Dear Shh and Kym, First, I love seeing how you support each other and at such deep levels of care and understanding! :) Now, the issue you are exploring is a topic - more like a revelation - that comes up in a particular phase of recovery. The person becomes less clouded by fantasy wishes/beliefs and more aware of reality. At this stage (and I said it too, in my recovery work) she say or shouts or screams - "This is what the real world is?!!! I worked so hard to be able to see this? !!!! This is horrible! This sucks!" The dream, fantasy, wish, belief is that the eating disorder is the cause of pain. Therefore, when the eating disorder and its hold on you diminishes you will be in a happy healthy world that is unclouded by ED miseries. Instead, you get the real world. Just look at the front page of the newspaper. Terrible things are going on and have been going on, as the Irish say, "Since God was a boy." (or girl. :)) Of course we cry ourselves to sleep or storm around the block on a walk to release rage or cower in the dark in fear. The full range of emotion emotions is available to us as we respond to the conditions of this real world. With an eating disorder you are oblivious - and often have no idea how oblivious you are. In recovery, oblivion fails and awareness pours in. Often you don't like what you see. Okay. So the adult, mature, healthy and courageous position is, what do I do about it? How do I best handle this? Starve? no. Binge? no. Treadmill till I collapse? no. What then? Avoid? maybe Get political? maybe Get more education? For sure! Learn how to learn? Yes Find people who can or want to address the negativity? Yes Be creative myself? Yes Seek out the positive in the world? Yes And support the positive I find? Yes! And create more positive myself? Yes! Yes! Crying or raging or trembling with fear shows us the raw energy we have. Instead of suffocating that energy with ED we harness that energy to create, build, support the life (and the world) we want. (I think I'll tweak this and write it as a blog. More people need to hear this. Do you agree?)