The secret is out; it’s been Pinterest’ed, Instagram’ed, put on ten thousand Hobby Lobby plaques and stitched onto as many pillows. “Courage is not the absence of fear.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful and profound. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. What about actually doing something while at the same time being afraid? It. Is. Terrifying. And if you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, you are probably doing A LOT of things that scare you every day. While it is exhausting work, know that every recovery decision you make is building your resilience and is going to make each following healthy decision just a little bit easier.
Cultivating Resilience
Resilience grows whenever we do something that challenges us in some way and we continue forward in spite of it. Like a sapling growing on a hillside; the wind blows the tiny limbs around and bends its supple trunk, and as it does, the tree grows stronger and more resilient so that later in life it won’t fall when the wind blows.
The same principle happens when an anorexic patient consumes a fear food, withstands the discomfort and anxiety it may bring up, and then moves on. The fact that he did something that evoked fear, witnessed himself being strong enough to sit through the feelings, and came out of the experience unharmed, creates a new neural pathway. That builds resilience. The old neural pathway “knew” that such-and-such food causes harm, but now we have a new path with new information that says “that food scared me, and I am stronger than that fear.”
Resilience is not circumstance-specific either. The resilience you build at the table in your recovery will branch out to other aspects of your life. These challenging experiences that you conquer will seep into your bones and develop a new confidence, a solidarity in your being that the “wind” won’t be able to shake. As your resilience grows and those new neural pathways become deeper, making recovery-focused decisions becomes easier and begins to feel powerful.