Tintagel, the legendary home of King Arthur, is on the high cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the sea.
Healing Your Hungry Heart is on schedule for an August publication date. As I read your letters and listen to your voices on my phone, in my practice, and on the internet I've learned more about how I need my professional psychotherapist self and my eating disorder-recovering self to join with my storyteller self in the pages between beginning and end.
In my introduction, where I talk about how I lived with my eating disorder - bulimia -, how I grew up with it, and how I found my path to recovery I mention a love story, my dramatic romance with a Cornishman I met in Truro in Cornwall. We traveled back and forth across the planet between
Cornwall and Los Angeles to be with each other while I was changing my life, in the midst of getting my degree and not yet licensed as a clinician. I had not begun my recovery work at all. In fact, my bulimia was still a secret. My editor at Conari Press said this part of my story was a tease. I either had to cut it out altogether or say more.
Say more? OMG.
This was too personal to share, I thought. But, as I sat with my feelings and reviewed the relationship I realized that I had to tell that story. So many feelings, actions and decisions within that relationship are revealing about the life of an adult woman with an eating disorder who is without recovery and then beginning to move toward recovery without her knowing it yet.
Clinically trained by wise mental health senior mental health professionals I had learned to keep my private self separate from my patients. So revealing my story was, at first, a revolution. But then I remembered that the reason I kept my private life separate from my patients was clear. I was not to burden them with issues in my life. My guiding star was, and still is, only speak and reveal what I believe is in the interest of my patient's healing and development.
My hunch is that my story, so personal to me, may be an outline of many stories women with eating disorders live before recovery and during early steps toward real healing. This thought freed me to speak of my lived experience to show you that healing and recovery can and do happen.
Plus, I believe that parts of my story may help you work through parts of the story you are living now or make peace with the stories in your past. So, my personal revelations are not a revolution at all. I'm still following the star my teachers taught me to see and recognize.
It's been wonderful to write this book and take it as far as I can go. And then......discover through gifted and generous editors and my publisher that I can go beyond what I thought were my limits and make the book a better book. Plus, I get to develop more myself as a writer and as a person. I hope you can share and benefit from my experience as you read Healing Your Hungry Heart.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR and FL. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
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