Recovery Quotes - Page 2

Clinicians have told me that our emotional is arrested at the age that an eating disorder takes control of our lives. After we recover, we pick up emotionally where we left off at that age.

It’s not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it’s any comfort, the dark wood isn’t just that. It’s also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

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Because the truth is, while bulimia is a devastating illness I would wish upon no one, it has taught me about the fragility of life and the vital need for compassion. Today, I’m quick to love and throw my arms around any girl who has ever stared at a puddle of her own vomit and questioned the point of her life. Or who has ever let a Photoshopped image on a glossy magazine preach to her about her own self-worth, her own beauty. Or who has ever been afraid to face the pain and suffering, within and outside of herself.Today, I’m quick to love.

Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

Sometimes I struggle. Sometimes I falter. Sometimes I live in gray. But always I remember the yarrow you’ve grown in the spaces of my rib cage. I now love with roses from my heart, with lilacs from my mouth.

Instead of saying, "I'm damaged, I'm broken, I have trust issues" say "I'm healing, I'm rediscovering myself, I'm starting over.

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of ‘victim thinking.’ Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me.

My Keeper's house. Right there. Brown shingles, dark red shutters, yellow-and-black police tape wrapped around the massive tree trunks. The attic window looks out over the yard and the world narrows until that attic window is the only thing I can see.

Is a few hours of hell-raising, or respite from life's toil worth this every morning?

When shame is met with compassion and not received as confirmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it go, we will see ourselves as clean where we once thought we were dirty. We will remember our innocence. We will see how our shame supported a system in which the perpetrators were protected and we bore the brunt of their offense — first in its actuality, then again in carrying their shame for it.If the method we chose to try to beat out shame was perfectionism, we can relax now, shake the burden off our shoulders, and give ourselves a chance to loosen up and make some errors. Hallelujah! Our freedom will not come from tireless effort and getting it all exactly right.

Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.

Just as others pray daily, you should think to yourself daily about what you can do to be closer to this Ideal Image. Think: "What can I do today to make my life better?" "What can I do to become more like my Ideal Image?

It was His gentle voice who calledand sent His angel pain to guide me, through the long ‘n dusty corridors, and empty hallways of my soul.

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.

When I was around Sunny, there was no time to dream about some easier, prettier, more comprehensible, less fucked-up existence. Now was all we had: Sunny lifting her eyes to meet mine. Cupping water in my own hands to rinse the blood off her head. Sunny’s tongue on my nose, her tail thudding on my leg. The reach of my hand across her spine. The words of comfort and rage and fear and sadness and hope that I spoke only in her presence.

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one...

Like an empty bucket, my soul rings hollow when empty vibrates with emptiness … hollow sound of loneliness. Every cell in my body does not want to be alone.My loneliness is frightening …an all consuming thought.

It will all be over in 2 weeks

I almost wish I had cancer. Then I’d either beat it or die from it. But my disease, even if successfully treated, will never go away. And it might not kill me. But it will hang over me like the blade of a guillotine; more threatening inert than if the blade suddenly slips and mercifully turns out my lights. This is my war to end all wars.

It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting. I wonder why my body seems bigger today than it did yesterday. Maybe it’s water weight. Maybe it’s my outfit. Or maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me.’ I know it’s not possible for me to gain a noticeable amount of weight overnight, so I will go no further than that. I move on with my day without skipping a beat—and definitely without missing a meal.

When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.

Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.

Everything was so broken, but it would heal. Saxonia will heal. Hollownot will heal. Everything will heal.I was broken. I will heal.It is certainty that destroys the souls of men.

When life beats us down, we often do not feel worthwhile to ourselves nor to anyone else. Often, we try to hide our feelings of inadequacy in pursuit of perfection, which develops into self-loathing. If only we can be perfect, then we can be okay.

Do it double, because some can't do it at all.

Better spend time working hard to maintain your good habits because you may look for time to recover it but to no avail!

There is life after abuse. This is mine.

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to “forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.

Late one night, during a toss-and-turn fretful sleep, I pondered my crisis. No solutions were on the horizon. I, again, wasted my psychic energy with prayer. Nothing. No angel on a white cloud. No rainbow’s pot of gold. No way to control the people I loved. As I rolled over and put the pillow over my head attempting to block all that was negative, I silently screamed for rescue. Then, in a far away and distinct part of my brain, a small voice said, “You have to do this on your own.”I thought, “Was that the best You can do?” This god, to whom I was desperately sending burnt offerings of my own humiliation, couldn’t send an avenging angel or a wise man imparting wisdom? All You can give me is this feeble message of abandonment? At that moment, I quit believing in that god.

Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps

At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness.

I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was striving for in recovery was a real possibility. I thought about these experiences and used them as encouragement to keep moving forward. Even one minute of freedom was proof that I was getting better. At first, these times were few and far between. Now, these moments are connected; they are my life

Compassion is the most powerful tool you can have when it comes to healing addictions of any kind. Put simply, what your partner needs most from you is compassion.

Life is a funny thing. We claim it to be our own; but the truth is, it's not. It belongs to something much bigger. We, like everything else, are transient. This life is temporary and everything about us is temporary. What we call our life is nothing more than borrowed energy from something much bigger--nature, the universe, God--whatever floats your boat. And one day, when we pass, we will give that energy back to the world we borrowed it from in the first place.

I say to my sister, "I thought you were doing the things in our Dream Book. I was sure of it." "Why would I do that stuff without you?" "Because you could.""Well, you were wrong.

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.

Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.

When I realized that my body had been damaged from adverse environmental exposures, I decided to use it for medical research and to develop the recovery techniques.

Eradication of pain, "deviant", or "oppositional" behaviors does not indicate healing; however, it can signify successful conditioning.

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance.

I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

In some ways, com­ing to terms with my­self and work­ing to­ward re­cov­ery has been like say­ing “I love you” to some­one but keep­ing a loaded gun hid­den in your back pocket, just in case that per­son pisses you off enough.

Healing isn’t just about pain. It’s about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.

Our minds have a great capacity for deception. This does not mean we are necessarily dishonest but if we are not careful, when our brains do not have answers, our minds will create them.

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was starving myself. In starvation mode, my body literally thought I was facing a famine. It didn’t know that I was living near a grocery store and several fast-food restaurants. Thinking I was facing a real food shortage, its primal instinct was to binge on large amounts of food, conserving fat in preparation for the hard times ahead.

Why would God create a defective product? Why would a God who gave me free will require any certain belief? Why would a God powerful enough to create the universe need me to justify His existence? Why would He want me seeking favor with Him to manipulate my entrance to some afterlife?

Eradication of pain, deviant, or oppositional behaviors does not indicate healing; however, it can signify successful conditioning.

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.

This woman’s size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry,as a silent scream frozen on her face.

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasons - I have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of colour that is a northern fall. And now, the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake rages below, I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.But first the winter must be waited out. And that waiting has worth.

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.