How to Stay Recovered
The journey of recovery isn’t as easy as a trip down the yellow brick road. There’s always the chance that you could fall off the path and end up right back where you started. Relapse is a scary truth but yet not something you should be ashamed of. Recovery is hard work, and just because you may seem fine on the outside, does not actually mean everything is fine and dandy on the inside. Eating Disorder success isn’t defined by how much you’re eating, or weight gained or lost since being recovered. Success is highly individualized, looking differently for each person suffering with an eating disorder, because each person’s case is unique. One similarity in recovery is the individual's change of mentality in regards to their image, worth, and the food they are eating. It’s the lack of guilt after eating a meal, or the extinction of body shaming, or self-hatred. Its having confidence in yourself and your abilities and not being afraid to do things that might flaunt your flaws. Yet success isn’t always as big as that. Success can still be defined as going out to dinner without previously checking the calorie count on the menu, having one bite of cake without hating yourself for it days afterward, walking past a mirror without body checking, or going out despite feeling uncomfortable. Again, there is no physical measure to success, its all about baby steps in the direction towards a positive mind. Unfortunately, it also isn’t something that’s guaranteed to last forever. Just because you are “in recovery” does not mean you are “fully recovered”. It’s a process and in that process you may fall down a bunch of times and have to start all over again. Relapse isnt something to be ashamed of, its something to grow from. A person in recovery should know that relapse is very common, statistics show that 35% of individuals will relapse within the first two years of recovery. Yet that does not have to mean that all the work you have done is for nothing. You are still stronger than you were when you started, it does not mean that you have failed or you should give up. All it is, is another way for you to come out stronger. There are many ways to fight relapse and stay on your journey of recovery. I have listed a few examples of ways that will make it easier for you to stay recovered and hold yourself accountable.
- Write it out- this is clearly one of my coping mechanisms, you can obviously tell from the creation of this blog. By writing down how I’m feeling, I am able to contain all the thoughts swirling around in my head. Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand how I’m feeling or know what’s going on inside my head. By writing things down, it helps me get a clearer idea of what’s causing me to certain emotions. It helps me understand myself and if publishing my thoughts helps someone else at the same time, then hey why not. - Doing things you love with people who make you happy- this is an obvious one. By surrounding yourself with a positive energy you are setting yourself up for success. When you’re with people who make you happy, its harder for negative thoughts to slip their way into your mind. So try to surround yourself with positive people and fill your free time up with doing things that make you most happy.
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It’s in the sweat dripping off your brow, the dryness in your lungs, the pounding that feels like a thousand horses stomping over your chest. It’s in the ringing in your ears and the voice that tells you to either run away or stay and fight. It engulfs your conscience, taking all your preceding judgements captive.
FEAR. It overwhelms our bodies by rushing in with the force of a tidal wave, knocking down any strongholds that we built for our own protection. Yet it seems when we need a clear mind to make the most paramount decisions, fear creeps in, sinking its teeth into our insecurities, making it impossible to think straight. It’s a paralyzing emotion, that if not learned to tame can be detrimental to any hope of life lived freely. It’s chilling voice, convinces us to run away from our problems and avoid whatever is causing us affliction. It has the power to persuade us into believing that hiding is better than living, forcing us into the passenger seat of our own life and making us go against everything we stand for. By surrendering our will to its own, we become its puppet, only dancing around on the strings of its demands. So how do we overcome this paralyzing emotion? “You must decide whether you have come here to experience life or to avoid life” However, only admitting that this decision needs to be made wont be the solution to your problems. In order to experience the life that you want, you must be able to forge on despite the overwhelming sense of fear breathing down your neck. Where does the strength come from to fight back? The answer is courage, but courage like fear, comes in waves of emotions. More often than not, its not something that can be pulled out of your back pocket whenever need be. It doesn’t work in the same unconscious way fear does. You have to consciously make a decision that you’re not going to drown in the storm that fear has created; courage is what reminds you how to swim. Yet this is much easier said than done. Being the crippling emotion that fear is, it knows where your insecurities lie. It knows where to target the chinks in your armor to make you crumble; and each time you fall, it only grows stronger, feeding off your desperation, leaving you empty and broken on the floor. More often than I’d care to admit, I’ve allowed fear to gain the upper hand in my battles. No matter big or small; whether it be giving up in a race or succumbing to the demands of my eating disorder. Fear is the voice telling me I’m not fast enough to catch my opponents or strong enough to challenge my illness. Fear is the difference between winning and losing a race, deciding whether to push ot the finish or let me opponent have it, and whether or not I want to live a life free of ED or a prisoner to his will. Fear is the one thing holding you back from the life you want to be living and courage is our way of getting there. As I said before, courage isn’t a constant emotion that can be evoked whenever desired. It is rare and it is fleeting and when not practiced enough, will always be an enigma. It works in different ways for every person and every person responds to it differently. Yet at the same time, we all share the choice of whether or not we choose to respond at all. For me, after fear has sank its teeth into the weakest parts of me, I have a five second window. That five seconds is the determining factor on how I’m going to respond to this attack. In that five seconds, courage floods through my veins and into every bone in my body, but stops at my brain. It gives my body the strength and ability to fight, but only if my mind allows it to. I still have to choose what the outcome will be; to fight or to run away; to hide or to live. If I decide not to act on that five seconds of courage, I won’t know when the next time I get it back will be, and I’ll have to live with my decision to run instead of fight, which in its own way is a punishment in itself. Yet on the other hand, if I took that momentum and went with it and decided to live rather than hide, failure isn’t an option, because by choosing to fight, I have already won the battle. And although it seems like the latter option is obviously the right way to go, it still isn’t the way we (or I) always choose. Much of the time, fear’s bite is so blinding that it doesn’t allow us to see the good that can come out of choosing courage, much of the time our body is so numb from the tightness of its grip that we can’t even feel courage flood into us at all. Its what makes eating disorders so scary. They have the ability to distort your perceptions of fear. They alter your understanding of emotions but making you become used to the constant fear that persists within you, that eventually it comes something you’re dependent on. So when the option to fight it comes around, you’re left wondering what you’re supposed to be fighting in the first place. In my case, I was lucky enough to remember my life without ED living on my shoulder. I was able to remind myself that at one point I had been carefree and happy and did not live paralyzed by the fear of unworthiness and depression and because of that it was easier for me to find the will to fight against ED and regain my life. However, that is not always the case. Many girls that I met along my journey had been in their way for far longer than I had. They had taken their fair share of broken bones and spirits and were still fighting. For some, ED had sunken his nails so deep into their skin that he became a part of their being and who they were as a person. They struggled to separate their identities from his and so in turn didn’t know who or what to fight against anymore. ED had become them and they had become ED. He rearranged every part of them until they could no longer tell the difference between his will and their own. If they couldn’t remember a life without him, what would they have left to fight for? Fear, unworthiness, and hopelessness became the essence of their being. This is why eating disorders are so hard to fight. If your thoughts are so distorted to a point where you find comfort in your pain and your fear, why fight it? To them, fear is a friend; hiding is their life and they can’t imagine a life any different. Yet the way ED got so strong was by letting fear win every battle early on. By making the choice to hide over and over again, resulted in a life where hiding is all you ever know. Because I recognized that my ED was growing stronger, I realized that I had been giving in to my fear instead of acting on my courage. The real battle began by admitting that I had let fear overtake me, that I had shied away from my life too many times and because of that, I had let ED find his way into my heart. But when I finally saw this, I knew that I did want to experience life and so I took that five seconds window and made the decision that admitting to weakness was more important than my pride. That I wanted my life back and I was going to take it back even if ED went kicking and screaming. In order to keep ED out, I constantly try to put myself in situations that scare me. I try to challenge myself and do things outside of my comfort level. I have always been a sort of “adrenaline junky” but even more so when I left treatment. By evoking the fear in me, I can learn each time to overcome it and every time I learn to conquer my fear, ED becomes weaker. So I encourage anyone, whether your struggling with an eating disorder or not to always take the opportunity to challenge your fears. Practice acting on that five second window of courage, because every time you do, you teach yourself to choose courage over fear and to live your life instead of hiding from it. |
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