Let’s face it. Relapse episodes are the pits. They always feel seriously discouraging. It’s the same if you’re just starting your recovery, or if you’ve been thinking you’re out of the eating disorder woods. Everybody who’s ever tried to change anything in their lives can commiserate. Though we all sort of know better, we fall into believing that improvement is a straight–line process to our destination. Of course, this just isn’t reality.
My opinion is that if you’re going to have to deal with the misery of relapse, you deserve to come out of it with something to show for your trouble. Unfortunately, the benefits you get from relapse don’t fall off trees or otherwise just come with the territory. You have to get in there and dig! But there are some guaranteed nuggets to be mined if you go looking for them. I’m going to discuss three relapse nuggets. Hopefully this will set you searching for your own.
Nugget 1: Learning from the relapse
If you’ve been working on recovery, I’m going to assume you’re already at least a little familiar with the necessary process of learning from your relapses. What led to the episode? How does this knowledge help you improve your recovery plan? What light does it shed on symptom triggers you may not have been aware of till now? Doing the post–relapse review is often one of the richest sources of information about your own personal eating disorder profile.
Nugget 2: Developing compassion for yourself
I’m an insight kind of therapist. By insight I mean gaining awareness about why we do the things we do. Not that I believe insight “cures,” but it’s awfully good for some things. One of the things insight seems good for is the way “getting it” about relapse episodes not only helps you plan better for recovery (see Nugget #1), it helps you forgive yourself.
Most of the time it seems to me my eating disorder clients start out with some pretty harsh explanations for their relapses and slips (for instance I’m stupid; I’m weak; I can’t succeed at anything.) Most of the time if they’re willing to dig for a deeper explanation, they discover the episodes actually happen for very human, very understandable reasons. More often than not, this involves seeing how their symptoms represent efforts to cope with overwhelming experiences. This awareness allows them to appreciate the positive intention of their symptoms while directing them to look for more constructive methods. Such a compassionate understanding can help neutralize the shame
Nugget 3: Building resilience
Think of all the unwanted personal experiences that confront you when you relapse: mistake–making, frustration, personal imperfection, disappointment and more.
All of these experiences are an inevitable part of recovery, just as they are a part of any change or self–improvement project, or, for that matter, of life itself.
So if we can’t avoid these experiences, what can we do? We can build our tolerance and flexibility in dealing with them when they occur. Tolerance means we come to know we can stand it even if we don’t like it. Flexibility means we can reset, learn from what happened, make appropriate adjustments, and move forward. When we work to increase our tolerance and flexibility in the face of recovery setbacks, we become more resilient, that is, we have more bounce–back. Bringing this increased resilience to life beyond an eating disorder is one of the great gifts of recovery.
