As a result of contacting a prior boss to have her review my memoir, I found out she has now started training what are called eating disorder “Recovery Coaches.” These coaches meet with you in person or on line in your everyday life to provide support in facing eating disorder behaviors. They text you, they meet you for meals, they go grocery shopping with you. They do all the things it is so very hard for therapists and regular treatment team providers to do. And all of this is done towards the aim of facilitating “complete recovery,” not just feeling like you’re getting through life but not fully living it.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, “recovery” is an uncomfortable word for me, partly because of the sound of it, to re-cover myself doesn’t sound appealing. Yet it is also uncomfortable for me because as far as I have experienced, a life without some form of these thoughts or behaviors, or at least the awareness of them and needing to set boundaries with them…this kind of life has never become a reality for me. After countless attempts to reach this state. To hear someone say, “Yeah, I don’t really think about it anymore” just floors me. So of course when I heard that there were coaches to help one get to this idyllic place, I was skeptical.

Yet I was also sad. I’ve tried to “get over this” for decades. I’ve turned away from traditional perspectives on treatment, and took my own journey deep into my heart, made sense of it, made it sacred, loved and accepted myself despite my continued cycling up and down with these symptoms. I worked really hard at learning to honor the fact that I may just need to learn how to “deal with it” at this level forever. So to hear that there are these coaches helping one to get to that place, over the rainbow, hearing this brought up so many feelings. There was a disbelief. There was anger. There was confusion.

But there was also a longing. This paradoxical longing stirred into that skepticism. And the fact that there was an opportunity to work with one of these coaches for free, at least initially, feels important somehow.

So I decided to give it one more try. Sure I could pose all skeptic and doubt this possibility that these coaches could somehow work utter magic on my decades-old eating struggles. But I could also be curious. Which is what I chose, to be curious, and now have started working with one of these coaches to see what is possible. To give the longing, the sadness, the yearning to actually experience this sense of moving beyond, to give this a chance. Again.

So this “recovery coach” is texting me at challenging times where we’ve set up goal behavior changes. This person is hearing me yodel about my small but annoyingly restrictive behaviors that keep me bound, in fear, anxiety. That keep me smiling to the world–functioning–but not really fully feeling free. I have hope, but I also know this road could dead-end and the skeptic is here too. The skeptic is ready to be disappointed.

So far, the focus on behaviors is making them stronger, and I hope that does not continue. There is a sense that whatever I am dealing with is bigger than me, and has been with me and my ancestors for many generations. There is a sense that a “recovery coach” may not be able to handle and work through this layer of bigness with me. Yet that doesn’t mean I will discount it. I have also enlisted some support from a spirit-worker I trust to help me see into the bigness of this energy I am wrapped up in, to see if there is anything bigger than myself that is opposing my attempts at shifting behaviors.

I am so ready to transform this, and the coincidence of the recovery coach concept coming to me at this time–when I am about to publish my memoir about my lifetime eating and body struggles–is one I am definitely taking notice of. With the recovery coach helping me with the behavioral moves, and the spirit work helping me to explore and possibly heal the bigger energies tied up in this epigenetic illness pattern, I hope to really feel into this sense of “moving beyond.”

For me, however, I think it may result in a more animist way of being with the spirits of illness rather than never thinking about them again. For me, as I’ve written about in previous blogs and in my memoir, I think that the ED is an initiatory energy, and if it can be honored as an archetypal, transformational force but not allowed to destroy one’s body, then the work is truly done. I feel this is my path, to learn how to work with the spirit of this illness, and to possibly help others struggling, but not to let it take me down. This is where I am letting my curiosity with the concept of “full recovery” and recovery coaches take me. Hopefully I will come out the other end with an uplifting story to share around the fire.