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

Situation - lying: Have you told a lie lately? Lying is related to overeating. Don't you lie to yourself about how much you eat and why?

Exercise: Think about lies you told or are still telling. Write down to whom you lied and why. Include yourself.

What made that lie necessary? How can you begin to correct that lie or prevent that lie from being necessary in the future? By facing the secrets you know you are keeping you become closer to facing deep, personal secrets you don't know about. These are the secrets that hold tremendous power over your overeating habits.

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 - 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

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

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.