from about a 5 from the time before the bulimia, to a 1 during and at the end of it, to an 8 now. It sounds unrealistic to become a completely different person in such a short time, I know. We are so used to these get-happy books and plans which tell us it will take time and you can do it, just keep thinking positive, that the greatness of the impact of something like this can’t be realized until you are sitting in the middle of it. It doesn't’t take months; it will take hours if you want it and are willing to accept the responsability.

I am someone I like better, someone who can live again. Someone who knows what happiness is again and knows how to become it. Someone who loves again. I still have a long way to go, don’t get me wrong, but the power and motivation I get just knowing what I know now, while very overwhelming, is indescribable. It’s magnificent and terrifying at the same time. I am my own creator. No one or thing else can ever make me feel anything I don’t want to. I can be and do that which makes me me and that which is my passion. I, I , I , I …me, me, me, and only I had it in me the whole time. It’s exhilarating to be so powerful now.

Look at your life. What are you doing that you don’t like? Smoking? Overweight? Bad sex/relationships? Hateful? Materialistic? Whatever…all you have to do is start with being honest with yourself, then acknowledge you created everything you have ever felt and that no one but you can change it. When you can do this, you are ready to learn how to be in control of your happiness.

Copyright © by Psycanics: A Science of Being and Life. All Rights Reserved.

Published on: 2007-08-28 (920 reads)

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