There are always ways to put suffering to good use. Suffering is never wasted, but there is a loss. There’s a loss of what we could have been, could have accomplished, could have experienced, could have seen, if we hadn’t been enmeshed with the food. You know health-wise there is a loss, just in terms of living life with excess weight, there’s a loss, so depending what all that means to you and what your relationship with food has cost you. There’s going to be more or less grieving involved in that and I just want to give you permission to do that work, to keep doing it. If it keeps coming up for you then it means that you need to keep going there, journal about it, get coaching about it, get support about it through a buddy…. Keep doing the work…. You keep working through it on deeper and deeper levels…. It’s worth doing the work. ~ Susan Pierce Thompson

Has it ever occurred to you to “put suffering to good use?”
Isn’t that what we do when we tell our stories,
what it was like, what happened, what it’s like now?
We think of that usually as helping others, not ourselves,
yet it’s a truism of recovery that we often speak as much
to ourselves as to others both in the passage we randomly read
in a meeting and what we say in sponsoring, or in sharing.
We need to understand the benefit of working through
regrets we may have, experiences of awareness
we’ll never be “normal” eaters, that we have the right
to grieve the “loss” though it helps mightily to
simultaneously appreciate what we’ve gained!
Let’s learn to put suffering to good use as well
as counting our blessings.
Is your journal your best friend?