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Hello Beautiful Souls! This is Lauren from Healingforeatingdisorders.com and today is Q&A day so were going to be answering a question for you!

If you have a question you want me to address or any sort of question you have for me please email us at support [at] healingforeatingdisorders [dot] com.

So today we have a question from Sara and Sara writes:

Hi my name is Sara, I’m a 40 year old mess of a whole bunch of ED-isms. I have been in 7 hospitals since my young 14 year old self was hijacked and tortured by ED. The problem with treatment is that it’s great but when i get out relapse happens quickly, (Lauren: and this is so common), ED will use anything to get back in my life, he tells me the only reason I was able to gain weight and stop exercising and binging and purging was because I was in a hospital where he couldn’t go and now that I’m out it’s time to make up for lost time. I object but he refuses to allow me take credit for any gains in any sense of the word — How do I stop this?

Thank you so much Sara for your email and i want to say that I relate so much to what you are saying about being hijacked and tortured by your eating disorder.

That did happen to me as well and many women who are in recovery say there are these two parts to them: the eating disorder and then their true self. I hear so much in your email that you’re saying how loud the eating disorder voice is.

So, the first thing I want to say to you is no matter how quiet that other voice whispers you know that it is there. Part of recovery is that we have to let go of listening to the strong really loud critical abusive eating disorder voice. Beyond that I have 3 keys I want to share with you on how to overcome this trend, this pattern you have that has been going on for your entire life

I have 3 keys to share with you on how to stop relapsing every time you get out of treatment. And i don’t know if you plan on going back to treatment but many of the women I talk to say that treatment is great but then when they get out they always fall back into old patterns.

I’m going to share these 3 keys with you that have to do with doing this outside of a treatment center just so you know were talking about after you get out of treatment.

When you are at home here are the 3 most important things that i want you to do:

#1 – Figure out your WHY – why you’re in recovery so you can find the motivation from within you to want to do this outside of a treatment center.

Most women will go into treatment and the whole point of being there is to listen to the doctors and what the doctors want for you. For example, for me I went into the treatment center knowing that if i didn’t go in there I was going to die. And for so many people it is like that. But when I got out, I relapsed right away and I didn’t know why I was doing it I just went right back to it.

The fist thing I want you to do is to sit down and say: Why do I want recovery? Why do I want health? Why do I want to get rid of my eating disorder? A lot of times we don’t even know, a lot of women say “I know that i don’t want to do the eating disorder,” and thats great and everything but that doesn’t give you the motivation to quit.

So let me give you some examples.

For myself I didn’t want to pass on the eating disorder to my children, that was my biggest motivation. Yes, I wanted to be happy yes i wanted to be healthy, yes i wanted to be free but overall the thing that was driving me through the whole thing was I have to get rid of it so my children don’t learn my dysfunctional patterns of habit and thought.

So many other women I work with have kids and that would be their motivation but this is all coming from YOU and why YOU want to stop doing the eating disorder.

Some of the other women I have worked with have found their WHY to be: I want to get my period back, I want to have a family someday, I want to stop the cycle so i don’t pass it onto my kids, so i can have more kids.

Some women want to do this because they feel like they’re married to their eating disorder and they really want a loving partner, a boyfriend or girlfriend or a husband or wife or whatever it is, that they want to get rid of the eating disorder to open up the space and energy so they can have a fulfilling loving relationship come in to their life.

I’ve had other women that their entire motivation for recovery is to be happy, to be content with themselves and to love themselves.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate, its doesn’t have to be that life transforming or complicated, it just has to be something that you know when the ED is screaming in your head — “go back to binging and purging! Go back to losing weight! Go back to exercising an starving and punishing yourself!” you have to have something to go back to to say this is WHY I’m doing this.

Its very very important that YOU know why your’e doing it. When you were in treatment you were doing it because they told you to do it and I’ve found that that is the biggest difference when you get out of the hospital you don’t have anybody telling you what to do anymore.

It does matter but you’re the only one living with the consequences of your actions. For you to say “I’m going to do this, this is why I’m going to do this, this is what I’m going to use when shit gets tough.” (And shit IS going to get tough.)

So you can always go back to this is WHY I’m doing it and this is why its so important to me to stop engaging in it, stop listening to it, etc.

#2 — After you find your why, is to create a treatment team or support team at home to help you reach your goals and hold you accountable.

Now i know that probably seem like “Yeah i know that Lauren,” but here’s the difference, and when i say treatment team I’m saying you want to get a counselor, therapist, you want to see a doctor, or a psychiatrist or if you want to go to a holistic doctor, or you want to use your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your best friend, your mom, your brother, somebody who’s going to support you unconditionally. However many people you have whether its one, two, five, or ten doesn’t matter but you want to create a support system so you can check in with them and say this is how I’m going on my goals.

Go to your counselor and your therapist and say to them: “This is my goal, how can you help me with this?”

Rather than going to the counselor or the doctor and saying “Oh, I’m so broken, I cant be fixed, I need help, whats wrong with me?” I want you to start taking responsibility for your treatment because it doesn’t matter how long you struggle with this, you’re the only one thats going to struggle with this if you don’t get help.

Nobody else really cares if you’re happy or not. Nobody else really cares if you’re fulfilled or not, engaging in your ED or not.

This step is really about taking responsibility for yourself, saying “I am important, I know that I want to learn to love myself, I know that I might not like or love myself right now and I need your help.” And thats how you look at the treatment.

Even if it’s just your doctor, your sister or your mom, you say: “This is what I want to do, how can you help me to do this? This is what I need you to do in order for you to help me.”

It’s turning it around, taking responsibility and creating a support system to hold you accountable. Then it’s your responsibility to reach out to them and say, “This is what I did today,” or “This is what I plan on doing today, can you text me later and ask how I’m doing or to vent to you?” Whatever it is you’re needing from your support system or your treatment team.

#3 — That has been most helpful in helping women get out of the treatment – relapse – pattern, is that you have to learn how to forgive yourself when you mess up or “make a mistake” because you WILL mess up and you WILL make mistakes and you will feel so bad about yourself and you will say “OMG why cant i do this? Why am I failing?” and the eating disorder just swoops in and picks you up and takes you back down that road, back into that cycle and the only way out is through forgiveness.

So when you mess up and you binge and purge or you start exercising obsessively or you’re restricting, you have to look at it and say “Its okay. I know why it happened.”

You look at your triggers and you learn from it and you pull out the gems of wisdom and you start saying to yourself “I know I was triggered by stress,” or “I know that I got too hungry and that triggered a binge for me.“

I want you to start going back and learning the lessons from what happened and then letting it go. Saying to yourself: “It’s okay, I’m just doing the best I can. That’s all I can do today. With the knowledge and the wisdom and the understanding that I have right now and I’m going to do better tomorrow.”

Now this is different than having a binge and purge and saying “I suck! I feel bad about it, this is never going ti happen again!” and you feel guilty and ashamed and anxious. Because I did that and I would say “It’s never going to happen again!” but it always did.

So forgiveness is different, it’s really about being compassionate and kind with yourself and saying, “You know what, I love you, I know you’re trying really hard and were just going to try again tomorrow.”

Because forgiveness is the only way out. You have to let go of those negative emotions that will keep you stuck in that cycle. That means watching your self talk.

Making sure you’re talking to yourself in a positive way. Letting go of self criticism. Remembering that you are not your eating disorder.

You are not this voice that tells you, “We have to make up for lost times, you have to go binge and purge or exercise.”  That voice is not you, that is the eating disorder and even those voices that come in and say “you’re not worthy, you suck, you’re disgusting, your so ugly, you’ll never be able to do this,” all of those voices come from the eating disorder, and I want you to remember that.

When you’re going through this because when you stop binging and purging, when you stop exercising and you start gaining weight or whatever it is your doing in your recovery, those voices are going to get louder and they are going to be more and more overwhelming because really the eating disorder serves as a distraction.

It’s distracting you from feeling your feelings, from stress, the anger, the guilt, the whatever it is, feeling bad about yourself, so when you can let that go and be more compassionate with yourself and just do whatever it takes for your recovery anyway you know that the voices will come up but know that you don’t have to listen to them anymore.

They are not you. You are more powerful than those voices. And when you consistently give energy to those voices saying “I love myself, I’m learning how to love myself, I’m going to do this, this is what’s most important to me,” picking yourself back up if it doesn’t happen, being accountable to your treatment team, these are all the ways that we move forward in recovery instead of going back on relapse and going back into the eating disorder cycle again.

So quickly to recap: the way that you stop this cycle Sara is that you first figure out your WHY, WHY are you doing this, so you can motivate yourself rather than being motivated by these external forces because that’s really what this is all about.

Finding that inspiration and motivation to say this is why I’m doing it, this is why it’s so important to me.

The second thing is to create a support system, a treatment team, people you can count on, people that most important you are going to tell them what you need, why you’re doing it, what your goals are, and how they can help you. So its about taking responsibility.

And the third step is really learn how to be forgiving with yourself, how to be more positive, loving and encouraging of yourself in this process to grow your recovery muscle, to learn how to love yourself and truly learn how to let go of your eating disorder voice that is not you but comes from the ED.

At first it will get louder, but over time it will get quiet and eventually it will subside, and that’s where you get to a place like I did in my recovery where one day I woke up and I said “Woohoo! I’m fully recovered, I don’t hear those voices anymore! And I do love myself!” And I take care of myself and I support myself and that’s really what recovery is all about.

It’s not so much about the absence of eating disorder behaviors but rather — how are you creating this new relationship with Yourself?

How are you learning how to love yourself and how are you going to support your OWN self through this?

Because if you can’t support yourself through this, you’ll never get through it. So it is about taking responsibility and learning how to love yourself.

You deserve it Sara and everyone else who is watching this video, you do deserve to take care of yourself and love yourself unconditionally, and know that that’s part of the work.

A lot of the work in recovery is actually getting to the point where you WANT to do recovery because I know that there is a period of time you’ll go through where you want recovery but you also want the ed and thats natural and just know that over time if you just keep putting your energy into what it is that you want, your recovery, loving yourself, being forgiving with yourself, learning from your lessons that you will eventually break free from the eating disorder.

I hope that was helpful for you Sara if there are any comments or questions please leave them below the video. If anyone else has any questions for me or if you want to setup a free 30 minute consultation with me please use the contact form on my website healingforeatingdisorders.com and that’s all for today!

Thank you so much for watching! Love you guys! God bless.