I was discussing life and recovery with Dr. H today, and somehow the idea came up that recovery was a lot like the childhood game Chutes and Ladders.  It seems that it's much easier to slide back down than it is to climb your way up.  What's more, it seems that there are far more chutes than ladders, and the chutes seem to take you bad much further than the ladders propel you forward.

"I remember getting so close to the final square as a kid," I told Dr. H, "and then I hit that stupid slide that took me back to the very beginning."

So it seems with recovery.  My recent struggles have made me feel (however incorrectly) that I'm back at the beginning again.

Then Dr. H said, "That horrible slide takes you back, but never to Square One. You're never back at the very beginning. At the worst, I think you end up on the second square. But never the very first one."

Translation: you have always learned something along the journey, however much you may feel you have failed completely.  Realizing you're at the end of a slide and have lost ground is disheartening, but you've never lost every last inch.

And ED slips can be often like a trip down a playground slide. Exilharating at times, but then the ride comes to an end, and you hit the ground with a thud.

Of course, the entire point of a slide is to climb up and go down.  The point of recovery is to not slide back down.  That being said, I think we all do at some point or another.  We slide a bit--maybe not all the way back down to the asphalt, but standing at the top of the slide can seem rather alluring.  We think we can catch ourselves before we hit the ground.  Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't.

Not to mention that climbing back up a slide isn't the easiest of tasks. Just ask these kittens.



Remember: no matter how much you slide, you're never back to Square One, not really.

Although I did see Dr. H this afternoon--Keurig time!!--and she did share a wonderful metaphor with me, I can't remember exactly what she said.  One of my friends I chatted with online the other night did, however, have a great analogy.

We were talking about how recovery could be so painfully obvious at times.  I know I need to eat.  This isn't a mystery.  I know I need to eat regularly, too.  But the interesting thing is that recovery isn't as straightforward as "just" eating.  I wish I could sit down to my daily three meals and two snacks each day with no chatter in my head and with no internal resistance.  It has gotten easier, yes.  Recovery remains a fight.

Emily said that her therapist told her that the difficulties are a lot like the difference between knowing how to drive and still needing GPS.  Knowing how to eat properly, knowing how to follow a meal plan (if that's what you do), knowing you need to eat is one thing.  Actually figuring out how to live a healthy life without an eating disorder is something else entirely.

I can drive a car.  Maybe not with any sort of special talent, but I know how to drive.  But if you told me I needed to drive to San Francisco, I would need to use my GPS--or at least a map.  The problem isn't that I don't know how to drive there (make sure the car has gas, push firmly on the long skinny pedal, ta da!), the problem is figuring out how to get there.  Knowing how to drive doesn't mean you don't need GPS.

So it goes with recovery.  Knowing what I need to do in order to get better doesn't mean that I don't need directions in how to get there.  Telling someone with an eating disorder to eat is like telling someone who is lost to drive.  Obviously eating and driving are part of the solution.  But there also needs to be more of a how-to involved.  Everyone takes their own path, just like some people avoid highways and others avoid bridges and tunnels.

Needing a recovery GPS--getting lost, realizing where you want to be but not having a damn clue how to get there--is pretty normal.  Most people have a GPS in their car or on their phone.  It doesn't replace learning how to drive, but many have found that little bit of extra guidance crucial.

Today was therapy, which meant another metaphor from Dr. H.  And--it really must be mentioned--another bonding session with her Keurig.

We got talking about stress, and she encouraged me to visualize my stress as a liquid filling a cup.  Some of her other patients like to imagine a rain gauge.  Others prefer teacups.  It's not so much the amount of stress (rain, tea, whatever) that causes a mess.  It's when your coping strategies (cup, etc) aren't large enough to hold all the stress.

I told Dr. H that my stress coping skills were like a cup, all right, but it's a coffee cup. {{I would never join the Tea Party for any number of ideological reasons, but I also seriously object to their choice of beverages. Latte Party, here I come!}}  This is especially interesting because I have the really bad habit of overfilling my coffee cup.  For some reason, despite decades of practice and thousands of cups poured, I always underestimate how much room I need to leave for milk.  To add the right amount of milk, I usually end up filling the stupid cup to the brim.  It makes transferring the cup to the microwave or to my mouth a somewhat difficult task.  Coffee stains are inevitable.

Most of the time, if I'm careful, the coffee doesn't spill much.  Of course, I can't just walk into the next room with my coffee cup. I have to carry it ever so carefully so that the coffee doesn't slosh around too much.  It's probably some of the closest I come to living on the edge.  It takes effort and concentration, but usually I manage just fine.

So it goes with stress.  Ideally, we'd have more ways of coping with stress than we do stress.  We don't need a lot more--an espresso shot in a Trenta Starbucks cup is a bit of overkill--but we also need to be able to feel that we have a handle on things.  That the stress isn't going to slosh over with one careless flick of the wrist.  I generally tend to keep my stress cup filled to the brim.  Major incidents are rare enough, but that filled-to-the-brim stress makes life much harder than it really needs to be.

Basically, you have two choices when there's a mismatch in how much stress/coffee is in your life and the size of your mug.  What I talked about with Dr. H was that you can either try and figure out how to decrease the amount of coffee in your cup, or you can find a bigger cup.  This means that you need to figure out how to decrease stress and/or increase coping skills.

The next two days are going to be Tip Day posts--the first on tips to decrease stress, and the second on how to increase coping skills.