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.
March 8, 2008 | Filed Under Coping Strategies
Bias Confession from an Eating Disorders Specialist
My patients and readers live their own lives with their own agendas and values leading the way.
My Bias
However, I am not neutral. I want, with all my heart, for you to live long healthy lives. I want you to be well, to have love, joy, satisfaction, confidence and a genuine liking for yourself as you proceed onward to a feisty, interesting and healthy old age.
I especially do not want you to break your own hearts.
Reasons for Entering Psychotherapy
People who come to my psychotherapy practice or writings need a reason to make that entry. Primarily, you come because you have an eating disorder. You also come because a person with an eating disorder is in your intimate circle. You may also come because you know someone who benefited from my work and want those same benefits for your life.
Mostly, you come because you experience emotional pain and frustration in their lives and have a spark of hope that maybe another way to live exists.
Ending an eating disorder is a step, a major step granted, but still a step toward creating and living a better life.
Establishing Goals
In my practice, my focus is on the whole person sitting in front of me. I see the energy poured into the eating disorder. I get a glimpse of what might be possible for you if that energy were directed toward living a more full life. When we share that glimpse we become a team of two with the goal being to send life energy to life. That means dismantling the eating disorder mechanism and removing the need for the protection given by the eating disorder.
Our mutual goal becomes creating a psychological, emotional and spiritual normal that allows your genuine life potential to unfold.
Priority of Your Goals
My job, as I see it, requires me to state my bias and let you know that your best choice is one that comes from your beliefs, not mine. You also need to know that I will support your living based on your values, not mine. But neither of us will make or honor decisions based on the distorted thinking and value systems that are hooked to the eating disorder.
Goals Based On Eating Disorder
A free and healthy person faces difficult choices in life. If an eating disorder doesn’t exist, then an automatic and artificial guiding system doesn’t take over the decision making by default.
For example, you don’t stay home and binge or use instead of meeting with friends. You don’t binge and throw up before meeting a potential employer and therefore meet that person in a partially numbed condition.
If an eating disorder isn’t there then decisions about school applications, career choices, pregnancy (to conceive or terminate), relationship choices (positive or negative), commitments of any kind, are based on personal agenda and personal values. These must belong to the individual, not me. And neither of us want them to be determined by an active eating disorder.
Discovering and Honoring Your Genuine Values
I do my best to make my bias clear so that you are free of any sense of obligation to please me. More importantly, my stating my bias helps you sort out what you she thinks you are supposed to choose based on the agenda and values of others, including the entire culture, as opposed to what you deeply value.
After all, in the end, you lives your life. And a satisfying life is one that is based on living according to your own true agenda and values.
Sometimes self sacrifice is based on deeply held and honored values known and appreciated by you alone. I believe a person needs to be free to make such a choice.
However, if an eating disorder is in the way, choices involving self sacrifice can be blurred or seen as required with no possibility of flexibility, change or even a vague sense of the option to say, “No.”
If you is oblivious to her your values or put the demands of an eating disorder before your own highest priorities you can make a choice that will immediately or eventually break your own heart.
As an eating disorder fades you are challenged to listen and learn your own truth. I stand for your listening t0 and honoring your own unbuffered self, mind, spirit, body and heart. When you can do that, you are on your way to living your real life. That is a joyous and satisfying way to live.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
March 3, 2008 | Filed Under Psychotherapy, adjunct healing methods and resources
Things to Do During National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (or Anytime!)
1. Sign the National Eating Disorders Association’s Declaration of Independence from a Weight- Obsessed World to free yourself from the three D’s: Dieting, Drive for Thinness, and Body Dissatisfaction.
2. Celebrate Fearless Friday - A Day Without Dieting - and feel how empowering a diet-free day of self-acceptance can be!
3. Attend a workshop, presentation, lecture, or meeting in your community that will help you feel better about yourself. See the National Eating Disorders Association’s website, your local newspaper or campus calendar for events.
4. Use your voice to effect change: join the National Eating Disorders Association’s national media advocacy campaign to write letters of protest and praise to media, corporations and advertisers who promote negative or positive messages concerning body size, weight, dieting and eating disorders. Sign up via the web at www.NationalEatingDisorders.org.
5. Consciously choose to avoid making comments about other people or yourself on the basis of body size or shape.
6. Compliment someone else for a skill, talent, or characteristic they have that you appreciate. Remind yourself that a person’s value is not determined by their shape or size.
7. Enjoy your favorite meal without feelings of guilt or anxiety over calories and fat grams.
8. Donate your jeans and other old clothes that no longer fit your body comfortably to charity. Someone else will appreciate them, and you won’t have to worry about the way they fit anymore.
9. Start each morning by looking in the mirror and saying something nice about yourself out loud.
10. Put away or throw away your bathroom scale.
11. Look through magazines and newspapers, ripping out advertisements, photos and articles that promote negative feelings about weight, body image and food. Talk back to the TV when you see or hear an ad that makes you feel dissatisfied with your body.
12. Read a book that lifts your self-esteem, promotes positive body image, encourages healthy living or helps you overcome stereotypes about social standards of beauty.
13. If you know someone who is struggling with an eating disorder, take the time to reassure them of your friendship and support for their recovery process.
14. Throw out all of the diet products in your house.
15. Remind yourself and others that It’s What’s Inside That Counts!
16. Become a member of the National Eating Disorders Association and join the effort to create a world where self-esteem is not weighed in pounds on a scale. Visit www.NationalEatingDisorders.org or call (206) 382-3587 for more information.
Challenge yourself to pick at least one of these easy-to-do tasks during each day of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week!
© 2004 National Eating Disorders Association. Permission is granted to copy and reprint materials for
educational purposes only. National Eating Disorders Association must be cited and web address listed.
www.NationalEatingDisorders.org ???? Information and Referral Helpline: 800.931.2237
Personal Note
The bold face type in the NEDA list is my contribution. My original intention, in making what I considered key words stand out, was for ease in reading (or scanning as blog visitors often do). But as I look at the words in bold as a group I realize they make a kind of affirmation statement that goes beyond the specific tasks. They address the kind of inner and outer energy rallying and action steps that contribute so greatly to eating disorder revocery.
I invite you to take another look at the NEDA list and catch those words. You might even make a list of them and see how they fit with what might be helpful in your personal recovery program. A word or two might fill in a blank spot you didn’t know was there.
By all means, share with us on this blog your experience when you do any of these activities.
For me, and all of us in the eating disorder recovery professional community, every day is eating disorder awareness day. I’ve been a member and supporter of NEDA since its inception. I support the recovery of others. I don’t diet. I wear clothes that fit, and I have no diet products in the house.
Whoops. Last night I co-hosted a wonderful dinner party in my home for the UCLA program, Dinner with 12 Strangers. Undergraduates, graduate students and alumni (that’s my category) met in my home for a terrific evening. Somebody brought tall bottles of soda including a diet soda. A left over half bottle full is in my kitchen but is on its way out.
These diet products do slip in, don’t they?
(I think “whoops” belongs on the list. We need to catch our errors of oblivion and carelessness and correct them as soon as possible. That’s essential for keeping on track in eating disorder recovery.)
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
February 25, 2008 | Filed Under Cultural Influences
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week Starts Today
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week
February 24 – March 8, 2008
Useful Resources for All Year
Here’s a list of what I consider useful and substantial resources related to eating disorder information and treatment opportunities. I’ve included two videos that impressed me. And I’m including my list of eating disorder in-patient and residential programs (93 pages) available for free via my website.
1. National Eating Disorders Awareness Week home page
2. National Eating Disorder Awareness Week - IAEDP Southern California Event
3. YouTube - Eating Disorder Awareness Week Video
Powerful and sensitive visuals and rap music
4. YouTube - National Eating Disorder Awareness Week Video
Candid talk by young woman who restricts
5. Gurze Books
Specializes in publishing books about eating disorders
6. Academy for Eating Disorders (AED)
The Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) is a global,
multidisciplinary professional organization that provides
cutting-edge professional training and education, inspires
new developments in eating disorders research, prevention,
and clinical treatments, and is the international source
for state-of-the-art information in the field of eating disorders.
7. International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals (IAEDP)
8. National Eating Disorders Association;
10. Eating Disorder Information and Referral Center
11. American Psychological Association Help Center for Eating Disorders
12. ANRED
a nonprofit organization providing information about eating disorders,
recovery and prevention.
13. Extensive list of in-patient and residential treatment programs - international
Created by Joanna Poppink, MFT, the list is free and available to qualified
individuals via e-mail attachment. Be advised, attachment is 93 pages long.
This is the week to learn and share knowledge about helpful eating disorder recovery resources. It’s a time to support all who are working for recovery for themselves or on behalf of others.
Please let me know if you discover other valuable and useful resources you feel belong on this list.
Thank you.
Joanna
February 24, 2008 | Filed Under Psychotherapy, adjunct healing methods and resources
Miss America, Anorexia, Fear: Hiding in Plain Sight?
Support for Carrie’s Post Regarding Control
Carrie, on ED-Bites wrote an indignant response to what I consider a rather cavalier column about eating disorders in the New York Daily News.
Carrie said her own anorexia was based not on controlling weight or the external world but on controlling fear. I agree. Controlling everything a person possibly can control in an attempt to control what is uncontrollable I feel is at the root of most eating disorders.
When that point is acknowledged the discussion goes away from food, fashion, weight, appearance, and even beauty and sexuality.
How Fear Relates to Control Issues
The discussion then becomes centered around the questions, Why are growing numbers of women at increasingly younger ages afraid? What are they afraid of? Why do they feel that their fears are justified and that they have no way of protecting themselves except through eating disorders?
Addressing those questions takes courage and honesty. In my experience as a psychotherapist, the attempt at reaching answers to these questions is the beginning of genuine eating disorder recovery.
Fitting into what our culture defines as beautiful, even if that definition encompasses an unhealthy and dangerous physical condition, may well be protection women seek from their fears.
Moore and Manville Get It Wrong
The authors of the Daily News column, Dr. David Moore and Bill Manville, end their discussion on a victorious note. They describe proof of Kirsten Haglund’s victory over anorexia in terms of her becoming Miss America. Good grief. The woman found a great hiding place. She is the epitome of what our culture describes as beautiful.
Challenges for Miss America in Early Recovery
I commend Miss Haglund for her industry, her hard work, her outspokenness in terms of eating disorder recovery. I wish her every success possible in living a long and healthy life.
I hope she and supportive loving people around her acknowledge that she is 19 years old, only four years away from her past experience of severe anorexia and that achieving a high cultural standard of beauty and acceptance – an anorexic’s dream – does not represent recovery.
I hope she is alert to her inner challenges and is prepared to cherish and honor her healthy emotional and psychological developmental needs as her term of Miss America fades and she continues.
Thank you, Carrie, for bringing up this issue and for letting your honest sense of indignation come through to all of us.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
February 23, 2008 | Filed Under Cultural Influences
Eating Disorders and Body Appreciation
An Exercise to Connect Your Mind, Heart and Body
What if we step away from body appreciation as an aesthetic consideration that relates to weight and appearance?
An exercise or meditation to open up communication between your mind, heart and body is this:
Just for a half an hour or less
1. Let your mind relax, and let go of judgments.
2. Let your heart be free to love.
3. Let your body be and discover how your body feels when it is appreciated.
Give yourself from a half hour to an hour for this exercise. Slowly walk around a large room or garden or around the block. Be sure you find a safe place to walk.
Starting from the top of your head, let your awareness move through your body slowly. Thank you body as you go.
Starting at the Top
For example:
Thank you, skull, for protecting my brain so I can function in this world.
Thank you brain for allowing me to think and intuit and for keeping my body working.
Thank you eyes for letting me see as much as I can of this world.
Move through your entire body, covering your neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, chest, back, spine, ribs, abdomen, stomach, genitals, legs, ankles, feet, toes, Thank each part of your body for the work it does, and be specific about recognizing that work.
Going Deeper
If you do this on a regular basis you will develop the ability to go deeper. You can thank specific organs, veins and nervous system.
You can thank your immune system for protecting you. You can thank the mysterious and wonderful ability your body has for healing, for cell regrowth. You can thank your skin, the largest organ of all, for protecting you and providing you with sensations that warn you, sensations that bring you pleasure and sensations that connect you to other people.
Love and Kindness
If you continue to do this exercise, over time you might feel that you want to do more than say thank you. You might want to help your body with love and kindness to carry on all the taks that allow you to live in this world.
This exercise has little or nothing to do with weight or physical beauty. It has everything to do with appreciation, health and love.
Of course, some might believe that appreciation, health and love create beauty in this world.
I do.
Do you?
February 20, 2008 | Filed Under Soul Nourishment
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
February 19, 2008 | Filed Under Coping Strategies
Healing Imagery and Intuition regarding Eating Disorders
The Marion Woodman three day Dreams workshop was warm, challenging and wonderful. I’ve been wondering what to share with you. Dream work is so personal, but then, so is eating disorder recovery.
The most powerful image I had, toward the end of the second day, my intuition tells me is relevant to all eating disorders.
Marion Woodman as Teacher and Inspiration
Marion is in her eighties. Her body is disintegrating. She uses and needs a cane. She conserves her energy as best she can. She survived and recovered from a serious bout with cancer.
But, when she speaks, her spirit is fiery. Her eyes glow. Her voice is strong. She beams warmth and assertive direction that makes us forget her physical frailty as we become inspired by her wisdom and passion.
Inspiring Imagery
The image came through to me of a candle, but not a candle with a wick that burns on top. This white luminous candle contains a wick in the center that burns all the way from top to bottom within the wax.
The fire within sends out heat that melts the wax from within. So, for Marion, the image was of her inner fire melting her body away.
I stayed with this image since Marion inspired it but was not it. The image went much farther.
The length of interior burning wick, if too hot, melts the wax encasing. The candle is gone leaving only a line of fire. Well, that could mean that the spirit burns brightly but is without a body. This is an anorexic dream.
Another Version
Another version is this: The length of interior burning wick is hot and melts the wax encasing. But, more wax is added on a continual basis. This makes the wax thick and forever thickening so the heat of the fire doesn’t penetrate through the wax and into living space. The candle keepsg getting bigger and the light is continually less visible. This is the experience of the binge eater or compulsive overeater.
Bulimia and the Image
What about bulimia? In terms of my image, bulimia is represented as a different kind of torment.
In this version of the image, the wholeness of both the fire and the wax is aware. The fire burns and the wax melts beginning to reveal the blazing wick. But the feelings that go with that fire are too intense to bear. Then the wax builds up thickly to bury the flame. The dullness of that burial is too lonely and terrifying, so the wax is allowed to melt away until the terror of exposure forces the build up again. This is the in and out, here and gone grueling and endless repetition that is unaddressed bulimia.
These are powerful and helpful images for me. They hold intellectual, emotional and physical understandings in a way that only intuitive imagery can pull together and allow to develop simultaneously.
February 17, 2008 | Filed Under Soul Nourishment
Expect Some Dreamy Posts!
“Dreams” is the title of the seminar I’ll be taking this week end in Santa Barbara with Marion Woodman (a talk) and Steve Aizenstat.
Integration
Integrating a person’s inner life with her outer life in harmony and health has long been crucial, in my experience, for achieving eating disorder recovery. Regardless of the specific diagnosis: bulimia, anorexia, binge eating, compulsive overeating – and all the possible associated behaviors, like cutting, shoplifting, over exercising, over scheduling, under achieving, abusive and exploiting relationships greatly benefit from developing a healthy integration between mind, feelings and body.
Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman is one of the early writers in the field of eating disorders. She is a gifted Jungian analyst with a way of understanding and bringing healing opportunities to men and women and, from my perception of her, particularly to women with eating disorders. I listened to her audio tape, “Dreams” many times and often recommend it to patients. Marion Woodman understands women and the language of dreams!
Dreams and Intuition as Integrating Forces
I plan to walk among the trees on the Pacifica campus, participated in the dream workshops throughout the days, speak and share with wonderful people, write down my own dreams, muse about the dreams of my patients and those collective dreams that speak for our culture.
The nourishment from the people, place and theme I know will benefit my in mind, heart and soul. From this will come new and surprising integrative thoughts and feelings that are bound to appear somehow in my blog posts as well as the rest of my personal and professional life.
If you care to join me in this experience, take note of your dreams this weekend. Write them down. We can share them next week on this blog and see where our dreams lead us.
More about Mrion Woodman
Here’s a bit about the wonderful Marion Woodman (excerpt from the Marion Woodman Foundation website www.mwoodman.org
Marion Woodman, LLD, DHL, PhD, is a Jungian Analyst, teacher and author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter; Addiction to Perfection; The Pregnant Virgin; The Ravaged Bridegroom; Leaving My Father’s House; Conscious Femininity; Dancing in the Flames (with Elinor Dickson); Coming Home to Myself (with Jill Mellick); The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness, Marion Woodman, Ross Woodman, Sir Laurens van der Post, and Thomas Berry, edited by Nancy Ryley; The Maiden King (with Robert Bly); and Bone-Dying Into Life. A visionary in her own right, Marion Woodman has worked with the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung in an original and creative way. She is the Chair of the Marion Woodman Foundation.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
February 8, 2008 | Filed Under Soul Nourishment
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
February 7, 2008 | Filed Under Coping Strategies
