Is Therapy Even Working?

This is the golden question. Therapy not only is a commitment of your time, but it also requires financial commitment as well as hard work on your part. Of course you want to know that it is working for you!

The thing is, when it comes to Eating Disorder treatment, it can become tricky to know if the therapy is working. There are many reasons why it can be hard to tell whether you are recovering from your Eating Disorder and whether your therapy sessions are helping you to get further along in recovery. I will list a few of the main reasons why it gets confusing;

• ​Eating Disorders usually don’t occur alone: I always make a point during my educational presentations that Eating Disorders are harder and take longer to treat than treatment for other disorders typically do. The reason for this is that not only do Eating Disorder pose imminent threats to your physical health that need to be dealt with, there’s usually co-occurring issues lying underneath. As you are dealing with the behaviors that are affecting your physical health first, you also need to deal with the underlying issues often including some or a mix of the following; depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, relational issues, etc. In Eating Disorders, there’s a lot to be dealing with, so it’s no surprise it takes a long time for recovery.

• Your Eating Disorder has become your coping: To add to the level of complicity, in recovery, you are working on lessening your Eating Disorder behaviors which tends to increase the symptoms of the other issues (depression, anxiety, OCD, etc). Instead of using your Eating Disorder to cope with it, you are developing new coping skills, which is difficult.
• Recovery is not linear: I encourage you to click on the bolded words to the left to read my post devoted entirely to this concept. Essentially, recovery doesn’t happen in the form of a perfect increasing line graph. In fact, it’s messy. There are ups and downs. There are times you will struggle greatly and times where things just seems easier. Usually, those suffering from Eating Disorders also have all-or-nothing thinking. So when there’s a down in recovery, it tends to make them think that they are relapsing. It usually takes removing yourself from the situation to see that it merely is part of the recovery process.

• ​Eating Disorder self vs. healthy self: Again, click on the bolded words to the left to read a post about this. The Eating Disorder can be very manipulative and can disguise as the healthy self. It may make you think that treatment isn’t working because it is desperately attempting to save itself. A good Eating Disorder treatment specialist will help you to identify this and will work with you to find the healthy self in this thought process.
  
• Perhaps, your treatment really isn’t working: Come back next week to learn more about why this may be the case!

There may be many reasons why treatment may seem like it is not working the way you expected it to. I urge you to look over this post and related posts linked throughout to help you to determine what may be causing this. It may just take a bit of patience on your part.

I hope you found this post helpful and would appreciate you sharing with anyone else who could also find it helpful. If you have any questions, concerns or requests for future posts, please leave a comment or message me privately.
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I wish you patience on your journey to finding your State of Balance!

Related posts you may find helpful:
BATTLE: Eating Disorder Self vs. Healthy Self
Recovery is NOT Linear