Bear the conflict. Eventually, if you follow step 1 and step 2 you will feel uncomfortable. You will feel afraid or mad or so angry and depressed you want to blame something or someone or many people or conditions for your emotional pain.

You can get through this stage without understanding, relying on a devil may care act of desperation. But that often does not work. If you try to break the conflict in yourself through dangerous activities you are not trying to die, although you may. You are trying to stop the pain by taking extreme distracting action.

Prepare a stable base for when you inevitably lose your balance. You will regroup in a new and more solid way.

Now, you take on the task of working through the polarized tensions in yourself to evolve out of the status quo and into your more developed life.

Friends change as you heal and mature. Being in harmony with your true self attracts new and more healthy relationships. *

When you have an eating disorder friends who are attracted to you are attracted to who you are and how you respond with your eating disorder intact. Friend change as you change throughout your recovery work.

How you and your friends change as you recover

When you are deep in your eating disorder your friends and associates have a relationship with a sick person.  When you start to get well your attitudes, choices and responses change. Your friends' responses will change too.

People can find their stable base from which to take this journey in many ways.

Leonardo DaVinci found his base in nature, as do many who can see through life forms to the metaphors and actions of natural life forces. Ray Bradbury found his base in libraries, as do many who discover the people and perspectives from across time who wrote and filled the books that bring us worlds we never dreamed of on our own. We recognize them when we find them.