“Finding Purpose-Driven Recovery,” Guest Blog by Lindsey Hayden
What is recovery? What are you recovering? Jump on your Google search engine and look up “recovery” and then click on the images tab. Ten thousand (at least) pictures of mostly nothing. So many ground-level road images where the road leads to seemingly nothing. Where DOES the road to recovery lead?
This was how I felt toward “recovery” when I started seeing someone for my eating disorder. Side note here, I didn’t actually want to see anyone for my disorder, I was doing it to prove to my untreated paranoid schizophrenic boyfriend that it was safe and we could “recover together.”
Yeah, that didn’t work out, but now you have some context about where my head was at when I started this journey. I would literally walk into my appointments and tell the provider we really didn’t need to say anything, just as long as my boyfriend knew I was here.So I was THE unwilling patient. But as I became more sick, was admitted to higher levels of care, and developed friendships with my fellow patients, some tiny little ember of what is ME started to glow a teeny bit little brighter.
I had weekly appointments with Scarlett Ramey at her Seattle clinic and she helped me fan that little ember even though I was still unaware of its existence. She saw it and she knew it would grow. But still, even with a desire to complete the journey to recovery I had absolutely no concept of what that meant, what it might hold for me, what it could feel like. I’d had an eating disorder for the vast majority of my life so I didn’t have memories to look back on of “those good times I had without it.”
The few people I met who had recovered didn’t seem to be more happy than me, more successful than anyone else, so what was it?The turning point in my recovery was finding my “why,” my reason for going through this raw, emotional and painful process. I know I had to get to a certain point in recovery to find what that was, there was hours and hours of work I had to do on myself to get to it. So part of the process is continuing to move forward and make the next good recovery decision completely on faith.
Your road might look like those Google images for a while. It might feel like you’re stepping out onto nothing at all and just hoping that road meets your foot and you don’t fall. But once you take one, and you don’t fall, you don’t get hurt, nothing gets taken away, the next step is just a tiny bit easier. You grew your faith in yourself and your journey just a little bit.
I’m now a yoga instructor and started my own company (Gro Yoga) using yoga as a tool to teach people this concept of building faith in themselves. Yoga calls on us to face ourselves in our strength and limitations we’re given ourselves. Eating disorders teach these same limitations. “I can’t eat that,” “if I eat that (Oreo cookie) I’ll gain 5 pounds,” I can’t speak up or I’ll lose someone.” It’s the same concept. We place these limitations on ourselves to keep us SAFE because at some point we made the connection that X plus Y equals Z.
The process of recovery is difficult, painful, all of it, but it’s a practice. We don’t wake up, decide to start doing yoga and are perfect at it, and the same goes for recovery. Take those little steps in the right direction and little by little you’ll build that trust in yourself again and then you’ll feel like taking bigger steps. Then you’ll start to find things along that road. Your “restoring Self” will begin to find meaning where you maybe couldn’t find it before. Bigger things will be revealed along the way, and then suddenly your Why will appear. That Why gives your recovery a purpose. There’s some line you cross where you’ve been pushing yourself forward by pure faith that it’ll be ok, and then you’re suddenly being pulled forward by your purpose.
Everything you do, every decision you make is suddenly so heavily meaningful because you know it’s bringing you closer to YOUR purpose. Your horizon is no longer empty.So yes, it does get easier. Where you’re at right now might be dark and feel hopeless, but if you just keep coming back to making the next right decision, it will get easier. It will get brighter. Remember this is a practice. You are practicing being a person recovered from an eating disorder and it’s ok to make mistakes, it’s ok if it’s hard. You have permission to start learning how to trust yourself again, and for it to be hard. You’ve got this. #GoGroYourself
Lindsey Hayden
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Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️