I’m finally beginning to realize what recovery is, and what it is not. There is a portion of the recovery process that many individuals, struggling with an eating disorder, get stuck in. Part of therapy is learning to express oneself, but individuals with eating disorders tend to get stuck in expressing the struggle of their eating disorder. You see expressing the eating disorder struggle is safe; you don’t have to recover from the eating disorder to do this. However, when you’re in recovery and you’ve been hiding your eating disordered rituals from the world, it feels liberating to finally have the capability of expressing the eating disorder. Letting go of the eating disorder requires moving than just expressing the eating disorder and the rituals you have been performing. True recovery cannot come until the eating disorder is one of many expressions that you have to offer the world.

The only way out of an eating disorder is to become real, but ‘realness’ is not an easy task. ‘Realness’ requires an individual to step into the world, and to experience the world color by color. Becoming real requires discovering the world color by color, because the eating disorder is living life in black and white. What many therapists do not emphasize enough is that experiencing color cannot be done in a single leap. Even though a world of color offers joy and happiness, when you’ve been living in a world of black and white, year after year, life in color seems pretty scary. For this reason, the world of color must be acquired in steps.

Melanie Dawn
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/what-recovery-is-135626.html