On December 8th 2020, I had my last therapy session. The therapist and I decided that we did not need to ask the health insurance for more sessions. I seem to be cured of BDD. I say "seem", as I can well imagine relapses. But I experience such positive changes that we shall at least pause for a while.
How far have I gone from October 2019 when, seeing myself inadvertently on the screen of my laptop, I ran sobbing to the bedroom shouting "No, this cannot be me, it is too horrible, I cannot bear it!" That same morning, I got in touch with a special unit for BDD at the University of Münster, not far from where I live. They directed me to the University of Wuppertal, the town I live in, where an online therapy study was starting, and I was lucky to be able to embark on it from November 2019 until March 2020, when I continued with a dozen of individual sessions with the person who had designed the online therapy.
The main sign of being (nearly) cured is that I am now able to look at myself on the screen of my laptop. Hating to be filmed and photographed has always been the main sign of my BDD. I have increased the size of the image and I was able to participate in a virtual musicological conference at the end of November, four days of seeing my face on the screen, getting more and more used to it, even at some point liking it. I was using my "Monna Lisa" smile a lot: it is the expression that I now have as soon as my eyes, thanks to peripheral vision, are relaxed. I like it very much. It feels good. And yesterday and today, I could prepare a zoom meeting with a singing pupil, giving myself time to look at myself and not running away sobbing to the bedroom.
I am discovering new ideas and feelings. As I said in my last post, the idea of accepting oneself was horrific to me. I had to be amazingly beautiful or nothing. As was unpleasant the idea that I could work at improving my appearance. A friend, whom I was confiding in two years ago, had told me: well, you can "make the best of yourself" in order to look better on photos. I tried it of course on the rare occasions when I was being photographed, but it was always with an uneasy feeling, it was something unpleasant, it felt illegitimate. Now that I can look calmly and benevolently at myself, I can understand her point. I can see positive aspects of my appearance, along with things that I do not like that much but which do not horrify me anymore, and things that I can change, like having a better haircut, taking more care of my eyebrows and maybe having the crowns of my two front teeth renewed, as their colour is slightly different from the others'. To sum it up, I am more and more accepting what I look like, and then I can "go from there". This is now an option, I have a choice.
I practice a lot to attain this state. I am now looking at my therapy as the study of a new musical instrument, love to myself. "Übung macht den Meister", the Germans say: only daily practice brings excellence. And it is now clear to me that all the exercises which I practice have one effect: freeing the vagus nerve on its way out of the skull down to the lower abdomen and back. I do it for singing, it works very well (the vagus nerve is an essential nerve of voice production), and I do it now for accepting myself.
Here they are (note that the length is arbitrary, it is a minimum):
1. The most important exercise of all: Freeing the vagus nerve in the upper face by the practice of peripheral vision for thirty seconds
2. Freeing the vagus nerve in the lower face by the practice of this exercise: I smile ten seconds with my mouth shut, teeth together
3. Freeing the vagus nerve at the bottom of the neck in the region of the clavicle and the first ribs, and in the chest with two exercises: I put my hands together at the small of the back, and I thrust my chest up and out ten times, shoulders down; I alternate moving one shoulder forward while moving the other one backward ten times, with the arms hanging relaxed
4. Freeing the vagus nerve at the level of the diaphragm with two exercises: I pull my stomach in ten times while expanding the ribcage sideways; I breathe out and stay up to ten seconds in apnoea
5. Freeing the vagus nerve in the lower abdomen with two exercises: I stand ten to twenty seconds on one leg; sitting on a chair, I press my heels ten times very lightly in the floor
I also practice a moment of body consciousness, eyes closed, when I try to feel intensively my soft palate behind the nose and the eyes, and my pelvic floor and the bottom end of the spine. This often results in a deep breath that comes of its own. I then feel a lovely tingling in the whole body, from head to toe
I practice the series at least ten times a day
NB: At the moment, I only have scientific backing for the exercises 1 and 3. With the others, I notice specific effects which I associate with parasympathetic activity, but it is still empirical.
