--- title: Help Yourself description: Support your recovery canonical_url: https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/eating-disorder-help/help-yourself/page-36 language: en-GB date: 2016-07-28T05:04:46Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/eating-disorder-help/help-yourself/page-36. markdown-tokens: 1382 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/eating-disorder-help/help-yourself/page-36. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. ![doorknob 948568 340](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/images/doorknob-948568__340.jpg)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. Details Category: [Workbook](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/table/help-yourself/workbook/) Situation - postponing: You are postponing beginning an activity. Is this routine procrastination? What are you postponing? Is it true that you can postpone everything except eating? Exercise: Reverse the order. Before you reach for food, pick one activity you have been postponing and take concrete action. It may be a note or a phone call. It may be gathering materials you need. A small action mobilizes your personal power. Now you are postponint your emotional eating and making headway in tasks that, once resolved, will ease your anxiety and need for emotional eating. Details Category: [Workbook](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/table/help-yourself/workbook/) I have been a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, CA, since 1980. Many of my patients have struggled with overeating. Some are brave adults on a particularly challenging healing path as they explore not only their own inner world but also how they contributed to the creation of eating disorders in their children. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/workbook/about-the-author) Details Category: [Workbook](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/table/help-yourself/workbook/) Uncompleted tasks add stress to your life and will trigger your eating disorder. Here's a simple way to complete your tasks, reduce your stress and strengthen your eating disorder recovery. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/workbook/exercise-28) Details Category: [Workbook](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/table/help-yourself/workbook/) **\*Simple P.A.M. Exercise - Pause a Minute** **Situation** - You are overeating: - You are eating more than you need during a meal. - Your snack is out of control. - Food is going from hand to mouth with no sense of feeling. - Your late bedtime snack has moved from a little yogurt to peanut butter and crackers with no end in sight. Exercise: 1. Pause. 2. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. 3. Breathe normally and pay attention to your breath. 4. Feel the oxygen enter your lungs and nourish your body. 5. Tell yourself there is plenty of food in the world. You can have more at your next meal. 6. Imagine your next meal. 7. Commit to what time you will eat a nourishing meal again. 8. Tell yourself you will be kind to yourself during the time between meals, and you will give yourself a good next meal. As you practice P.A.M. on a regular basis you develop the ability to break your overeating pattern. You learn to trust that you can bear your feelings. You earn your trust by supplying yourself with nourishing and tasty meals on a regular basis. When you trust that you will care for yourself and tend to your needs, you don't need to overeat because you want to ward off deprivation. You know that you will provide yourself with enough. 1. *Do you trust yourself to give yourself the nourishment you need?* 2. *How can you develop even more trust in yourself?* \*PAM is based on an exercise in [Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from your eating disorder. ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/index.php/healing-your-hungry-heart) [Joanna Poppink, MFT, Los Angeles eating disorder recovery psychotherapist. ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/index.php/therapy-with-joanna) Details Category: [Workbook](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/table/help-yourself/workbook/) Mary [(her story)](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/workbook/the-creation-of-an-overeater-marys-story) found a way to protect herself as best she could from unavoidable and intolerable fear and pain. Her pain comes from more than the physical event. Mary is emotionally incapable of tolerating the knowledge that her father can and will terrorize her at any time and that her mother will not or cannot protect her. The people she depends on for daily care-taking and protection are dangerous to her. She cannot bear to live with that knowledge, and so she finds a way to know as little as possible about her true situation. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/workbook/discussion-of-marys-story)