cozy recovered life

Ok so recovery should be accessible to everyone, but therapy is honestly expensive, so I wanted to share what I've been doing to put myself through recovery pretty much on my own. If you can find a therapist on your insurance or on a sliding scale, I 100% recommend that. If you're on your parents' insurance you can contact your insurance provider to make your explanation of benefits confidential so your parents can't see what you're using your insurance for

Free support groups: there are lots of free online support groups where you can connect with other people with eating disorders and get advice. I especially recommend The Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness because their groups are therapist lead. You can literally just join these groups and listen or you can participate and share your experience

Learning about dialectical behavioral therapy. Even without a therapist or skills group, you can learn the foundations and skills of DBT. Dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com has amazing videos and worksheets (all free) to help you understand your emotions and learn skills for emotional regulation, distress distolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal skills. There are also lots of podcasts including "The Skillful Podcast" that go through different DBT teachings

"the 8 keys to recovery from an eating disorder workbook" costs about $20 on Amazon. If this is affordable to you I highly recommend. It offers great insight into recovery from people who have been through it. It also has journaling assignments to help you work towards recovery. I've been going through the book on my own and found most of the assignments really helpful

Stopping myself from consuming any content related to diet, exercise, body image, obesity, nutrition, or ANYTHING like that. For a long time my ED convinced me that this content wasn't triggering and I was just interested in it, but a lot of that content had messages that supported my ED. By avoiding it I lost absolutely nothing, but avoided fueling my ED

Reach out to friends. It is possible to recover on your own, but EDs thrive by isolating you.

Black cats ♡