When Best Intentions Aren’t Enough It’s incredibly difficult for someone suffering from trauma to share what they experienced. We want to be supportive and help as best we can, but sometimes even our best intentions can lead us astray. A recent article on Huffington Post shares some therapists’ suggestions on what we should and shouldn’t…
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Body Image Issues: Symptoms and Triggers When we talk about “body image,” we’re talking about how we see ourselves in a mirror or how we think about our physical appearance. Unfortunately, serious body image issues can be a major factor in the development of an eating disorder. These problems spring from a number of sources.…
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Putting Our Thoughts Into Action When we last talked about the principles of recovery, the topic was love. Specifically, we discussed moving our focus from inward to outward. We’re going to continue that thread this week in our discussion of discipline, the next principle of recovery. Step Nine of Alcoholics Anonymous states that we “made…
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Trauma: A Core Focus Ocean Recovery deals with the fallout of trauma every day. As we’ve pointed out many times in these pages, trauma is often at the heart of mental health disorders, such as substance use and eating disorders. In fact, we focus extensively on trauma in both our women’s and men’s programs. A…
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The Importance of Being in the Present Moment A recent article by the always-excellent Eating Disorder Hope talked a bit about mindfulness in eating disorder recovery and, in doing so, echoed some of the things we’ve said in past blogs. The piece quotes Kristen Neff, author and associate professor in the Educational Psychology department at…
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The Next Logical Step If you think back to our discussion on the principles of recovery a few weeks ago, you’ll remember we left off on humility. We quoted the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous as saying that, “the attainment of greater humility is the foundation principle of each of A.A.’s Twelve Steps. For without…
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Overwhelmed and Unable to Cope As we’ve stated in a number of previous blogs, trauma is an unprocessable occurrence. It’s an event that’s too horrible to put into words. Survivors of trauma often find themselves overwhelmed or unable to cope. Furthermore, because these folks can’t find a way to process this event, they will relive…
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Building Blocks to Success Just like substance abuse disorders, eating disorders are a mental health condition that can be treated and managed, but not “cured.” While it is certainly possible to recover from them – many of us at Ocean Recovery, both staff and clients, are a testament to this fact – it takes a…
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A Bedrock Necessity On page 70, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states that, “the attainment of greater humility is the foundation principle of each of A.A.’s Twelve Steps. For without some degree of humility, no alcoholic can stay sober at all.” We’ve said numerous times in our previous analyses that the principles overlap, support,…
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An Overwhelming Sense of Helplessness Traumatic experiences, and the traumatic stress that follows, are the result of circumstances beyond our control. Whether it’s “hard” trauma, like the horrors of war, or “soft” trauma, such as emotional or sexual abuse, we survivors often feel an overwhelming sense of helplessness. And, all too often, our response to…
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