Privacy and safety are essential for your early recovery work. You need to feel safe enough to feel whatever feelings come up in you. You need privacy so you are free to experience your feelings with no concern about how someone might react to your emotions.

Establishing a place of privacy and safety, even for a short time once a week, may be a new and challenging experience for you. Your secret places for acting out your eating disorders are not safe.

Determining what is a safe and private place and giving yourself regular access to this place is a crucial part of your recovery. Over time, as you make progress in your recovery you will find that you have more safety and privacy in your life because you are learning how to create it for yourself.

For now, you begin with manageable steps. For a short time, once a week, you enter your safe and private space. What you write is for your eyes only.

If you have any worries that someone will read what you have written, you will censor yourself. If you feel someone is looking over your shoulder and reading what you write, you will not put down your private thoughts and emotional experiences. You may even prevent yourself from knowing what you actually think or feel as a way of protecting yourself.

You need a private and secure place for your book. You need to develop the habit of taking it from your private place when you are going to write and then returning it to your private place when you are finished.

Step Four:

Select a safe and private place for your appointments with yourself and a place of safekeeping for your notebook.

Step Five:

Read the seven introduction points again.

Step Six:

Choose one of the secret discovering questions.

Questions: 1- 9

Questions: 10-20

Make your choice using your own criteria. For example, you may select a question because:

• It touches you the most.
• It intrigues you the most.
• It causes you a degree of emotion you feel you can tolerate.
• You feel it's the safest place to begin.

Eating Disorder Recovery Action Steps in Online Self Help Workbook  1-3

Eating Disorder Recovery Action Steps in Online Self Help Workbook  4-6

Eating Disorder Recovery Action Steps in Online Self Help Workbook  7-9

Eating Disorder Recovery Action Steps in Online Self Help Workbook  10-12

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.

She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR, FL, and UT. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder

Appointments are virtual.

For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

In 1991 I was co-hosting a radio talk show concerning health issues with Tamiko in Beverly Hills, California. She asked me to write  "Ten Tips to Stop Overeating" that we could offer our listeners. Her idea was to create a card that people could tack on a refrigerator door. (Second part of interview.)

I liked the idea of writing something that would help people understand how to stop overeating. It had to be longer than a simple card.

I thought of my own eating disorder history, of bingeing and throwing up for may years in secret, long before bulimia had a name.

If you overeat or binge, you may in your past have experienced something you could not bear to feel or know. Overeating puts a great, numbing shield between you and your awareness of yourself. It is part of an effective system many people develop in order to not fully know their history.

That history may involve events that happened to you, events you witnessed, events you heard about. That history may involve powerful and bewildering emotional experiences you had in the past but did not have the strength or maturity to understand or tolerate. Overeating protects you from knowledge about yourself.

No one can end an effective protective system unless they know they do not need that protection any longer. If the threatening sense of danger you have is a secret from yourself, you have no way to evaluate your safety. Without knowledge of your inner life you can't know when you are out of danger so you will continue to use your protective system, overeating.

Once you know your secrets you begin to learn that you are able to live with the knowledge. You can strengthen yourself through practice and understanding to live your life with more appreciation for the experiences you have survived. Then you will have no need for the methods which keep you numb and oblivious. There lies triumph and freedom.

Continuing the action steps for eating disorder recovery. Let yourself be as alert and natural as the swan. Be still. Let your breath glide and guide you as you reveal yourself to yourself.