Reaching My Breaking Point

Sometime in the past few months, I started referring to myself as "recovered," rather than "in recovery." I didn't know exactly why I made the switch, or how I personally distinguished between "in recovery" and recovered.  What I did know was this: I simply couldn't see myself ever going all the way down the road to my eating disorder again.  Even if I were to have slip-ups along the way, I trusted in what I'd learned so far to talk about it openly, reach out for support, and stop the downward spiral.

But even with this fluid definition of recovery, I had had enough conversations with my treatment team and support people to start believing that I'd never fall prey to to even the thoughts again.  For me, "recovered" was beginning to mean being completely done with the eating disorder and constantly at peace with my body. 

So I was pretty shocked when I found myself fully engaged in an episode of actively using eating disordered behaviors during finals week.  Afterward, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.  I was afraid to tell anyone, even my therapist.  Did it mean that I was no longer "recovered"?  Had I been fooling myself into believing I was doing better than I actually was?

Surprisingly, no.  Returning to ED symptoms was not a relapse or a failure in recovery.  It was simply a signal to me that I had reached my breaking point with stress, and it was my body's way of telling me that I was asking too much of it.  My mind-body-soul had reached the point where it was dealing with so much stress that it knew of nothing else to do but revert back to habits that used to comfort and distract me.


I have ultimately decided that the symptom episode will be no more or no less significant than I choose to make it.  And at this point, I've let it go.  I took it for the red-alert signal that it was, and I responded by adjusting my expectations of myself during that week.  I took it as a message that I needed more self-care, less self-judgment, and that I also needed to shift my expectations about how much I could accomplish.  I set my intention for the rest of finals week to frequently check in with myself and make sure that my personal needs were being met.  "Powering through" the stress simply wasn't an option.

Last week, I learned that recovery, like life, is messy.  I was reminded that no state of being lasts forever.  Mastering recovery, self-care, and learning to cope with stress in a healthy way is never really a done deal.  But in my mind, that's a good thing.  It makes life dynamic and exciting, and it gives me the chance every day to learn something new about finding that inner peace that I trust will always be available to me, as long as I'm willing to plug out of my old habits and plug into my heart.