Awareness: Your Threat or Ally?

Awareness, necessary for eating disorder recovery, comes in countless and unpredictable forms. 

When we are not aware we do not have the awareness of what we are missing.  Awareness rises from a dark night gently through a slow dawn.  Or it arrives during a dark storm with the crackling blast of a lightning bolt.

An eating disorder, with all its many symptoms, blocks awareness and keeps you in a limited and painful life.  But you don't know how limited or how painful your life is because you don't have the awareness of life beyond your eating disorder.

The people you see who seem to be living free, making positive life choices you cannot, stepping forward into the hurly burly of living while you remain isolated, moving among others comfortably regardless of their shape and size, speaking up for what they believe and taking the consequences seem like strangers, even aliens.

You either don't know them or recognize them or you do see them and feel they are living in a day to day world that has nothing to do with your existence.

When awareness comes it's not an additional viewpoint you add to your existing way of being in the world.  Awareness turns your perspective around or inside out or deepens it or whisks you to a new way of seeing altogether.

Awareness is dangerous to the status quo.  If an eating disordered way of life is your status quo, then your eating disorder ways will fight off awareness.  Awareness is a great threat to your disorder.

If you know that, then wouldn't it make sense to welcome what threatens the way you live your life if your life is governed by your eating disorder?

1. What's in your life now that threatens you?
2. What would be required of you to meet this threat?
3. How would taking that action affect your eating disorder symptoms?
4. Is the action worth taking?
5. In other words, will you accept the challenge to your eating disordered way of thinking, feeling and living?
6. If you will accept your challenge then what is your first step?

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