A question I am often asked is “What was the most important thing you did to recover from your eating disorder?”

I don’t know what kind of answers people expect, but my reply always seems to land with surprise.

Because the truth is, I didn’t do anything to recover from my eating disorder…

To break free from the shackles of ED, I had to surrender. That is to say, I had to STOP trying to control, manipulate, and get recovery “right.”

From my perspective, the main reason treatment fails people like you and me is because it’s all about ACTION.

Follow the meal plan.

Throw the scales out the window.

Delete the calorie counting apps.

Or how about the literal “take opposite action!”?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the above strategies aren’t helpful – they definitely can be! They’re not tossed around the internet for nothing.

However, more often than not, the autistic individuals that go on to develop EDs are the highly gifted individuals of our time. These are the leaders, the truth-seekers, the people that are here to create revolutions.

I recently finished watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix (highly recommend, btw). A scene I will never forget is when 9-year-old Beth (the prodigy chess player) is sitting across from Mr. Shaibel and he says “People like you have a hard time; two sides of the same coin. You've got your gift, and you've got what it costs. Hard to say for you what that will be.”

If you’re anything like me, some of your “costs” are the anxiety, the perfectionism, and the debilitating fear of being “wrong” in this world.

Here’s where the ED comes in as an adaptive response; it’s the “escape hatch” from everything that’s far too heavy for our weightless souls. It’s a way to shrink away from the vastness that can never be captured by physical reality.

So what to do with this coin? How do we balance our gifts with their inevitable cost? And how is all of this even relevant to what I was saying about surrender rather than action?

Well, I believe that the most meaningful existence becomes possible when we stop trying to avoid the cost and instead, trust the gift(s).

In other words: what if, instead of trying to “manage” the anxiety, “overcome” the perfectionism, “fight” the fear, we used it as fuel for expressing our gifts?

What if, instead of resisting the fact that the coin has another side, we embraced both sides of the coin – acknowledging that one cannot exist without the other?

What if, instead of trying to either “run away from fear” or “run into fear,” we took fear by the hand and said, “Let’s go on this journey, together”?

When you stop looking for the map, you realize you never needed a map in the first place – because when you put one foot in front of the other, you can one day look back and see that your path has paved itself.

If you’re ready to forge your own path and break free from the eating disorder for good, schedule a 50-minute breakthrough session for 1-1 coaching here!