WBB ESSAYS
My Recovery - Was it Ever Real?
- Shannon Cutts
[ Taken with permission from her fabulous recovery-focused site, Key to Life.]
Question of the Month
I receive many wonderful questions each month from women I mentor, and I will share one question, and a summary of my answer, each month in Good News. (If you have a question you would like to submit to be answered in a future edition of Good News, please follow the link below to submit your question for consideration)
This month’s question is:
Q: Dear Shannon - I am really starting to question what recovery really means and if I was even in recovery in the first place. I am wondering if I was ever really in recovery or if I just changed my life and my eating habits to accommodate my eating disorder. Are there places that you still slip up big time or situations that you still avoid?
A: You might disagree with me now, because I know you are in pain at feeling like you’ve failed in your recovery, but I honestly believe your ‘relapse’ is not a relapse at all, but an opportunity for even deeper continued recovery. Day-by-day steps towards success often look like failure if we don’t see it with the right eyes....like layers of the onion, as we peel back each layer, the layers themselves appear to look the same, and we peel and peel, feeling after awhile like this is all we will ever do! But what we can't see that IS changing is the distance between our 'masks' (the self-protective barriers we have erected between ourselves and the world/each other/our own pain that are causing our addiction/eating disordered behavior) and our vulnerable, wounded hearts! So we must simply dig in and continue to work, peeling back layer after layer, trusting that even if we can't see it, healing is taking place....and then just at the point we are beginning to despair of ever 'getting anywhere' in our recovery, we finally peel back the last layer and presto - our shining clear heart's light breaks through.
You may think I'm kidding - but this is exactly how recovery happened for me. For me personally, and for everyone I've ever talked to who has achieved recovery from a serious addiction, we have found that recovery itself is a very un-glamorous daily process of being willing to fall down again, to break again, to cry again, to get up and try yet again until 'success' manifests as ever-greater sustained healing.
It is also very easy to forget that your body is not you – it is easy to convince yourself that your body and you are the one and the same. But maintaining this mental distinction is another non-negotiably essential part of any lasting recovery. No matter what spiritual tradition you come from, or even if you are more of the scientific type, the body = the garden (and the garden = a collection of individual systems that take nourishment from the environment around them to sustain the life within them). The Spirit = the conscious awareness of being you. The mind = the gateway through which the Spirit communicates guidance about what the body needs to continue functioning to the body's caretaker - the gardener - you. ‘Hunger’ is an indicator that you, the gardener, are receiving the Spirit's guidance in the area of nourishing the garden of your body. It really is this simple – if we live this way, eating will become a simple, peaceful daily act that is just like brushing our teeth or going to sleep at night and waking up in the morning.
It is GOOD that you are questioning what recovery really means. It is actually essential. We learn what recovery is by considering, and experiencing, what it isn’t. We also learn what recovery means to us by considering what we WANT it to be, which is actually a measure of our dreams of respecting and caring for ourselves in the future in ways we cannot respect and care for ourselves yet in the present.
And, to answer your question, YES – I still have places I slip up big-time. I have my triggers, my stressors, my 15 years of disordered eating that are always ready to come back and keep me company the moment I say the word. Ask me how I even know to write to you of these things! I have had to, and in some areas of my life am still learning to, live out these things, day by day and question by question, by trial and error. There is no other way. I have had days, even months, where I questioned whether I was recovered at all. I have had days, and sometimes months, where I didn’t want to be recovered – where even living with the eating disorder again seemed easier than attempting to recover from it. Recovery is a HARD thing that we try to do! And we live in a society that will NEVER affirm our desire to be slender not skinny, nourished not starving, curvy not emaciated, okay the way we are not striving for ephemeral ‘perfection’. And yet somehow I look back now at all the years since I was first that 11 year old anorexic girl, and I see steady, uphill progress in my body, mind, heart and soul that convinces me that ‘recovery’ is still going on in my life, one day at a time. I trust in that when I can’t trust in the challenges of a particular day.
You will be ‘just fine’ – I have no doubt of it. But you will have to relax your standards of what ‘just fine’ looks like into the process of continued recovery that you are in now and will be in for some time yet. You are on a journey. You are in the midst of a process. You are no doubt doing SO much better in some areas – enough that you write to me with talk of 'relapse' rather than an initial effort to heal - better enough that you now have energy and attention and courage to look into some new areas where you still need to grow. BE ENCOURAGED. Be prepared to ‘mess up’ again – possibly many times. But if you can start working with your mind now to stop seeing it as ‘messing up’ and start seeing it as a new and deeper layer of recovery offering you a new lesson in healthy self-care and a healthy sense of separation between 'body' and 'self', you will be energized and encouraged when you hit hard times to not give up, and to trust the process of recovery you have embarked on as providing just the right experiences to teach you just the right lessons at just the right times that are faithfully leading you day-by-day towards your recovery goals.
- Shannon Cutts
[ Taken with permission from her fabulous recovery-focused site, Key to Life.]
