Shared activities with friends are fun and boost your health.

How to make friends is a skill we need as we move through life. Plus, friendship plays an important part in continued eating disorder recovery. Isolation can be familiar and life-draining.

Wandering through grocery store aisles in a state where you feel invisible, just looking for foods that will be good for a binge, is practice for continued isolation. You feel invisible, but what's happening is that the people in the store seem almost ghostlike. It's not that they don't see you. It's that you don't see them.

When you are on the path to recovery, your eating or not eating may be more in harmony with your body's needs. But without friendship, you may roam through your days looking for stimulation and not seeing people.  You may miss opportunities to make friends. You may believe you are as invisible as ever.

Shadows of the mind. Light and darkness. Active and passive. More in our depths that we can develop and use than we know.

People usually come to psychotherapy for the first time because they are in pain, bewildered and because everything they know about problem-solving no longer works for them. Going inside their psyches seems like the last option. Even then, they do not know what to expect. At first, they want to know how long it will take to fix their lives.

This is a normal response when a person is plunged into an unrecognizable world where their well-honed talents and skills do not bring desired results. They feel angry, lost, frustrated and afraid.

We need our internal structure to hold, especially when we can't see ahead.

Values

We define ourselves by our personal values. We know who we are and live by our personal code. At least, that is what we convince ourselves.

But some of our values are what we wish we supported. Some of them are based on what we are told to support by respected others. And some of our values may be based on our fear of disapproval.

This slackliner achieves stability from a developed inner sense of fluid, subtle movement to maintain sustainable balance. We need that ability now.

The eating disorder system that gave you a sense of control and protection is drastically altered during this coronavirus era.

When you have an eating disorder, you have developed ways to rely on it when your feelings are too uncomfortable to bear and when disruptions in your life feel overwhelming. That’s what an eating disorder is for. It may cause havoc in your life and prevent you from developing and moving on to a more mature and satisfying existence, but it’s there for you when you want comfort and escape from what feels like too much to experience.