Self-Discovery

Preview Self-Discovery

The journey of recovery is a journey of self-discovery. Our site offers a variety of activities to help you learn more about yourself…your strengths, challenges, connections, support needs, successful wellness strategies, and more. We invite you to engage your creativity and sense of play. And we share with you other resources you can use in the essential task of truly getting to know yourself.

Examples of Self-Discovery Activities: 

1. Complete the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) questionnaire and calculate your score. Discuss your score with your therapist or health care professional.
2. Journal your responses to the following questions: Where do I feel the most comfortable (at home, work, school, house of worship, etc.)? If someone asked my closest friend, spouse, partner or parent what my three best qualities are, what would they say? When I have free time, how do I like to spend it?
3. Complete the Mayo Clinic Depression Self-Assessment and share the results with your therapist or health care professional.
4. Complete the Boston University Drug and Alcohol Screening and share the results with your therapist or health care professional.
5. Make a joy collage. Eating disorders rob us of the present. We typically spend most of our time worrying or fretting about the past or future. Joy comes in the moment. When we are first recovering some people have difficulty listing what brings them joy. They have forgotten. Rediscovering joy provides powerful incentive to be in the present. Collage directions: gather materials (more than you may ever need!), find a spot that provides you enough work space and comfort to begin, explore and create your joy. Include as many joyful events, sights, sounds, etc., on your collage as you can. Fill up the collage with joy. If you get stuck, it can be helpful to think back to joy you experienced as a child, or to ask others what brings them joy. After finishing your collage, hang it up somewhere and look at it periodically. A few days later, write in your journal what you learned as you created the collage. Is there anything you would add to the collage after reflecting on it? 

Daily Commitment

Preview Daily Commitment

The Daily Commitment section is intended to provide you with a focus point each day of your recovery. Initially we will supply you with a list of examples and ideas. We believe Healthy Reflections members will have creative suggestions as well. Our hope is members will contribute their commitments to be included as an ever-growing, vibrant part of our site.

Examples of Daily Commitments

1. Sit in a quiet place and talk to yourself or journal for five minutes about what qualities you appreciate in yourself. Trust the process and kindly stop any negative self-interruptions. Please refrain from sending yourself messages about being conceited or arrogant as you do this. If you were your best friend what qualities would you appreciate in you?

2. Are there clouds in the sky? Go outside, be in the moment. Remember the shape game from childhood, where perhaps you identified one cloud as a rabbit and another as a giant sailboat? Play it for a while.

3. Each time you find yourself starting to binge, overeat, or restrict today, eat a fruit or a vegetable. Savor it, write a poem or sketch it if you want to. Or simply enjoy it. If after 20 minutes you still want to binge or engage in some other negative behavior, journal briefly about what the negative behavior can give you that you can't give yourself.

Weekly Challenge

Preview Weekly Challenge

Recovery is a series of steps and challenges. If you are in outpatient therapy there are still 167 hours a week after your therapy session to work on recovery, make positive choices, learn ways to modulate behaviors and begin treating yourself well. If you are using this site to gather more information about recovery and define your recovery work, we encourage you to be conscious of your choices every day. Healthy Reflections is committed to offering a variety of recovery explorations and ideas to help you on your journey.

The weekly challenges are suggestions, a starting place. If you identify a challenge that “hums” to you, then it is your priority. If the challenge is something you would like to try later on, you can always save it in your journal, returning to it at a later time.

Examples of Weekly Challenges: 

1. Each day this week when you wake up say a life affirmation out loud such as “I love life.” Believe it. Don't spend one nanosecond arguing with your affirmation.

2. One time this week pamper your body in a special, loving way. There are many options: a manicure, a pedicure, trying a new lotion and gently covering each part of your body you can reach…As you do this think of ways your body supports you and enables you to do the things you want to do.

3. Write in your journal about an old anger or resentment you've been holding on to. Ask yourself if holding on is hurting you. If so, how? Ask yourself if you are willing to let go of the anger or resentment. If so, how do you want to do it? Do you need to talk to someone about it and make a commitment to let it go? Do you want to release it verbally several times? Would hiking a trail and leaving it behind you help?

Common Issues

Preview Issues Commonly Seen In Treatment

This is an excerpt from the “Issues” list available to Healthy Reflections members. As a member, you will be invited to select one or two issues to work on at a time and will be given assignments related to those issues. New assignments are available on a regular basis to keep you actively engaged in your recovery.

Sample Issues

None of the issues listed below are exclusive to eating disordered individuals. They are issues seen in most all psychotherapy settings. The ones we list are the issues we see most frequently in our experience treating people with compulsive overeating, bulimia, and anorexia. All definitions are simply stated. They are not intended to be clinical definitions.

Perfectionism and expectations: Perfectionism is the unreasonable expectations and standards we place on ourselves. Perfectionism raises havoc with our existence. We challenge ourselves to be perfect, often upping the ante time and time again. We are never satisfied. We rarely allow ourselves grace or congratulate ourselves for doing something “well enough.” Expectations is what we expect of others; people with eating disorders often expect far less of others than of themselves. An interesting way to begin working on perfectionism is to expect only of ourselves what we expect of others. It gets back to treating ourselves as we would a good friend. Rarely would we expect friends to be perfect or would we demand impossibly high standards from them.

Low self-esteem, lack of self-love: Repeated negative self-talk, constant self-criticism, and failing to love and appreciate ourselves leads to low self-esteem. Childhood expectations from teachers, parents and others may have contributed to our negative sense of self. As part of recovery it is important to accept our parents and others are no longer in charge of our sense of self. We, alone are accountable and responsible for the relationship with ourselves. Examining childhood messages, both spoken and unspoken, can enlighten us, but ultimately we are responsible for the messages we send ourselves today. We can learn to appreciate and love ourselves. We can learn to change our thinking about ourselves.

Assertiveness, expression of feelings, disagreement: These three skills are important recovery tools for persons with eating disorders. Asserting ourselves can be scary and confusing. Some of us believe our feelings are meaningless or unimportant. As we deny or minimize our feelings our negative eating disordered behaviors worsen. We are afraid to disagree or we think our opinions are not worth expressing. We fear rejection and censure. Sometimes we fear being wrong or embarrassed if someone focuses attention on us. We prefer to go unnoticed as we strive to have noticeable, acceptable bodies.

Sample Assignments

1. Body Image: In your journal write about one of the first memories you have of disliking your body. About how old were you? Can you remember what or who precipitated the memory? If it was something someone said, did (or do) you like them? Is this person still in your life today? Are you giving their comment or thoughts too much power over your current view of yourself?

2. Conflict Resolution: How does your family of origin handle conflict? Think about each person and write a sentence about how they respond to conflict. Write about this in your journal.

3. Conflict Resolution: Do you recognize any familiar patterns in the way your family members handle conflict and the way you do? Is your current way of handling conflict working well? Is there someone you know who handles conflict in a way you admire? Write down their name and journal a little bit about their style.

4. Control: Try to remember the first time (or an early time) you attempted to gain some semblance of control by modulating your eating behaviors: Overeating, restricting intake or number of meals per day, cutting your food into tiny pieces, not eating a food you really wanted, refusing to eat when at the dinner table, etc. Please write about that time and see if you can recall what might have been going on in your life.

5. Identity: List ten attributes or characteristics of your personality. Eight must be positive, or at least neutral. Record the attributes in your journal.

6. Deception and Manipulation: Sometimes humor helps us see things more clearly. Make a fun collage about mind reading, deception and manipulation. Cut pictures from magazines, draw, paint, create a crystal ball out of tin foil…exaggerate the behaviors. Try not to think too much or too deeply while you are creating the collage. Let your playful energy take you where it wants you to go. When you have finished, take time to appreciate, enjoy and learn from what you have made. 

Amazing Bodies

Preview Our Amazing Bodies

Our bodies are truly amazing. We often lose sight of this during our struggle with an eating disorder. One important step on our recovery journey is to reconnect with our physical being…to develop and nurture an awareness of and appreciation for the remarkable human anatomy.

^{(We offer our heartfelt thanks to the HOPE Recovery Support Group for contributing these body facts.)}

Click on each fact to reveal something amazing about your body!

Discussion Forum

Preview Discussion Forum

Insight Wall

This page will be co-created with Healthy Reflections members. We envision it as a garden – we provide the soil (the web site) and seeds (assignments, challenges, quotations, and other site content); you nurture the seeds with your time, energy, attention and honesty until they blossom into awareness and insights for your recovery journey. When you and other members have “ah hah!” moments you want to share, those moments when you see your hard work bearing fruit, let us know. We invite you to submit your writings, completed assignments, collages, and other insights, and ask only that you give your first name to honor and take ownership of your work. We carefully review all materials before posting to ensure the Healthy Reflections site retains its wellness focus and remains as trigger-free as possible.