Ed Recovery Quotes

Real hope combined with real action has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through.

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible to live without Ed.

To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of you. When you find it, let that part be in charge. Let the minority rule and lead you to a life you never dreamed was possible

Oftentimes, especially during my recovery, I didn’t need to think about everything I was doing wrong; instead, I needed to focus more on what I was doing right—and then do more of the right stuff. I needed to live more in the solution.

Clinicians have told me that our emotional is arrested at the age that an eating disorder takes control of our lives. After we recover, we pick up emotionally where we left off at that age.

With Ed, I always pushed away the good and only heard the bad. Today, I let in the good.

Connect with supportive people who empower you. The more you jump into your life, the further away from Ed you can get. Don’t have a backup plan for living. Live today. […] Trust in God. Believe in yourself. Get friends and family members to stand behind you. That’s the only backup you’ll need.

Ironically, this physically weak feeling signifies that I’m actually getting stronger. I know from my past that I will ultimately feel strong if I just sit with the feeling and experience it.

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of ‘victim thinking.’ Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me.

I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud, but I walked numbly through the park, round and round, 40 times for 4 hours just wanting to make it through the day. There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got through and the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories, but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk tick tick tick me not making a sound and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind, but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine. This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely ways but you can not let it. I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use. the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness, thinking it will help but it only feeds the fire and I don't want to hurt myself anymore. I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all. And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again. It will always be spring again. And there will always be a new day.

When we feel like giving up, like we are beyond help, we must remember that we are never beyond hope. Holding on to hope has always motivated me to keep trying. I have found this hope by connecting with others. I’ve found it not only in individuals who have dealt with eating disorders but also in people who have battled addictions and those who have survived abuse, cancer, and broken hearts. I have found much-needed hope in my passions and dreams for the future. I’ve found it in prayer. Real hope combined with real actions has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through. In other words, sitting around and simply hoping that things will change won’t pick you up after a fall. Hope only gives you strength when you use it as a tool to move forward. Taking real action with a hopeful mind will pull you off the ground that eighth time and beyond.

anxiety becomes high energy when taken to the light. For me, it worked like this: I used to live in a constant state of anxiety, worrying about the past and the future. Now I do my best to focus my attention on the present moment. So the mental energy I used to waste on worrying is channeled into the present, making me better able to focus intently and enthusiastically on a task (whether work or play). In a similar way, perfection becomes tenacity, and compulsivity becomes drive. Traits that once brought us down can lift us up when taken to the light.

I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was striving for in recovery was a real possibility. I thought about these experiences and used them as encouragement to keep moving forward. Even one minute of freedom was proof that I was getting better. At first, these times were few and far between. Now, these moments are connected; they are my life

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was starving myself. In starvation mode, my body literally thought I was facing a famine. It didn’t know that I was living near a grocery store and several fast-food restaurants. Thinking I was facing a real food shortage, its primal instinct was to binge on large amounts of food, conserving fat in preparation for the hard times ahead.

In the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received an 88 out of 100 percent on an exam, I felt that I failed. The fact is most things in life are not absolutes and have components of both good and bad. I used to think in absolute terms a lot: all, every, or never. I would all of the food (that is, binge), and then I would restrict every meal and to never eat again. This type of thinking extended outside of the food arena as well: I had to get all of the answers right on a test; I had to be in every extracurricular activity […] The ‘if it’s not perfect, I quit’ approach to life is a treacherous way to live. […] I hadn’t established a baseline of competence: What gets the job done? What is good enough? Finding good enough takes trial and error. For those of us who are perfectionists, the error part of trial and error can stop us dead in our tracks. We would rather keep chasing perfection than risk possibly making a mistake. I was able to change my behavior only when the pain of perfectionism became greater than the pain of making an error. […] Today good enough means that I’m okay just the way I am. I play my position in the world. I catch the ball when it is thrown my way. I don’t always have to make the crowd go wild or get a standing ovation. It’s good enough to just catch the ball or even to do my best to catch it. Good enough means that I finally enjoy playing the game.

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting. I wonder why my body seems bigger today than it did yesterday. Maybe it’s water weight. Maybe it’s my outfit. Or maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me.’ I know it’s not possible for me to gain a noticeable amount of weight overnight, so I will go no further than that. I move on with my day without skipping a beat—and definitely without missing a meal.

Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . .

Food is something I am going to have to face at least three times a day for the rest of my life. And I am not perfect. But one really bad day does not mean that I am hopeless and back at square one with my eating disorder. Olympic ice skaters fall in their quest for the gold. Heisman Trophy winners throw interceptions. Professional singers forget the words. And people with eating disorders sometimes slip back into an old pattern. But all of these individuals just pick themselves back up and do the next right thing. The ice skater makes the next jump. The football player throws the next pass. The singer finishes the song. And I am going to eat breakfast.

I now view food as energy for my mind and body rather than something to be scared of. It's fuel, not punishment. Because without it, I can't grow stronger, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

The week after my happy Tin Man 5k, I learned that a friend had died of a heroin overdose, possibly a suicide. He and I had attended the same weekly recovery group for years. His death stunned everyone who knew him, myself included. A few days later, a friend’s boss shot himself in the parking lot of a nearby police department. Both events rattled me. While mourning the losses, I worried the knives in the kitchen drawer might jump out and stab me. I asked Ed to hold me. “I need to tie myself to the planet, so I don’t spin off.

Though I did not write about neurofeedback in detail, I trained in it, and learned an immense amount about changing the brain from these neurofeedback scientists and clinicians, in supervision, in courses or through their writings: John Finnick, Moshe Perl, Sebern Fisher, Ed Hamlin, Lynda Thompson, Michael Thompson, Len Ochs, and Jaclyn Gisburne.

An injured man would heal in time, and his pain would gradually diminish and ultimately disappear, because injury was a part of the human condition. A man was born to be hurt from time to time, and the mechanism for recovery was born with him.

Tendinopathy recovery requires patience and discipline. You will likely experience some setbacks on your road to full recovery. During these times, take a step back and use the EdUReP model to correct course and prevent the injury from degrading further.

A useful framework for thinking about tendinopathy recovery is the EdUReP model.90 EdUReP stands for Education, Unloading, Reloading, Prevention:

Reward-related contributions to Eds instate disordered eating and hinder recovery.

What do guys who successfully recover from porn-induced ED suggest? Suggestion number one is to eliminate porn, porn substitutes, and recalling the porn you watched. Or to put it another way, eliminate all artificial sexual stimulation. By artificial I mean pixels, audio and literature. No porn substitutes, such as: surfing pictures on Facebook, Snapchat or dating apps, cruising Craigslist, underwear ads, YouTube videos, ‘erotic literature’, etc. If it’s not real life, just say ‘no’. Content isn’t as much the issue as whether you are mimicking the behaviours that wired your brain to need novel, screen-based stimulation. The second suggestion is to rewire your sexual arousal to real people. While this helps everyone recover, it may be a key component for young men with little or no sexual experience. This does not mean that you need to have sex to rewire. In fact, slowly getting to know someone is probably the best path. Hanging out, touching, and making out help connect sexual arousal and affection to a real person, and may be essential to recovery.

Ed Taub had shown that the more stroke patients concentrated on their tasks—the more they paid attention—the greater their functional reorganization and recovery. In stroke patients who sustain damage to the prefrontal cortex, and whose attention systems are therefore impaired, recovery is much less likely. Two months after the stroke, a simple measure of attention, such as the patient’s ability to count tones presented through headphones, predicts almost uncannily how well the patient will recover motor function. The power of attention, that is, determines whether a stroke patient will remain incapacitated or not. Ian Robertson’s research group at Trinity College found much the same thing: “How well people can pay attention just after a right-brain stroke predicts how well they can use their left hands two years later.” If the attention circuits in the frontal lobes are damaged by the stroke, the patient recovers less well from injury to other regions of the brain than if the frontal lobes are spared.