Liv and Susie are asking questions that relate to many people who restrict. (In response to invitation post) The questions go like this: "How do I change course and start gaining when I am underweight?" "Even if I’m at a weight that’s too low, how can I just maintain instead of losing?" "I’m still losing weight! How can I stop?"  "When will I feel that it is okay to eat?"

An approach to stop restricting I’ll give you an approach you can use to help yourself stop restricting. Then I’ll try to help you understand how it works. But please know, you don’t have to understand how this approach works for it to be effective.

For you quick readers: Be your own doctor. Give yourself the authority to take charge of your health.

Sudden anorexia recovery efforts can be as shocking to the body as well as the mind. Here is one woman’s recovery story presented via our correspondence. She gave me permission to post our dialogue on my blog in hopes that our exchange would help you. (Her name is changed and her city is omitted.)

Hello Joanna, I found your website online and was hoping that you could help me. I struggled in silence with anorexia for eight years.

Coping with the pain and turmoil in a life governed by an eating disorder can tempt you into making to do lists.  You want positive change in your life. Why not just make a list of what you want to change, and follow your own directions in an orderly manner? A "To Do" list can seem like your solution. Can it work, or is it a set up for failure?

Do you know about Sojourner Truth? Perhaps this strong, brave and eloquent woman of the 1800's can inspire you as she did me and millions of others.

Recently a new therapist asked me, "Do you try to get your clients to diminish their bingeing behaviors from the beginning of therapy or do you explore their feelings first? I know there are differing views on this."

When I heard this question, several points of equal value, in my opinion, arrived simultaneously in my mind concerning therapy work with eating disorder patients.  Please understand that these considerations are simultaneous.

My first thought was that I don't try to 'get' my clients to do anything. I want them to heal and develop the capacity to live a fulfilling and satisfying life. But what that means to them and how they specifically accomplish that falls into the realm of their personal values, decision making and evolution.

The Dream That Opens the Way: Toward a Midlife Woman’s Conscious Rescue

By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Summary
In the quiet interior of recovery, the dream that opens the way often marks the moment a midlife woman senses her own rescue becoming possible. When she stays with its images rather than explaining them away, she enters a living relationship with her unconscious. Through dreamwork and active imagination, depth psychotherapy transforms night images into a path toward conscious healing that develops from within.

Claiming the Lost Self: Emergence of authentic life rising from the shadows

Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women
Seven Part Series Introduction and Orientation
By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Series Note

This Introduction opens Claiming the Lost Self, a seven-part series that traces a woman’s movement from early distortion to the emergence of her genuine identity. Here, you will see how survival patterns that were once required now block truth and vitality. The series shows how clarity and instinct rise from within, guiding a woman from false love and unconscious suffering toward restored meaning, inner authority, and a life grounded in her real self.

Series Summary
Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women, a series, examines how women repress their authentic selves to survive and how, in midlife, their hidden lives press upward to be lived. The series traces the movement from distortion through recognition toward a life they can respect and honor based on their true values. It is for women who want not explanations but the strength and freedom to live as themselves.

This series strengthens and supports a woman as she moves from adaptive self-protection into living her life as her own.

This seven-part work explores how early distortions of care and loyalty bury authentic experience beneath vigilance, compliance, and performance. Adaptation that once provided protection becomes too costly. What a woman tolerates begins to feel unbearable. She senses conflict between how she lives and what she privately knows. The friction itself becomes a sign that something is rising in her that will not be dismissed.

Each article stands alone. Together, they accompany the movement from survival through awakening, recognition, meaning, and lived presence.

Beauty safely hidden in the leaves

Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women