The Battle Continues...

Recovery

Choosing to leave your demons behind, and wanting to live a more positive life, is one of the best and most difficult steps in the journey to beating mental health.

Some refer to this as "Recovery." It means that they have realised how much damage their mental health is doing to them (both mentally and physically), and have decided to make a change for the better! It's a wonderful thing when someone wants to fight the issue and conquer their fears and bad habits. It's similar to breaking an addiction like alcohol, smoking and drugs. It's a difficult period of time because you're going against what your addiction has been telling you to do for years, and for some it can be very hard to ignore the voices they hear everytime they eat something or even think about food.

Control

The difficulty with going against a severe addiction, is that the person 'recovering' will feel suddenly 'out of control.' Meaning they are out of control of HOW they run their daily lives. For example; people suffering from Anorexia like being in control of how much they eat/don't eat in the form of counting calories. The foods they eat are usually very low in number (e.g. less than 400 calories a day) and even then the food eaten most likely won't be what the body needs daily, like proteins and vitamins.

Relapse

What is Relapse? For example, an E.D. sufferer may feel this loss of control when they have to eat foods that are higher in calorific number (but more nutritious for them!) it can be very easy to slip back into bad habits. This could be simple things like not finishing a meal, going to bed early to skip dinner, or over exercising at night to "burn the calories."

This is called "Relapse." It's common to fall into this period when fighting mental health/addictions. It's a way of them gaining that feeling of CONTROL again. But don't panic! This does NOT make you a 'failure' or someone who's not 'good enough for recovery.' (These are actual words I've seen used by those in recovery and it's so not true!)

What's really happening here, is that the addiction, be it an Eating Disorder or Self Harm, is the thing that's controlling YOU! It's making you refer back to you're old habits. But if you take control of the ADDICTION, you can stop it from taking over your life! You have the say, you press the stop button, and you can always say NO.

Finding the courage to say no and fighting that mental battle IS going to be difficult, but once you realise that it is nothing but a parasite feeding off you're emotions and physical body, you CAN recover and you can get rid of it. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it! And we all know how the rest of the journey goes...

#gumption!

x FREEDOM x