“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”
Dear Readers,
Please find below ‘Choose Responsibility Over Blame’ part 3 in Bulimia Healing Series with our favorite Catherine Liberty.I’m sure you’ll find this post very
Choose Responsibility Over Blame
I’m sure you’ll agree with me that sometimes, no matter how hard you’re trying in recovery, there always seems to be something or someone waiting to knock you off track. I remember having a huge meltdown about 6 months into my own recovery, I’d experienced a particularly devastating relapse and I suddenly realized that I was always going to be surrounded by triggers.
So how do you heal in a world filled with triggers? Well this leads me on to my next strategy for finding more happiness and balance in recovery:
Happiness in recovery strategy: –
When I first started to relapse in recovery it was usually down to the influence of someone or something else. One of my friends encouraging me to eat an unsafe food, my mother cooking multiple course meals that I just couldn’t handle, my brother encouraging me to drink alcohol (which lead to intense binge urges every time) or some kind of triggering diet advertisement that would send me into a spiral of obsessive weight thoughts. When triggered in this way I would find myself becoming furious at others and at the world in general. I was so angry at my friends for triggering me, I was so angry at the world for being obsessed with dieting, and I was ready to blame everyone else for my slips. I mean after all, I couldn’t help relapsing, I wasn’t strong enough to deal with these things, I was too broken, or at least that’s what I’d convince myself of.
Of course those things really did trigger me as I’m sure they may trigger you, but I quickly learned that the “blame game” only served to fuel further unhappiness and more than that – it also helped me to believe that I had very little control over my own life.
But what I found was that by learning to replace blame with responsibility, or a better word here may be accountability, I actually became happier and more successful in my recovery over all.
Now that’s not to say that we should blame ourselves for relapses or blame ourselves for feeling triggered (because I certainly don’t believe there is room for self-blame in recovery either), but simply that we should understand that at the end of the day, we are accountable for our own recoveries.
There’s a brilliant quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that says ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ And I think that way of thinking is so incredibly relevent, she’s talking about the control we all have over our lives and outlining the fact that it’s how we respond to external situations (triggers) that ultimately determines their power over us.
We can’t hide from every single trigger and we can not change the world overnight, so instead we have to learn how to respond differently to those triggers, until ultimately they lose the power to trigger us at all. Changing responses to triggers is an issue I like to work through in depth with the people who I coach here at Bulimia Help because it is such an essential step in the healing process.
A very simple way to get started with this the next time you find yourself wanting to blame an external trigger for a relapse or challenging day in recovery, is to become focused on treating it as a learning experience.
Instead of focusing on the need to change others, instead ask yourself, “how could I react to this differently next time?”
I really hope this has helped to give you a slightly different perspective on triggers in recovery and learning to live along side them long-term.
