What happens when recovery gets quiet
At the start of recovery, you’re thrust into a world of clashing voices, conflicting messages, and confusion when you’re unsure what to do. This can last for months, years, or maybe even decades. But as time passes, you unravel the disordered voice from your natural voice. You learn how to live free of self-hate, criticism, and hopelessness. One day, you reach a place you never thought you’d ever see.
And then, everything gets quiet.
You enter a phase of recovery that’s less chaotic and more maintenance-focused. The crisis has passed, the clamor has died down, and you’re set adrift into the real world—just you and your recovery.
This phase can be unsettling. It can feel disorienting to shift your focus from moment-to-moment action to whatever comes next, like a future you never thought was possible in the throes of your eating disorder.
In this post, I explore:
what happens when recovery gets quiet,
how to balance feeling “fine” on the outside with internal struggles you just can’t shake, and
how to maintain momentum during what feels like latent periods.
What the post-crisis phase looks like in recovery
In the weeds of recovery, life is a little busy. Whether you’re at an inpatient facility or going through intensive outpatient treatment, the work isn’t just daily, it’s hourly. Actually, it’s minute-ly. You’re tapped into thoughts and behaviors, and you’re trying to learn how to re-establish trust with yourself. As you move through recovery, the intensity wanes, but this doesn’t mean the work is over.
Eventually, you may feel ready to cut back on appointments with your therapist, nutritionist, psychiatrist, and primary care provider. You may find you need fewer check-ins and are ready to employ what you’ve learned on your own. This is something to celebrate, but it’s also something to pay close attention to.
The issue with ending whatever form of treatment you decide to end is that it communicates to the outside world that you don’t need it anymore, that you’re all better. But this isn’t always the case.
There are myriad reasons why we decide to exit, decrease, or ease up on treatment. Maybe they’re financial. Maybe we need to go back to work. Maybe our insurance only covers a certain number of days. (Don’t get me started on this.) And when this happens, we may be nervous about our ability to maintain our recovery on our own. Because as much as treatment providers try to equip us for real life in eating disorder recovery, it’s hard to feel fully trigger-proof in a minefield of diet messaging.
What to expect when eating disorder recovery gets quiet
When left to our own devices, eating disorder recovery can seem insurmountable at times. Temptation and triggers can emerge at any moment, even when we’re not immediately around food. The external structure we became accustomed to in treatment is replaced by internal autonomy. The onus is on us to practice what we’ve learned.
As outside support dwindles, the inside chatter might be harder to ignore. We’re expected to self-manage and self-regulate, but we may still be learning how to trust ourselves. It’s a delicate balance between feeling empowered and feeling discouraged.
Even when we’ve graduated from the need for constant care, what comes after doesn’t always feel like an achievement. It can often look like the following.
An internal/external conflict with appearance
After a period of treatment, maybe we’re what our treatment team considers to be “weight-restored.” Maybe color has returned to our face and energy to our muscles. Maybe our loved ones are telling us the last thing anyone in eating disorder recovery wants to hear (“You look healthy!”).
These external indicators of recovery can be hard to grapple with. Even when we’re “recovering” by physical standards, our minds may take longer to catch up. As much as our appearance might convince the world we’re OK, our insides may want to scream that we’re not.
People with eating disorders get really good at faking it. Smiling through meals, eating normally while panicking internally, plotting purge plans before the meal even starts. We may appear to be functioning, but we might still be trapped.
Personal Story: A comment that rattled me
Months after my recovery began, I made a routine visit to my primary care physician, one who had years of experience treating people with eating disorders. I’d always felt comfortable being honest with her, and in turn, I received compassionate and informed care, void of judgment. (It was in her office that I learned about blind weights, which I still request today anytime I am asked to be weighed.) During one appointment, I was weighed blindly, per usual. As my doctor swiped through my vitals on her tablet, she let a comment slip: “Well, your weight looks great!” As if this were something to celebrate. For a person recovering from anorexia nervosa, this is the equivalent of telling me my dog had just died. Since I’d stopped weighing myself months before, I had no idea how much I weighed anymore. But the words of my ED-informed physician revealed to me progress I wasn’t sure I wanted.
The ‘in-between’ exhaustion
Once we’re out of treatment, we’re deemed (either by our treatment team, ourselves, or both) no longer “sick enough” to warrant concern. But we’re likely not yet fully recovered. This in-between can be a confusing and exhausting place.
We might feel an urge to label this phase, to have a story or a status ready when someone asks us how we’re doing. Something like, “I’m in recovery,” but with no end date in sight.
Even on days when nothing dramatic happens, when there are no major wins or losses to track in our recovery, we may exert an enormous amount of mental effort just to stay afloat. This can feel draining and defeating, work that is invisible to the people around us but is constantly on our minds.
Life in trigger land
In addition to the physical and mental strain of quiet recovery mentioned above, the less-quiet aspect of recovery involves triggers. Stress, holidays, diet messaging, conflict—anything that knocks us out of our routine in the normal world can feel infinitely more intense in recovery.
Triggers are unavoidable, as are slips in recovery. We may feel old thoughts creep in, urges whispering to be honored, a constant self-awareness that strips us of energy (see previous section).
We may experience shame for not being “better” at recovery, for falling victim to disordered voices and commands. It’s in these moments when we fight for quiet, desperate to turn off the tape even for a few seconds.
As much as we’d like to sidestep these moments in favor of a clear path to recovery, we must accept these incidents as normal, and not see ourselves as failures when they inevitably pop up.
How to hack quiet recovery
So when recovery gets quiet, how can we handle it?
Check in with yourself
When quiet seeps in, use it as a chance to have a one-on-one with just you. Ask yourself:
What am I afraid of?
What’s the worst that could happen?
What do I truly want out of recovery?
Accept the turbulence
Not embrace, not honor—just accept. Acknowledge what the dips are trying to do (i.e., keep you safe in your coping behaviors). These learned instincts won’t go away without a fight, but as you practice new ones, the old ones start to realize you don’t have room for them anymore.
Practice honesty
Getting honest with yourself will likely terrify the eating disorder. Why? Because their existence is grounded in lies.
Honesty begins the moment you realize the way you’re living isn’t sustainable. From there, each honest moment moves you closer to freedom.
Be open to changing your definition of progress
You may think you’re supposed to be “done” or “recovered” after a certain amount of time. But progress in recovery is a made-up construct. Just because you’ve been dismissed from or have “completed” treatment doesn’t mean the work stops. Likewise, hitting a roadblock doesn’t erase all the progress you’ve made.
Personal Story: How I knew I was ready to move on
For years, I’d been attending a very casual, unofficial eating disorders support group, a group that undoubtedly changed the course of my recovery for the better. Simply knowing there were other people in the world (besides me) who were experiencing my disordered thoughts and behaviors made me feel less alone and gave recovery a new possibility. Over time with the group, I cultivated the courage to stand up to my eating disorder, confident that I’d have support of the other group members if things went awry (which they always do).
Then one day, a foreign calm crept in, an unexpected (and unfamiliar) feeling that assured me it would be OK if I skipped Group that week, and the next week. I felt ready to move on. In the absence of a recommended timeframe or target weight or some other arbitrary rule that confirmed I could exit, I went off a gut feeling, knowing I could always go back if I wanted or needed to.
Why quiet work matters in recovery
One of the goals of recovery is to find peace. And sometimes, peace is boring.
But quiet recovery is still recovery. Even years after the concerned looks and the periodic bloodwork and the doctor’s office weigh-ins, recovery continues from a deeper place, one that the eating disorder will (hopefully) never be able to touch again.
Pause & Prompt
When I’m met with still, quiet moments, I…
More posts like this:
Because giving up is exactly what the eating disorder is waiting for.