Skip Eating Disorder Detours and Find the Path that Nourishes Your Soul {Guest Post}

I’m honored to share with you today a guest post from psychotherapist, Joanna Poppink, MFT, who recently authored, Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder. She has been gracious enough to share some thoughtful and practical insights on finding a path of nourishment for NTS readers. I hope that you will enjoy her post as much as I did.

6 detours; 6 destinations; 6 possible discoveries

Everything related to your eating disorder creates big DETOUR signs for your energy and takes you away from the healing soul nourishment you need for recovery and a fulfilling life. Eating disorder behaviors and thoughts are grim. Soul nourishment is inspiring and joyful. Get ready to have some fun.

By giving yourself an hour or two a day (or less) that you commit to an exploratory adventure, you can discover clues to your authentic center. You begin an enjoyable and worthwhile aspect of your journey to eating disorder recovery.

Eating disorders are distracting detours that lead away from your center. They envelope your mind, distort your perceptions and fuel rigid thought patterns. They shroud your awareness of your humanity.

However, the inescapable fact is, regardless of your awareness or lifestyle, you are a human being being. Therefore you have deep emotions. You can forget. You can remember. You can be inspired.

Disregarding your eating disorder detours allow you to search for forgotten clues your soul has left for you to find. Beyond your familiar detours you can find what you postponed so thoroughly that you forgot you even cared.

Energy detours:

1. Self criticism at the scale and mirror

2. Self criticism at clothes sizes

3. Binge planning

4. Hiding your restricting

5. Diving into a binge purge episode

6. Pouring out energy on the treadmill

These activities take up energy you could be using on a soul discovery adventure.

You need a topographical map for your journey beyond the detours. On this map you see the layout of the land but not the names of what you will discover. That’s what makes it an adventure. Your map is your plan. Make a list of simple areas to explore.

Areas to Explore:

1. Closets – on the floor, the back of shelves and jammed hangers.

2. Book shelves – especially the dusty ones

3. Cupboards – especially the back

4. Drawers – desk, kitchen, bedroom, office – go deep.

5. Storage boxes wherever they may be – attic, garage, storage unit, friend’s or parents houses.

6. Journals, diaries, letters and memories of people you don’t see anymore.

Possible Discoveries:

1. A faded newspaper clipping about a play you saw or meant to see. It reminds you or how much you enjoy live theater. Nourishment: attend professional and local community theatricals. Take a class in improv. Volunteer to help at schools and senior community centers in putting on shows.

2, A catalog of continuing education classes. Nourishment: thumb through the pages for a class teaching a loved or intriguing subject or skill dear to your heart. E.g. gardening, astronomy, history of your home town or ethnic origins.

3. A book you wanted to read before you died but still haven’t read. Nourishment: read it. Maybe it’s a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel. Maybe it’s the best science fiction of the golden age of SF. It could be Yeats poetry or the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Now is the time to go for it.

4. Art supplies in the back of a cupboard, unused, and waiting for your creative life to re emerge. Nourishment: Unpack them. Set them up so you can easily do a little something during the course of a normal day. It could be as simple as leaving a sketch pad and pencil on a counter or table in full view.

5. Unused gardening tools. Nourishment: remember what you plans were. Find away to use those tools in the ground or a pot. Plant the old dream you can still make come true.

6. Photographs of people you love. Nourishment: If they have died, find a way to honor the significance they had and still have in your life. If they are alive, find a way to reconnect.

Discovering what you have neglected or endlessly postponed can bring up guilt or rueful feelings. But you can move through these emotional detours as you discover what genuinely inspires you. You learn how your own human psyche finds a way to keep what nourishes you tucked away and safe. It may be hidden in the recesses of your mind and home, but it is present somewhere. It awaits your awareness and attention to bring it forward from behind the eating disorder barriers and into your life.

As you nourish your authentic loves, your eating disorder detours fade. You discover that you have fun living your life free of your eating disorder and governed by the joy in your soul.

Joanna is a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorder recovery, lecturer, and author of Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder. To read more from Joanna, check out her website where she shares more thoughtful insights on recovery and building a life outside of eating disorders.

If you would like to enter for a chance to win a copy of her book, leave a comment below letting us know where you find nourishment for your soul. For another way to enter, tweet, facebook, or share this post on your site and leave a comment below letting us know you did. No entry limit, and the winners will be contacted directly once chosen.