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.

Details: Category: Workbook

Are you curious about your secrets? Curiosity is the beginning of freedom. It mobilizes your strength and courage. Curiosity propels you on your recovery journey.

Responsible diet books or physical exercise programs provide tools and guidance to help you achieve more physical health, strength, flexibility and stamina. They do not address the powerful issues that challenge or block your entry to a more healthful psychological and emotional path.

To reach the more healthful path that can lead to triumph and freedom you need your curiosity.

Curiosity asks, "Why must I live this way?" Then, as you become more alert and aware, you seek your answer in new and deeper ways.

Asking this questions is the beginning of the search, find and understand section of your journey. Your secrets are treasures which, when discovered, understood and emotionally processed, will help free you from your overeating life style.

How Secrets Relate to Overeating and Binge Behavior

There are two kinds of secrets: the ones you know about and the ones you don't know about.

Secrets overeaters know about and try to keep hidden from others cover a wide range of eating behaviors. Some secrets include:

Gorging on bread, pasta, pastry, ice cream, frozen yogurt, especially alone at night.
Getting caught in the sweet/salt trap eating peanuts and chips with cookies and candy.
Sitting in front of the TV, eating and 'checking out' for hours.
Eating for comfort while driving the car.

Overeaters often calm social jitters by eating privately before they eat a meal with other people. This also helps overeaters to hide their true eating habits. It's easy to say no publicly to second helpings and chocolate cake when you have eaten sweets before the meal. Plus, you know you can gorge yourself when you get home.

Overeaters often try to convince others to join them in "innocent treats," pretending their eating splurge is an occasional lark and not part of a regular pattern.

Keeping secrets from others often involves lying. Lying strips you of your self esteem and fills you with permanent guilt. The guilt feels permanent because the lies seem so necessary. Without the lies your secrets would become known. Public disclosure of your secrets seems to you like it would be a personal catastrophe.

What are your secrets? What secrets do you try to ignore and even forget about at times? What secrets have you kept hidden away for many years?

Bringing them out in the open in a journal first, with a therapist, with a trusted friend can begin to open pathways in your mind, heart and soul that allow you to experience new forms of healing.

Details: Category: Workbook

Situation - broken promises: Have you broken a promise to anyone lately? Include yourself. You break a promise to yourself every time you overeat.

Exercise: Make a list of your broken promises. Make good on the promises you can still honor. You may discover that some promises are impossible to keep and should not have been made. Acknowledge this. Knowing and accepting what you can and cannot accomplish increases your ability to establish reasonable limits for yourself. You become trustworthy to yourself and others.

Details: Category: Workbook

Situation - loneliness: Alone at night you want to eat. You want the comfort of food and perhaps television.

Exercise: Pause. Think of the people you have known throughout your life. There is one, perhaps more, who made a positive impact on you. Perhaps you like, love, or admire them. Perhaps you didn't know these people well, yet are grateful they touched your life.

Think of a thought they would appreciate. Share it with them. For example, send them an expression of appreciation or a picture, article or cartoon that might delight them.

Rather than sink into the oblivion of food and television, you can connect yourself with people in a meaningful way.

Details: Category: Workbook

Situation - good bye: You have said good bye to your friends and are home alone. You feel nervous. You are ready to eat whatever you can find for comfort.
Exercise: Pause. Consider moments that delight you. Give yourself a simple delight now while you are feeling the overeating urge. Perhaps it's listening to music or taking a warm bath. Read a poem out loud to your cat or dog. Sing in the shower or do some physical exercise to let out some energy.

Details: Category: Workbook

Secrets from yourself are usually based on inescapable stress situations in childhood. They often involve blatant physical, sexual and emotional abuse. However, roots of secrets can be found elsewhere as well.

Some examples are:

To change homes, schools, friends and neighborhoods regularly or in a traumatic way.
To face death or serious illness of crucial people in your life.
War
Riots
Earthquakes
Fire
Refugee flight and resettlement

Too much unpredictable behavior and schedule changes can cause intolerable stress to a child. Sometimes the child discovers that food stops or at least dims the pain of that stress.