I have been thinking about hope. When I first met you, most of you felt hopeless about recovery. Some of you have had your eating disorder for fifteen or more years and have tried over and over again to recover without success. Some of you believe that no one can help you; that you will be sick for the rest of your life. Some of you are afraid to even think about the possibility of being behavior free, aware that once again you might try only to be disappointed yet another time. Over the past five months, I have watched many of you go from feeling hopeless to feeling hopeful and have been trying to understand what precipitates this transformation.
I began by looking up the definition of hope in the dictionary. Hope is "A desire accompanied by expectation or or a belief in fulfillment (of that desire)." Thus, to go from hopelessness to hopefulness requires two things: (1) a DESIRE for something to happen in conjunction with (2) the BELIEF or EXPECTATION that this desire can be fulfilled. When this happens, one moves from a feeling of powerlessness and lack of control to one of power and choice. However, with this realization of CHOICE and POWER comes RESPONSIBILITY for how you use the power and what you choose to do. In the face of this realization, hopelessness can become a desirable refuge once again.
I have seen many of you fluctuate: hope...despair, hope...despair. If you desire to stop binge eating, purging, or starving and realize you have a choice whether to engage in the behavior or not, you may feel a combination of hope and fear. Hope, because you know that you actually can stop your behavior and that it does not have to be part of your life forever, and fear, because you understand that now that you are aware that you have a choice, you also understand that the responsibility for your actions is your own.
So...how does one avoid falling back into despair? How does change happen? Part of it comes through accepting responsibility for your behavior and FORGIVING yourself for it. You need to recognize that in your pain, you were desperate to find a lifepreserver to help you survive and you did; you found a way to cope, but not a healthy way. In fact, this way of coping is being mean/abusive to yourself while at the same time, in a destructive manner, this coping behavior has helped to make your world a little easier place in which to live.