Basics Regarding Insurance Coverage When Seeking Private Psychotherapy
Mental Health Insurance: Research Your Policy
If you want or need (or both) financial reimbursement for part of your psychotherapy treatment please research your insurance policy. Insurance coverage is set up in the following way:
Policies define who and what they will cover in terms of mental health. This is not determined by the service provider, but is determined by your insurance company and your particular policy.
Three Main Categories of Policies Related to Mental Health Insurance
Some policies, like PPO policies, cover a certain amount of the mental health provider’s fee when you use a service provider included on the insurance company list of preferred providers. Those policies will also cover services, but to a lesser degree, when a qualified and credentialed service provider is not listed with the insurance company, i.e. an out of network provider.
Some policies, like HMOs, only cover mental health service providers who are signed up with the HMO company.
Other policies are POS (point of service) policies where you can see any mental health provider you choose as long as she or he is qualified, credentialed and offers services for conditions covered by the policy.
My Practice as an Example
For example, I am an independent service provider, a mental health clinician, i.e. I am licensed and have a private psychotherapy practice. I am not listed on any HMO panel. I am not on any PPO preferred provider list.
I am qualified, and I have credentials. I am a fee for service provider. This makes me an out of network provider.
HMO policies will not reimburse for my services.
For patients to get full or substantial insurance reimbursement for the cost of working with me, they need to have POS insurance.
To receive partial reminbursement they need to be signed up with a PPO. Then a certain percentage of my fee will be reimbursed, usually with a maximum amount for each year.
Both POS and PPO policies must specifically cover the conditions for which treatment is sought and the services I offer.
Need for Accurate Mental Health Insurance Coverage Information
I’m posting this information because many people with eating disorders who are looking for treatment ask if the psychotherapist accepts insurance. The question is really, “does the insurance provider accept the mental health clinician?”
Appropriate Questions
Once you research your policy, you will be able to ask a private practice clinician:
Are you a preferred provider with my insurance company?
or
Are you signed up with (on a panel with) my HMO?
If you ask the questions appropriate to your coverage you will have a much better position to look at your money issues and what will be involved for you to receive the treatment you need. You will also have more realistic information regarding your financial situation so you can determine your next step.
Good luck!
Useful insurance information link from Psychology Today:
Ins and Outs of Mental Health Insurance
Bulimia: How to Recognize Triggers for a Binge or Purge Episode and How to Recognize Six Levels of Recovery. (long title for a brief summary)
In eating disorder recovery you explore your triggering situations in stages.
Explore Your Situation
Please pay attention to what is going on in your life, including your internal life, just prior to a binge or purge activity.
When you feel the urge and then need and then out of control compulsion to binge or throw up or do some other ritualized behavior familiar to you and which numbs you out or which you think relaxes you, explore your situation.
Even if you can’t explore in the moment, be ready to look at that moment later.
First Level
First you look at possible triggers after the fact.
You’ve binged and then purged. You are in the familiar aftermath of mess or sorrow or sense of failure. Or perhaps you are relieved and feel ready to take on the next event in your day.
Before you move on into despair or into a numbed automatic functioning machine, look at what was going on for you earlier in the day. Look at what was going on in your mind and emotional world as well as tangibles in your life.
You may notice something that triggered your binge. If you don’t and you give yourself a moment to attend to your situation after every binge purge episode, you may discover patterns. You may discover that certain events or people or feelings always precede an episode, and perhaps they are triggers.
If you attend in this way you give yourself an opportunity to see what events, relationships, activities, thoughts or feelings seem intolerable. These are the triggers that set off eating disorder actions to help you feel relaxed or numb.
With increased strength, growth and more curiosity, you begin to look before the eating disorder actions.
Second Level
Later you can start to restrain yourself from acting out. This is a stressful time full of anxiety and paradoxical thoughts and feelings.
“I want to.” “I won’t.”
“Just one last time.”
“No.” “Yes.”
“Just a little.” “It’s never a little.”
You might feel dizzy, off balance, afraid. Your vision might go into a light strobe action, as if everything were going through a slight shudder. You might feel your gorge rise and fall as if your body were trying to get ahead of the binge purge cycle and just rumble as if you were going to heave.
You succomb. You binge. You go back to Level One.
You may or may not be able to look at what preceded the episode.
Third Level
Same as second level except this time you succeed. The agony is the same. But this time you call for help from an established and trusted resource person to help get you through the experience without acting out.
You may be so relieved that you didn’t act out that your mind shuts down for a while. Or you may get a window into your situation where you see what triggered you in a way you could never see before.
Fourth Level
Same as second level except this time you have more options than calling a particular person as you did in level three.
At level four you feel the binge urge feelings coming on. You have an idea, if only a vague idea, of what is triggering you.
Now you can call a person or go for a walk or read poetry, or wash the dishes or clean your room or closets or do laundry instead of living through another binge purge episode.
The key word is “instead.” You grab hold of your energy along with your awareness of what is triggering you and you use your energy in a constructive way.
At level four you begin to experience more fully the fact that feelings are temporary. Even the enormous and powerful urge to binge and purge is a feeling that will pass.
At level four you discover the wonderful feeling of living through the urge and instead of seeing food wrappers and feeling groggy from the eating disorder binge purge episode you see something positive. The dishes are done. Or the closet is more orderly. Or your mind holds a moving image from a poem you read.
Or simply and profoundly, you don’t see the aftermath of a binge purge in your home or reflected on your face in the mirror. The presence of the absence of the binge or purge episode seems like a miracle.
Fifth Level
With more practice and more recovery you learn to anticipate what can trigger you. You make self-care arrangements for yourself in advance of compelling urges.
Sixth Level
With solid recovery, you use your stable, healthy, integrated self and positive, realistic sense of yourself to get through periods of stress without the aid of eating disorder actions.
Progress, Not Perfection
Do you ever go backwards? Yes.
Is that failure? No.
Going back levels simply means you need more practice, more growth, and more development.
Raising the Stakes
Also, you might not appreciate that you have raised the stakes during your progression toward health. If you remember the fundamental principle behind these levels, i.e. explore your situation, you may find that some situations are more complex and stressful than others.
Anytime you move back a level you probably have encountered a situation that calls upon you to develop more fully.
For example, if a visit to friends for dinner is a triggering event for you and you overcome it, then you might think you are at level four or even five.
But if you then are to attend a family dinner and find yourself unable to stop a binge or purge episode, that doesn’t mean you are failing. It means you have more issues to explore and resolve with your family than you do with your friends. That’s normal and even predictable.
Failure or Progress?
Once you are on the recovery path, an episode is not a failure. An episode serves you. An episode lets you know that imbedded in the triggering situation are some life lessons for you, some issues that need to be understood and resolved, some strength in you that needs to be more developed.
In your recovery process, wherever you are in your progress toward healing, health and development, please remember to pay attention to what is going on in your life – outside and inside, like it or not. This reflection on your experience gives you the opportunity to recognize your eating disorder episode triggers.
Giving yourself respectful attention as you go through your life experiences is key to creating an eating disorder free life. Plus, you can discover what is genuinely meaningful to you and rally your strength and energy to go for what might give you real and sustained joy.
Binge Eating Question Based on Ignorance of Nature of Eating Disorders
“Do I have an eating disorder if I only binge on healthy foods?”
Desperate Hope
This question always brings sadness to me. It speaks of a desperate hope to find a way to be safe and healthy. If you are asking this question, then deep down you know that bingeing is dangerous. You know bingeing is wrong for your body and your life.
You want to give yourself good nourishment. You want to take care of yourself. You want to live.
Compulsion to Binge Eat
At the same time you are compelled to binge. You feel helpless to stop. So you continues to binge while attempting to make your binge safe.
Danger of Ignorance
You may try and even succeed for a while in convincing yourself that if you are bingeing on healthy food, then it’s not really a binge.
This belief will only prolong the duration of your eating disorder and prevent your reaching out for help so necessary for recovery to begin.
Eating Disorders, Autism and Shift to Recovery
Recommendation
I just finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a novel by Mark Haddon about an autistic boy’s detective adventure and want to recommend it to you. The book can open your emotions in a surprising way and open your mind to a different way of being in the world.
As I thought about what I would say to you about this book I remembered another, which I read some years ago, Nobody Nowhere: the Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic, by Donna Williams
I want to recommend this one too. They are both short, fast reads, moving, funny at times, and, to my way of thinking, mind opening.
Why the recommendation? Because visiting another culture can open your perceptions to new and different ways of being in the world and relating to yourself and others. And visiting another culture can give you a blast of insight regarding your own ways of being in the world and relating to yourself and others.
Culture Bound in Eating Disorders
If you have an eating disorder, you are stuck in an eating disorder personal culture that governs your feelings, your perceptions, your behaviors and your relationships (or lack of relationships).
Because an eating disorder exercises a comprehensive and thorough influence on every aspect of your life, you can’t see it clearly. You only have eating disordered eyes to see which makes you culture bound.
You are committed to routines without knowing you are committed to them. You maintain these routines even if you hate them. You are stuck in patterns you can’t break. You live within the eating disorder.
Yet a small change in your patterns can mean a beginning shift from an eating disordered way of life to living a life free of eating disorder controls. Once you step beyond the jurisdiction of the eating disorder you are in new territory where you can begin to reach for growth and healing.
Shift to Recovery
But, how do you find your way to that first tiny shift?
That’s the question I forever ask myself because I consider it the crucial question. That first shift can move you to a path leading to a new and better life, a healthier and longer life, a more satisfying life. That experience, or thought or feeling or perception or fantasy or jolt or subtle dream message takes a personal form unique to each person.
These two books might lead some of you to your shift. So I invite you, in the privacy of your safe space, to observe another mind’s way of being in the world and finding ways to function among people who don’t understand the lens by which his and her world is seen and lived.
Learning from Someone Else Locked in a Different Culture Bound Experience
Visiting the inner mind of an autistic person, through the writings of Haddon and Williams, just might give your mind an opening. You might experience compassion for the people you meet through these books and develop more understanding and compassion for your own situation.
These people are more thoroughly locked within the confines of their autism than you are within the confines of your eating disorders.
Yet the world beyond autism might be as vast as the world beyond eating disorders. As you observe these remarkable people using their gifts and talents while burdened with their limitations, you just might get a glimpse of limitations that surround you.
Once you have an inkling of the nature of your own barriers you can consider what might be possible for you without those barriers. Perhaps you might move a tiny step beyond the boundaries set by your eating disorder.
You never know what little moment of feeling or insight or experience can set off your shift into recovery. That shift can begin with one tiny step.
Danger and Safety for Women with Eating Disorders
Eating disorder behaviors, like bingeing or purging, or starving or compulsively eating are methods a woman uses to ease or ward off entirely, feelings of anxiety.
If successful, the behaviors block the woman’s access to her feelings of fear. This may be a preferable state of being, but it can be dangerous.
A woman can feel safe but not be safe. A woman can be afraid and that fear can help her make herself more safe.
Reaching for immediate comfort to block fear comes in many forms. The result is that the woman can unconsciously accept a large degree of vulnerability and potential danger in her daily life.
I’ll describe a few high-risk situations in this post and more in posts to come.
High Risk Home Environment
A woman lives alone in an apartment or a condo. She is numb to a sense of anxiety that might come if she let her awareness awaken to the physicality of her home.
- Her parking is not secure. She may have to walk a block or more to each her front door. She may park in an underground parking structure that is not well lit, not secure and leaves her exposed to predators.
- The entrance to her building is not well lit, is shrouded with bushes, perhaps involves dark steps or a turn in a pathway that makes her invisible to others.
- Her rooms are on the ground floor with unsecured windows facing a public walkway.
A woman who lives in any one of these circumstances may feel a low-grade sense of anxiety most of the time but not attribute her feelings to her vulnerable position at home.
She may criticize herself for feeling a bit anxious coming home and may feel shame when she runs to her front door.
Worse, and this is often the case, she is oblivious to the safety flaws in her environment and accepts as normal activities and events that may raise the level of potential danger.
If she were followed home (because of other unappreciated risk factors in her life) the person following her would have little difficulty in approaching her under these minimal secure conditions.
Certainly driving home alone after dark and then walking some distance to her front
door and/or walking through an area where a predator can lurk creates a dangerous vulnerability.
Safety Relates to Eating Disorder Recovery
Recovery from an eating disorder involves first creating a safe and secure container from which to do the psychological work necessary for healing. Usually this is discussed in terms of the therapeutic alliance and the therapy itself. And this is true.
But the early stages of psychotherapy and recovery from an eating disorder also involve creating a secure space or correcting a fragile space in the person’s external world. She needs to be able to live reasonably safe from danger and more free to feel and progress on her healing path.
Also, in creating safety for herself, she can begin to learn that some of her fears are justified. When she acknowledges realistic fears they can inform her about what positive and self-protective action she can take on her own behalf.
This can be the beginning of developing confidence and trust in herself as she draws on her own power to genuinely care for herself. This can be the beginning of solid recovery.
Well-lighted pathways, secure parking and other safe conditions are far more effective in keeping a person safe than any binge or purge or compulsive eating activity can ever be.
Bridge Building: from Spiritual Aliveness to Binge and Back
Feeling Alive and Hopeful
My last post brought healthy eating into connection with love, appreciation for life and gentleness with body and soul. If you have an eating disorder, you’ve probably had glimpses of this experience and continue draw hope from these glimpses.
However, anyone with an eating disorder of any kind knows that such feelings are seemingly “off the planet” and out of awareness during the urge to binge or the urge to actively control anything or anyone.
Feeling Like a Thing and Hopeless
When the binge or the bone cracking hours of treadmill running are over, when the empty candy and cookie wrappers litter the room, when friends and family are distant because of demanding manipulative remarks and actions, the person with an eating disorder feels ashamed, guilty and like a failure.
What Happened?
What happened? Where was the awareness of love and kindness for self, food and others? How did the you become a driving thing, afraid and warding off more fear and pain by using anything you could to get through your experience?
During the glimpse of beauty and health, the desperate need to use is just as far away and non-existent and the good feelings are during binge times. It’s as if the person’s mind or emotions or personality or even identity itself are divided and not in communication at all.
Bridging the Two
This consistent aspect of eating disorders has me thinking about bridges and bridge building. Healing from the bottom up is required for eating disorder recovery. Picking up from where the person left off developmentally and proceeding on a healthy psychological developmental path is also required.
However, It seems to me that a fundamental piece of this complex business of thorough healing from an eating disorder involves bridge building. With a bridge the person, instead of being totally in harmony with spiritual aliveness or totally gripped by the eating disorder desperation, could hold on to reality. She could have, at least a chance, to gain a foothold on emotionally stable ground. Even if one side of awareness could just just throw a line to the other, it would be a powerful start.
Importance of the Link
As I think more I can imagine your asking, why would someone want a line from the binge side when the person is in the lovely love side?
Good question, and maybe pivotal. Part of the answer may be that we need to respect and embrace ourselves as whole complex individuals. We each contain the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. How to hold our own complexity and so experience ourselves as neither extreme saints nor sinners, but as humans full of ambiguities and paradoxes is a great challenge for all of us and especially for people working toward eating disorder recovery.
This holding of both or all sides of experience and identity is so very important during the process of psychotherapy. In fact in psychotherapy many people discover for the first time that such a way of carrying themselves in the world is even possible.
A little bit of heaven in hell and a little bit of hell in heaven allows recognition and communication between the two worlds. It’s the basis of internal bridge building. It’s what helps us connect and understand each other as well as ourselves.
Creating and using her internal bridge allows knowledge from both realms to join in a more powerful and healthy way of being in the world. When you can simultaneously hold awareness of your feeling of aliveness as well as your need to binge you begin to develop the ability to ward off extreme highs and lows, stay aware and be present for your own experience.
I’ll be thinking and writing more about internal bridge building. I hope you’ll share your thoughts and experiences about this area of eating disorder recovery work.
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
John Milton (1608–1674)
Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 253.
Transition to WordPress
In eating disorder recovery work, daily life and blogging, if all goes well, we develop and grow.
Growth inevitably involves change and the process of transitioning from one way of being or living or working to another.
So here I am, in the midst of public transition and change. I believe that I can offer more to people seeking information and support about eating disorders through WordPress.
So I’m learning the new blogging methods required, changing categories so they are more clear for you, and figuring out with my web designer and my WordPress for Dummies how to make this new system work.
Technorati is a big help once it’s connected properly. My biggest challenge is to achieve a free and relaxed enough feeling with the technology so I can speak to you about issues around eating disorders that I consider compelling.
This blog and I are developing during this transition. I wish for you something similar: a growing positive developmental change as you transition into more of the life you find fufilliing.
Eating Disorders: Reversing Short or Long Relapse
I’m in the middle of attending a great conference at UCLA this week end. It’s “Adult Attachment in Clinical Context: Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview.” Superb and gifted researchers and clinicians are gathered to discuss and share information on the latest neuroscience findings, the reasons why humans bond or do not bond well with each other, how human relationships can harm and heal, and the powerful healing force of human love, compassion, stability, flexibility and reliability.
As I participate in this conference, surrounded by clinicians dedicated to learning and fostering healing, I feel richly held. I am free to let my mind relate what I’m hearing and learning to people who, in some way, live with the experience of eating disorders.
Here’s what I’ve come up with after two days of the conference. Perhaps more will emerge after tomorrow, the last day.
Changing Our Brains
The joyous or painful or frustrating reality is that we humans can destroy, create, and change neural functioning in our brains. In other words, we can improve. We can deteriorate. We can change – for better or worse.
The research coming out of neuroscience provides evidence that particular circumstances over time can alter brain activity and even brain structure. See Dan Siegel’s work and Allan Schore’s writings.
Power of Love and Kindness
The good news is that a durable, kind and informed relationship with a trustworthy and stable person over a considerable period of time will actually create conditions where a person’s brain can change for the better. This is one of the great and wonderful powers of long term, in depth psychotherapy with a trustworthy and focused psychotherapist.
This is also why loving, trustworthy, stable, reliable and empathic parents produce secure, loving and self confident children.
This is also why a loving, trustworthy, stable, reliable and empathic aunt or uncle or grandparent or teacher or neighbor can contribute to building a secure base in a child who has problematic parents.
Love and kindness as well as focused attention and knowledge creates an environment in which new ways of seeing the world can become permanent. The developing child or the adult patient not only develops trust for the parents or the therapist. She actually develops the capacity to trust, to be more optimistic, to recognize good opportunities and act on them.
Power of Negative Influence
We can also put ourselves in circumstances that destroy trust, not only in a relationships but in the brain’s ability to trust at all. One of the tenets of 12 step programs is: stay away from lower companions. The people around us affect our sense of ourselves and our brain functioning.
Stress and Relapse
In a stressful environment where fear, pain, ridicule, shame and unpleasant surprise are continual, we will adapt in ways to care for ourselves. If you are a person with a history of an eating disorder or an active eating disorder this can mean going back to old coping mechanisms like binging, purging, “spacing out” and hiding.
You can also reinforce this negative condition yourself by pummeling your mind with negative critical judgments about yourself. This too affects neural pathways, synaptic connections and your view of the world. This can reinforce eating disorder thinking and behaviors.
Difficulty in Getting Relapse Recovery Help
In such a state you will find great difficulty in recognizing opportunities for help. Even if you do recognize such opportunities you may lack the trust and self esteem to reach out and ask for help. The longer this situation lasts the more ingrained your eating disorder style of living will become.
Meaning of Relapse
The return of eating disorder behaviors or feelings or both signal that either new growth is necessary or achieved progress is undermined.
This is a time for you to look for relationships, behaviors and circumstances around you which are negative, isolating, critical, demanding, frightening or composed of unrelenting stress. The return of the eating disorder is an attempt to cope with these circumstances. Noticing them is the beginning of restoring your recovery path.
Effect of Short Term Negativity
If you experiences harsh negative circumstances momentarily genuine recovery will stand. If
you experiences such circumstances for a longer period, you will be stressed but can most likely rely on your newly internalized strengths and self confidence powered by your more developed neural mechanisms.
Effect of Long Term Routine Negativity
But, if you experiences such circumstances as part of a new normal routine in her life, regular and unrelenting, your brain can adapt to the situation and create entrenched patterns. What begins as a temporary state can become a permanent trait. Here we have the relapse stretching out into what seems an intractable way of living and being.
Relapse Recovery
However, even if this happens you can still take action to put yourself in a loving, kind, healing environment where you can once again allow her heart, mind and brain circuitry to heal and develop along the pathway to health. Yes, a relapse, even a long relapse, can be reversed.
It’s truly amazing and wonderful to learn how putting ourselves in relationships filled with love, compassion, empathy and focused attention will not only allow us to build good feelings but actually change ingrained patterns of negative feelings thoughts and action. We can actually help each other evolve, even at the neural level, toward health.
Who would have thought neuroscience would bring such a message, backed by scientific evidence, of hope and loving direction?
(In addition to Siegel and Schore’s work, I recommend, for those who are up for some heavy reading, The Development of the Person. When Drs June and Alan Sroufe discuss their research following individuals from before birth to To their 30’s I’m always inspired and find myself filled with teary heart felt appreciation for them and their work.
Eating Disorders and Body Communication
Much material I read and hear about eating disorders concerns how a person feels and thinks about her body. But not much has come to my attention that relates to how the body thinks and feels.
How the body thinks and feels may be a concept that requires a stretch for some or even many people until we open ourselves to understanding the language of the body.
Language of the Body
The body has no words. Still, our bodies tell us when they need sleep or food or a change in external temperature. Our bodies tell us when they need a more firm or cushioned bed or chair. They certainly tell us when something is hurtful to them, like too much heat or cold or abrasion or puncture.
Most of us have had a near miss when our eyelids blinked faster than thought to avoid a spec from flying into our eyes.
Our bodies communicate potentially life saving information like when the hair on the back of the neck rises. This is a primitive body warning of danger on a survival level.
An aspect of eating disorder recovery involves giving respect to the body itself and learning not only its language but also how to heed what the body says.
Listening to Your Body’s Requests
What if the anorexic woman listened to her endocrine system that cried out for nourishment as hormonal function shut down?
What if the bulimic woman listened to her esophagus plead for a rest from the continuous flow of digestive acids?
What if the compulsive eater or binge eater listened to a stomach that cried out for mercy and relief from the continuous need to stretch to the point of pain?
What if, instead of war, we learned to make peace with our bodies? What if we befriended ourselves?
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
Beginning Your Eating Disorder Recovery
Two Vital Questions
How does a person with an eating disorder take genuine action that will realistically create a solid recovery path? How does she maintain her sense of purpose so she keeps to that path despite painful challenges?
These are two of many vital questions I’m attempting to address in this blog. They are in the back of my mind always when I think about eating disorder recovery.
Terror and Hope in First Psychotherapy Session
I remember my first psychotherapy session with the psychotherapist who led me through the first years of my own recovery from bulimia. She was the third person I ever told I was bulimic and the first who was not in a 12-step program. I was terrified. When I saw that she was still warm and interested in me and not overwhelmed by my revelation I thought I was free to breathe again.
But then she said, “We’ll begin an interesting journey.” I burst into tears. She was surprised. She wanted to know why I was crying. Perhaps you who are reading eating disorder recovery blogs and websites will understand.
My psychotherapist said we would begin a journey. I told her, it had taken me years of hard work and despair to reach the point where I could sit before her. And she called this the beginning.
I cried because my beginning was such a long time ago. I cried because I had come so far only to learn that this now was just the beginning.
New Beginning Concept
Of course, I didn’t have much recovery to work with then so I didn’t appreciate the concept of “new beginning.” Now I realize that in recovery and in most or all areas of life, we always have an opportunity to see and live any and every moment as a new beginning.
But I was bulimic then. I thought in terms of black and white, all or none, and I thought in a linear fashion. I had no idea that my way of thinking was narrow and confining.
Lightning Flash of an Awakening Mind
Sometimes, on a dark night with heavy black clouds and pouring rain the world seems mysterious, powerful and almost invisible. What you do see is distorted by slanting water, shadows and imagination.
Then suddenly, from out of an unknown somewhere a bolt of lightning strikes out across the blackness. The startling glare dispels shadows and brings the world up clear and vivid. The moment passes. The dark returns. But your memory of the light remains. You got a glimpse of the presence beneath the cloak of darkness.
Eating disorders are like that black stormy night, full of passion, fear and misguided distorted visions. The stroke of lightning is the life force in us that gives us a glimpse of who and where we really are. We may not like what we see.
But if we can hold that awareness a little longer each time our inner lightning strikes, our awareness will grow. We can use it to build our way out of the darkness and into an opportunity of finding our healthy and distortion free life.
Staying Power in Recovery Work
What equips a person to get on and stay on her recovery path? It has to do with keeping alive those many tiny glimpses of light and health that shoot through the eating disorder way of life. When you gather enough of those glimpses you have a compelling vision of a better life.
Lightning is raw energy. A glimpse of the truth of your life comes from your inner life force. That’s a kind of raw energy too. The awareness leads you to your Recovery path. The energy helps keep you on that path.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
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