Final Notes on the Recovery Process

In accordance to the previous blog, “Recoveries in Language,” I thought it prudent to conclude with the main difference between Struggling Recoveries and Full Recoveries. What I found in the same article was that “these two genres are consequential for the women’s experience of recovery, since it seems that the telling and retelling of an empowerment (full recovery) narrative, with its clear beginnings, turning points, and felicitous, institutionally condoned endings may well be critical for recovery to remain a stable condition in life.” As far as the Struggling Recoveries are concerned, talking about their experiences is hard, and sometimes uncertain. They don’t know how to make sense of what happened, and fail to put their experience in a step-by-step process.

I couldn’t help but relate the idea of story telling to the experiences of organ donor kin. In Leslie Sharp’s book, “A Strange Harvest,” the same idea that one must talk about an experience is crucial to the healing process. The more we talk about a situation, the more it becomes flat and free of repressed emotion. Making this tie helped me to realize that anorexia is similar to many hardships in life. It is not as individual a disease as we think, and shares similarities to a number of diseases and disorders. What makes anorexia so scary and different from other disorders is the numerous symptoms it holds in combination with “the notion [of] recovery…is not just an outcome to be measured in terms of symptoms but entails a narrative process that links past, present and future visions of the self in relation to others.”

I have learned, through this information and from self-experience, that getting to a stage of full recovery is a lot harder than shown on the surface. The stages we experience on the way to the end make it seem like we will never find closure. It takes the strongest of wills to overcome such a hardship like anorexia but it is those wills that make it to the end that show us that the experience of anorexia becomes merely, a piece of the past; an utter experience that happened to the previous self no longer attached to your present self.




Citations

Shohet, Merav. "Narrating Anorexia: 'Full' and 'Struggling' Genres of Recovery"
ETHOS Vol. 35, Issue 3, pp. 344–382, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.