I believe you're addicted to the drama--that it serves as a distraction from confronting the prospect of processing painful emotions and memories, and the unknown of moving into a new identity, past a struggle which is familiar to you, as it's caught up in shame and self-flagellation, as you put--likely just as your memories of, and identity in, your significant trauma.
We so often stay stuck in the familiar, as safe, even if only unconsciously--despite how it might honestly seem to ourselves that we'd like to do otherwise...just as the woman leaves one abuser, only to end up with another with nearly identical patterns. If she truly wanted to be through with abuse, why would she have chosen another of the same type?
Because it's all she's ever known. Even the pain is preferable to the unknown--the devil we know better than the devil we don't. And of course, the battered spouse/lover is not consciously aware of seeking out a replacement abuser. But it happens time and again nonetheless.
And so you may well remain stuck in the same comfortable cycle of familiar pain, shame, and self-flagellation, replicating early life experiences---and at the same time, serving to distract you from what you'd otherwise be more likely to fill your time with, actually productively addressing the core traumatic experience.
I don't know you, of course, so this is all supposition according to patterns. But I do speak from experience, not as one issuing edicts from the top of a mount, as if from a remove.
You mention the tendency to feel guilty. This is a common reflex in those who've long been victimized. It took me a long long time to identify it in myself. In order to begin to see it clearly enough to move passed it objectively, and cut it's strong, perverse hold on me, I've had to begin thinking of it in terms of an addiction--I'm in fact addicted to shame.
I get a rush out of it. An overwhelming, overpowering sensation is associated with it.
You'd think that you wouldn't be likely to become addicted to something that made you feel so "bad"...but think about it...people continue to become addicted to cocaine, despite that it makes them terribly paranoid. People continue to drink, long passed the time when it still has any real effect on them, to the point that they are only really dealing with the physical fallout of it, and getting none of the positives.
We're become addicted to intensity. It doesn't necessarily have to be intensely good. Any intensity is false, and prevents us from simply and genuinely connecting with actual feelings, and sitting with them. Intensity is a distraction, after all.
Sky divers and other dare devils become addicted to the fear rush--but that couldn't exactly said to be pleasurable in it's purest nature.
But even more insidious, in my case, I realized, was that I had an "upside down" value system.
What do I mean? I mean that I learned to think of something as "good" if it made my parents pleased with me, as a child.
However part of gaining that approval was feeling "appropriately worthless", when they wanted me to display those feelings--whether as a means of discipline, overused--or for the simple glee of watching another creature squirm...
..to me I began to think of myself in terms of finally getting approval from my parents, if I only felt miserable and shameful enough.
So I was unconsciously pursuing this early life association with the "goodness" of my parents approval, with my "duty" to feel bad.
And I indulged this unconscious association even after they were no where in the vicinity, as though on auto pilot.
I was getting my fix, of feeling "worthy" finally, (in the eyes of my parents=good), by making myself feel unworthy, so as to gain that approval, despite the fact that they were long gone! I had been taught so well, I took over my own victimization! But even more perverse--and for so long, unknowingly--I actually got not only the gratification from it associated with childhood duty, but the "intensity rush" that I could wallow in, and so avoid the genuine work of honestly feeling real feelings. I didn't know where to begin at that, after all. I was very familiar with feeling miserable. You know what they say....it may be soft and warm...but it's still sh*t. It's amazing how we'll continue to seek the familiar despite its being painful and miserable. Familiarity is more comfortable than the worse human fear of the unknown. We are creatures of habit.
I wonder if this guilt falls along those same lines? I'm not saying you're a bad person indulging in guilt-mainlining and only using the excuse that you feel bad for your husband in order to do so. Nothing of the sort.
But if you think back to your abuse, how much of it had to do with making you accept cringing feelings of worthlessness in order to finally make your predator happy?
This is all really more of a side note, really. Just wanted to bring something into your view as one survivor to another.
Just trying to open that door, so that you might spare yourself years of shame addiction as I did--even in the absence of my tormentors. And it can be every bit as debilitating and life-robbing as other addictions, I found.
So glad you're here. And glad you've finally found someone you deserve, and who deserves you. Hope you'll continue to post about your experiences with this "outpouring" of stored trauma. There's a book intended to aid in discharging stored trauma through specific exercises, entitled "Waking the Tiger", by Peter Levine. Maybe of some help.
So in a brief answer to the question "How do I develop a relationship with my weight"...I believe the answer is, you already have....an abusive one...and an addictive one....serving the same underlying need: for distraction, the comfortable familiarity of misery held over from the past, and the shame rush of making yourself feel bad--self-flagellation, in order to unconsciously feel good as a result, having "given yourself what you deserve" in the model set for you from your previous abusers.
The real question should be, then....are you really ready to change your relationship with your weight, and risk the unknown of moving forward, and forging an identity not based in past patterns--as well as to be left without your addictive worry-stone of drama, which kept you preoccupied enough to distract you from confronting real issues?
Just my opinion, of course. And I don't know you at all, granted. But I do know me...and this structure fits me to a tee...not fit, but fits....and I have to make a regular daily decision to risk finding something that fits in a different way, and work at forging it from scratch on a continuous basis.
Sometimes I forget. Many times I forget...and find myself reaching into my stash box of shame...before I realize what I'm doing, and catch myself. and remind myself that I'm now in recovery.
So glad you've found a place for support, as it sounds as though you're in the pits of discouragement. If anyone understands, I certainly do. And I'm glad you've reached out, and shown the bravery that honestly baring your weaknesses requires.
I don't recall seeing you here previously, but I'm new myself. Hope you'll post back with some reaction, and hope you've taken this post as it was intended, as one recoverer to another.
Be well.
I'm including part of a post made to a different thread, as it pertains, here, I believe as well.
