Eating Disorder Recovery: An Intentional Journey

Last week we discussed what good recovery effort looks like. It discussed four aspects deemed important when considering the recovery process itself. This week, we’ll zoom in more on you, the individual, and what will be required from you. Remember, recovery will not just passively fall into place, but will need your investment and input.

It’s one thing to talk about recovery, but meeting recovery’s many calls-to-actions will certainly challenge you. It’s best you prepare yourself so that you can meet these responsibilities head on and with the healthiest mindset you can muster. Let’s understand what this intentional mindset entails.

The Misconception of Passive Recovery

Many people struggling with eating disorders fall into the trap of viewing recovery as a passive process. Passive process refers to those believing that merely attending therapy sessions, talking about their feelings, or following a meal plan will erase years of disordered eating patterns. Even though such steps are good in themselves, it’s important to understand that you need to bring your own will and intention to the table. True recovery demands active participation, and your own pursuit of changing your life.

In this sense, recovery is not something that happens to you – it’s something you consciously pursue. The emphasis being that eating disorder recovery infers change. Change in how you think about yourself, change in how you deal with emotions, change in what you focus on, change in how you come to make decisions, and so on. It requires daily commitment and conscious choices to challenge ingrained behaviours and thought patterns. And such changes aren’t something that I, or anybody else can do on your behalf. Even though I, or anybody in your life, could provide advice and support – the changes need to come from you actively choosing to do these things, not just passively waiting for such changes to come about.

This highlights a simple, yet difficult prospect: Change will be something I need to choose.

The Road Less Travelled: Embracing Discomfort in Recovery

Intentional recovery often means choosing discomfort. In that sense, recovery isn’t about feeling good all the time. It’s about being willing to feel everything—the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable—because that’s what it means to be fully human. The road to recovery is never a straight trajectory of improvement, but rather ups-and-downs that can be uncomfortable, even sometimes terrifying.

So why must I choose the uncomfortable?

Because the uncomfortable space is where growth and development takes happens. This is a fact of life that you’ve been part of since you were born. Any real personal growth, whether physical or mental has come about from you engaging with something that challenged you and challenged you to grow stronger in skills, mindset, knowledge, or strength. During your recovery this fact remains true as well.

Think about the person you’d like to become. Hopefully you describe something like: “Someone who is content with who I am, and copes well enough with what happens in life”. Essentially, this describes someone who embraces all feelings, thoughts, and events – whether they are good or bad, simple or complex, easy of difficult. To become this type of person implies that you don’t avoid difficulties or discomfort, but rather willingly choose to face them. You stop using ways to avoid these, or using maladaptive ways of approaching life’s tougher realities (including your own insecurities).

By no means do I infer you’ll always be happy with what happens in life. However, by truly accepting (and thus, embracing) life in its totality, you’ll accept that life does what it does. This already makes things easier in itself, because we accept we are mere ships on the ocean of life. The ocean and currents will do what they wish, and all you can control is your reaction to it, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Thus, discomfort and pain will not be something to avoid, as you accept that they are part of life.

By extension, even your own discomfort towards yourself will be easier to embrace, because you willingly choose to face uncomfortable feelings and thoughts (whether they come from food, body, or self).

The Psychological Landscape: Cultivating Self-Compassion

Living with an eating disorder often means navigating a minefield of negative self-talk, including thoughts on you own distorted body image. Intentional recovery requires consciously challenging these thought patterns and cultivating self-compassion. Sounds simple? Unfortunately, this is very complex, takes time, and once again, calls on you to engage with the one person you’ve probably been trying to avoid for a very long time – YOU.

I encourage clients to start this journey by noticing and attending to how they talk to themselves. We all talk to ourselves, but some of us are more aware and more intentional in the way we talk to ourselves than others. Usually within eating disorders, the self-talk is extremely negative, condescending, and focussed on critique. If you’re going to change this, you will have to be the one that addresses and challenges your own statements. But if you aren’t even aware of how, and when, you have these thoughts towards your own person, then changing them is quite impossible. So, try to keep track of your thoughts and your self-talk. You can write these down if that makes it easier (in a journal), or stay focussed on your inner voice as you go about your day. But when you notice yourself being very critical, try to step back and align yourself with the idea that you’d like to change such statements, and grow a healthier relationship with yourself.

Another way of thinking about this is to imagine how you would change the words and actions towards your partner if both were working on mending your fractured relationship. Let’s imagine both parties recognise they’ve grown apart, haven’t been treating each other well, and need to work on connecting more with the other. In such a situation, both of you would be very attentive and acutely aware of how you act and talk to the other, because there is a focus on healing the relationship. In the same way, try to focus on prioritising the relationship with yourself. Meaning, stop focussing on your apparent faults, and engage with yourself in a kinder and gentle way that encourages appreciation for you as a person.  Even if you don’t feel this way yet towards yourself, you can still choose to treat yourself in a more respectful way, which paves the way that appreciation for the self can develop over time.

The above suggestion is just one step of a journey that encourages a real change in the relationship you foster with yourself. In my opinion, cultivating genuine self-compassion is one of the hardest things to do in recovery, but it’s also one of the most important. Healing the relationship you have with yourself (physically and psychologically) is a wonderful growth process that sets you up for a rewarding and happier life. It can be very freeing to people when they stop this internal war they’ve been having with themselves (and their bodies) for the last few years, and sometimes even decades.

Recovery’s Intentional Effort

It’s clear to see that recovery calls for your intentional effort. You need to actively pursue and engage a process of growth and self-discovery that, perhaps, hasn’t occurred for a very long time in your life. It’s a very personal journey, but one of the most rewarding you could take.

If you need support, don’t hesitate to reach out to loved ones or professionals who could be of assistance. But in doing so, try to understand how you will be called upon to be the primary driver of your own recovery and healing.