Now I'd really appreciate it if we could all take a moment to talk about someting else

I read an interesting article today about 'All about that bass' which highlighted the absurdity of selling positive body image and promoting girls with curves but thin-shaming in the process making the message of every woman being beautiful defunct if they don't have the curves that men are seeking. It's frustrating as it feels like once again the message is wrong and a certain group of women are getting written off as imperfect yet again.

All body shaming needs to stop but perhaps we need to move away from this topic for a while? The body image debate is becoming a bit of a mud slinging match where essentially any-body isn't good enough for another subsection of the population. I would really appreciate it if we could all stop for a moment, take a look at what's important here and perhaps talk about something else?

Perhaps we could have a think about the minds of the people who own those bodies and discuss who we should vote for in the General Election 2015 who will prioritise Mental Health provisions, or how the UK can help in the aftermath of the Nepal Earthquake which has killed over 2000 people or about the issues of deadly migrant routes across the Mediterranean. We need to get back to having a bit of perspective and working on what we can do to make things better. Perhaps people would be able to have better self-esteem and a better body image if they could just get on with having a body rather than needed to discuss it all of the time. Let's get back to celebrating everything incredible we can do with our bodies and learn to love them for that.

The place of true healing is a fierce place

The reality is, recovery is shit but gradually you get used to that and it becomes more tolerable, eventually you don't even realise you're doing it anymore... well that's the hope anyway.

Once again the timing of my blogging has been quite apt, I seem to have a knack of starting a blog post and then having a conversation of the same theme with someone, or seeing it in real life. This happened again today. Last week I wasn't well and as a result I was under quarantine and 'banned' from the ward. Now so close to my discharge date, a bit of independent practice wasn't a bad thing but it showed me that actually living a 'recovered' life is exhausting and a real challenge. The nice shiny idea I had of leaving the program all better was possibly a bit of an unrealistic expectation because I actually do still have an eating disorder. This realisation, I suppose, has been something I've been coming to over a number of weeks but the time to myself completely independently just brought it to the forefront of my mind.

I have a cartoon on my wall that depicts the road to recovery as two lines, the expectation of a line that goes directly from A to B and the reality of a line that goes backwards and forwards in a form of a scribble, ultimately getting from A to B but not straight away. As long as the general movement is in the right direction then it's ok if it's not exactly the way you would expect, it's ok for it to be good enough. Nb. I've added the cartoon now! Because it made more sense to have it in my blog.

So one night, at the dining table, we were discussing the difficulties we were facing and wondering when it would start to feel easier. At the start of the program, we complied with the boundaries because we had to which became doing it for ourselves because we had worked out our reasons for recovery which often also included recovering for others. The reality was that recovery was and still is hard work, a constant battle and drive to keep on track and make the 'recovery' focused decision multiple times a day. The silver lining, I determined, was that gradually you get more used to how crap recovery is until, hopefully, it would become so routine and mundane that it would be the automatic choice rather than requiring an internal dialogue each time. It all sounds somewhat depressing but actually it feels like real life. The hard things become tolerable, you may not always love doing them but you have an inbuilt understanding of why you need and want to be doing them which then becomes almost innate. And overall, faced with the alternative, recovery sucks a while lot less than life with an eating disorder does! So yes, recovery is a bit shit, but I will be choosing it as it holds the key to the life I want to leave and I'm ok with the fact that it's going to feel uncomfortable until I've got used to it.

Please follow me for blog updates and to make me happy! 

There is always something to be thankful for!

A page from my relapse prevention

It can be really difficult to have any outside perspective on life if you are feeling low. It’s so easy to get really stuck on your failings, how bad you’re feeling or all of the little details with inadvertently keep you really stuck and trapped. If you’re feeling bad physically or emotionally it’s so easy to end up in this trap and the prospect of it ever being any different can be unimaginable.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in a couple of areas that I have found really helpful and empowering; gratitude and personal values. I think both of these kind of fit in with this idea and are kind of the antidotes to think internally and getting really stuck in the moment with how you are feeling. In my relapse prevention, I’ve tried to think about all of the things I’m grateful for, and unsurprisingly (…well now I’ve done it!) there’s a hell of a lot I have to be thankful for. The key for me now, is to look at it as a positive and not as another means of beating myself up and thinking… well look at what I’ve got, I need to buck up my ideas and fix the rest of me. I think it has been really helpful to be able to refer back to my list on days where I feel a bit low and hopeless and like everything feels really difficult, these are the things I already have that are amazing and can’t be taken away from me. It’s such an empowering thing to do and once you get started you really can get carried away with all of the different things you have to be thankful for.

And some more relapse prevention

Then… values! In our Core CBT group, we looked at KellyWilson’s values worksheet. I’ve attached the link to the worksheet because it’s a really awesome tool to help focus you and work out what you want in your life and think about how successful you are being at fulfilling that value. You start by looking at the value ideas given on the sheet and rating them in their importance to you, I obviously added in pets/animals to the end of my list too. Then you think about the type of person you would like to be in each of the relevant areas, next you think about your success in each relevant area and finally you rank the values in the order of their importance of working on them at the present moment. You end up with a really focused idea of what’s important to you and what you’re neglecting at the moment. My values have really guided my relapse prevention and I’ve gone on to think about what the immediate steps you need to take to be working towards those goals. It’s really interesting because sometimes you have to work on different values before you can get to others, for example a lot of my values need to come second to me sorting out my health and mental health; without a healthy body, I can’t work on my family values and goal to have children.



More relapse prevention

The beauty of these two areas is that they can give you a real focus and kind of grounding to help you get back on track and work out where you want to go next and what that might look like. You can see what you have got and realise how fortunate you are and then think about the values that you want to guide your life and help think about yourself as a person. See recovery really is that simple... well possibly not but I think this definitely could help. I think the next step for me will be to think about my gratitude for my body and then perhaps tie all these into my positive data log and positive qualities work... all for another day!

My self-critical voice is looking at this post with an air of despair at the quality of my writing... and art work at the moment! My anxiety and self-doubt looks at different areas where I could have written better or more coherently or just differently, but my goal for today is to use the ‘good enough’ principle and think… sod it, it’s fine!! My perfectionist nature is trying to stifle me and I want to, for now at least, try and ignore it and post this piece anyway without judgement or regret.

Just keep swimming

I think I've been looking for a eureka moment in recovery when I wake up one day and think... 'jolly good, that's me recovered now'. I think, coming into an inpatient program, set me off thinking that I would defeat my eating disorder and be rid of it before I left. The scary reality is that I will be leaving this program with my eating disorder, it's not going to be completely squished as I hoped it would. The difference is that I am a lot more resilient now and able to manage it in a way that is compatible with real life. I have friends and acquaintances who say they are 'fully recovered' and I really do believe them. I suppose it really feels like this journey isn't going to be one that I reach the end of any time in the near future but one that's more of a slow burn... chipping away at my eating disorder and continuing to shift the balance to the recovered life I want step by step, bite by bite. 

It's so weird even contemplating a life without an eating disorder and a life out of hospital, where I've been for the last 7 months. It's weird to imagine having stretches of free time to fill and manage and enjoy! I have a realistic view that life won't be completely perfect and there will be times that are more challenging but hopefully the work I've done will keep me on the straight and narrow and on the right road to recovery. 

I also wanted to say hi to my lovely new followers! Please let me know if there are any blog topics you'd like me to talk about! 

#OneBeautifulThought

Dove have done it again with another stunning video asking women when they last had 'a beautiful thought' about themselves. In another interesting and empowering video, they have taken the internal monologue of 'normal' women and presented it as two women talking in a cafe beside them some time later. The women were, quite understandably, horrified by what they overheard.

I think it is important to think about the internal pressures women (and men!) put on themselves. There's a lot of talk about how we are influenced by the media and society around us but not as much about the internal battles we have with ourselves and the unfair expectations we place upon ourselves to reach a standard that is just really unobtainable. As humans, we have an evolutionary trait of looking at ourselves and working out how we can improve to be able to better survive. Unfortunately this drive to perfect ourselves is now somewhat unnecessary and leads us to continue to internally beat ourselves up for never being good enough. Of course, this isn't always a bad thing, but in terms of our body image, it can be a really negative thing.

The antidote... a healthy bit of self compassion and understanding and perhaps giving ourselves a bit of a break.