Your dream images can help your awareness explode like a blooming fire and lead you into recovery with newly released energy.

Dream Journal Value

Keeping a written record of your dreams is often part of eating disorder recovery work. Clients do it dutifully, resentfully, awkwardly, and enthusiastically. They forget to do it.

They can't do it because they can't remember their dreams. They are embarrassed to do it because the dreams are embarrassing. Or they refuse to do it because the dreams are frightening. Yet, any of these experiences add value to the recovery process.

This is the story of how one mother, with Jesus imagery in her dream, reconnected to her authentic self during a time of conflict with her adult daughter.

Q: Why are inner explorations and investigations of dream images called work?

A: Because we are construction workers. We build bridges. We gather raw materials from our psyches, discover their relevance and shape them to form bridges between our unconscious and conscious.

We create a means of transporting what is deep within us to our day-to-day perceptions. We learn to tolerate emotional disruption as we adjust to greater meaning and understanding in our lives and the world.

Code: Man or woman, prince or princess, boy or girl is transformed into a frog. Clue: The crown on the head signifies a magical metamorphosis. Action Required: Find a human to accomplish three impossible tasks to free the frog-encased prisoner. Question: Are you the prisoner or the human who can free the prisoner? Or are you both?

Fairy tales are old. Most were not written by a specific author. They were created over hundreds of years from bits of story, myth, dream, culture, told and retold by storytellers, altered by the storyteller’s individualism and the response of the villagers in the telling.

* Nightmares, when explored, are gifts and guides to what is right and next for you.

When energy is suppressed and squeezed into a smaller and smaller container, it eventually can tear the container apart and surge forward. We see it in our kitchens when water reaches the boiling point and the spout of the tea kettle catches the steam. You hear the whistle and know it is time to make tea. The surge is useful information.

But boiling soup or sauce will blow the lid off an unwatched pot. And a quiet subservient person can be carrying unexpressed frustration and pain that grows in intensity until it explodes into violence. The nice, quiet, unassuming person with no criminal record who thrashes out with fists or bullets is well known to newspaper readers and TV news viewers.

Women recovering from eating disorders can be unaware of the massive change about to disrupt their lives. Many report versions of an overwhelming wave of water dream. They consider this dream a nightmare.

One version is this: The woman is on a boat in the ocean, often with friends or spouse or both. It's a beautiful day. The sea is calm. She and her friends are relaxing. She feels that all is normal and pleasant.

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?