Help Yourself

doorknob 948568 340 Doors can open for you if you knock or simply turn the handle.

Here you can find articles that may answer your questions and support you in your personal recovery work.

You'll also find a series of inspirations and affirmation that may help you stay on your healing path.

Please remember, helping yourself does not mean going it alone. Helping yourself means discovering what what you can do to support your own recovery. That includes how to recognize opportunity and reach out for what supports your health and personal development.

When you help yourself you are looking to people as well as books, websites and classes, who are in a position to offer you genuine recovery help on your journey to healing.

Open new doors to find your recovery path.

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My self help eating disorder recovery book is in it's almost final form at Conari Publishers. It is due to come out Spring of 2011.

How lovely to see this research today: Binge-Eating Treatment Found Cost-Effective Using Self Help Book.

In my training as a psychotherapist I was taught not to tell patients what to do. After all, they are leading their lives based on their values, loves, goals, wishes and desires not mine. Yet, as a seasoned clinical with rich experience as a professional and rich hard won experience as a former bulimic, I recognize psychological and behavioral mine fields when I see them.

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1046592 buffet If you have an eating disorder, all you can eat buffets are a great place to binge or a nightmare to be avoided. Here’s a way to redefine your experience, eat well and claim your personal power.

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Stalkers and Eating Disorders Certainly not everyone with bulimia acts out their disease as I described. But many do match the scenario in tmy last two posts and many are worse. At least in the descriptions I gave, the woman got home. I wrote the full bulimic episode description to make clear that bulimia covers a territory far more vast than eating behaviors.

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by Joanna Poppink, M.F.T.

Learning that your friend suffers with an eating disorder can shatter what you believed was an accurate picture of a normal and healthy relationship. The discovery may jolt you into realizing that your understanding of the world around you is incomplete. People you know, perhaps close friends, can be in danger.

Recognizing that deep-rooted, destructive, and often deadly pain exists in your friend can be a loss of innocence and an awakening to mortality and suffering in the human condition. It's a difficult but valuable experience for a person at any age.

If you live a fairly healthy and normal life, it may be difficult and even frightening to hear your friend describe her internal experience. Often people with an eating disorder know they are on a destructive path and that their behaviors can kill them. Yet they cannot stop. Some people are certain that no matter what day it is, they have six months to live from that date. They cannot plan a future or take anything or anyone really seriously, as they don't believe they will be alive long enough to follow through on anything.

Details: Category: Help Yourself

Experience of Crisis: If you have an eating disorder, then you experience a crisis when you perceive, real or not, that the presence of a constant, reliable, important and nourishing something or someone is leaving you.

Your feeling of being adrift and alone in a vast emptiness with nothing to hold on to and where no one can reach you or even know where you are is unbearable. Regardless of what eating disorder you have, you will feel the urge to do what works for you during periods of real or perceived loss.

Reaction: Depending on the severity of your disorder and the severity of the loss, real or remembered, you may binge on food or exercise or go into starvation mode. You may cut or edge toward suicide. You can fall into a binge-purge episode stretching across a range of once in one day to 15 or more episodes per day for many days.

If you have some degree of recovery, you may find yourself saying to a friend or your psychotherapist: