I had a tough day yesterday… I guess this topic just makes me emotionally raw. Anyways good news is the Addictions specialist I am seeing for my pain injections has offered to take me on for some counseling. I was feeling pretty yucky so opened up some NA literature to get grounded… this is the page I opened to…
It is a good read if you had a few mins very focused around this topic. My higher power has a way of doing that. 
@CATMANCAM I thought you might get something from this reading too. 
Letting Ourselves Go
In the Third Step we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." Most of us make that decision for the first time early in our recovery, but our desire for control expresses itself in many different ways. It is not a decision we make only once. Each time we return to it our resistance lessens, our commitment deepens, and our ability to let go increases. Some suggest that we are in a process of progressive surrenders. We take back control and let it go again, each time finding that we can let go a little more, and that some of what we took back last time we can now let go for good. Next
time we look, we find that we are still holding on here and there: “I can turn over this part of my life,” we say, “but that
other part is my job to handle." Finding the line between personal responsibility and willful control is a challenge.
One member shared that for her, “The real surrender is surrendering to the fact that I will be surrendering for the rest of my life." It’s different for each of us. In fact, for most of us, the answers change over the course of our recovery.
Feeling at home in our bodies can seem to be beyond our wildest dreams. We feel too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, too old or too young. Some of us feel we were
born in the wrong time, place, gender, or culture. We may hardly recognize the person we see in the mirror, or in
photographs: “That can’t be me!” When something feels wrong inside, we look outside to explain it. Our sense of
alienation surfaces in all sorts of ways. We may simply feel uncomfortable in our own skin. We bring these issues into recovery with us, but it may be a while before we see that they are important. Many of us will share at meetings about having been bone-thin when we got clean, what we talk less about is our response when our bodies start to heal and we begin putting on weight. Some of us find that once the weight starts coming on, it
doesn’t stop. We might joke that we “put down the spoon and picked up the fork”, but it’s not always funny. We may feel deep shame or horror at the weight gain. Some of us consider using again to deal with it. We may stay clean but find that compulsive behavior-eating to discomfort, vomiting, fasting, abusing laxatives, experimenting with radical diets-brings its own problems, and its own rush. Obsession with our weight can also lead us back to control games with ourselves: We withhold food, exercise compulsively, and punish ourselves in order to drive ourselves into shape. Substitution can be a good tool for keeping us away from that first drug, or for helping us to replace destructive behavior, but it can also create its own problems. Obsessive and compulsive patterns other than using drugs often emerge after we get clean. Many of us find that our relationship to food is complicated. We may never have
known how to eat properly, and in our addiction, frankly, other things were more important. We ate irregularly, or we
ate junk food, or we didn’t eat at all. We got used to being hungry, or throwing up, or eating as much as we could whenever we could.
Our pamphlet Self-Acceptance cautions us that “sometimes we slip into the melodrama of wishing we could be what we think we should be.” We often act as if that only applies to the parts of us that we can’t see. We understand that freedom from our defects of character comes through acceptance of ourselves as we are, and willingness to allow a power greater than ourselves to remove them
but when it comes to what we perceive as our physical imperfection, too often we address the problem through attempts to control or punish ourselves. We invent strict rules and try to live by them. We act as if these obsessions and compulsions were somehow different from those we had already surrendered. It can be difficult to know the difference between behaviors we can change ourselves and those we must surrender. We are on the wrong track when we hold ourselves to unreasonable standards and berate ourselves for failing to meet our own unrealistic expectations. Allowing ourselves to be human does not mean that we live without boundaries or restrictions; it means that we seek sanity in our lives by taking the actions we can and turning the results over to our Higher Power. We let go. Even though we have so much experience in sharing our struggles with a Higher Power and allowing that power to
work in our lives, many of us hold on to the relationship with our bodies as something we must control through willpower. Whether we are learning to eat well, gaining or losing weight, or letting go of smoking or other habits, too often we forget that we have a program that teaches us to be free. Instead we mistakenly say that we have to “get ourselves under control.” We may never be free from the disease of addiction, but that doesn’t mean we cannot experience freedom. Fear of change is common among addicts—after all, we are creatures of habit! But sometimes this reaches extremes. We may be paralyzed by our fear. Sometimes what we fear are specific outcomes or consequences. Sometimes we experience a kind of free-floating fear that will attach itself to all sorts of things: We develop phobias, or we avoid risk to a point where it makes our lives very small. Some of us hold ourselves back from pleasure or sensation, either because we are afraid of the future or because we are afraid of the memories that may be unleashed. We fear that letting go might mean releasing our most destructive impulses. Some of us hide out by not caring for ourselves. We let go of personal grooming or hygiene, gain weight, or simply
present ourselves as people we don’t care much about. We may want to make ourselves invisible to hide from attention, or to walk away from an old way of being that we don’t know how to change. When we admit our fear and look at it honestly, we realize that the actions we take to avoid harm are sometimes more destructive than the consequences we fear. But when we really do let go, we are free to be all that we are, without fear, without guilt, without reservation. We begin to climb out of the hole we have dug for ourselves when we recognize that our behavior is not working. We practice appreciating small things about ourselves: the unique way we move, the way our eyes glitter when we talk about things that matter to us, the warmth we feel when we know we are connected to our Higher Power. We celebrate the fact that we are unique and have beauty to offer the world. Our uniqueness is our gift; when we forget that, we let the disease back into our lives.
When we fall back into disliking or even hating ourselves, our ability to love suffers. We buy into the old lie that we are not worth it or we’re broken. As we let go of the defects of character and other baggage we have been carrying, we
begin to uncover the truth of our humanity, our spirituality, and our beauty. Accepting that can be some of the hardest work we will ever do. Acceptance of ourselves comes as we develop a healthy relationship with reality. We accept what is, and learn to apply the Serenity Prayer, changing what we can and letting
go of the rest. We find that we can be happy in our own skin if we are willing to let go-not in the old sense of neglecting ourselves, but allowing ourselves to experience our freedom. We begin to experience our senses. The Basic Text tells us that we are “free to enjoy the simple things in life, like… living in harmony with nature.” And it’s true! When we see the color in the changing leaves, or feel the wind in our face, we feel the joy of being alive. We find a sweetness in
our pleasure that had been gone a long time. Some of us discover that we want to make art; we want to communicate
in creative ways. We may value being athletic-to be able to run, or swim, or dance. We lose ourselves in the moment and find, for once, we don’t have to think at all. We can just be. When we express the joy we have in living, it comes through
in our movement, our work, the shine in our eyes. We have a beauty about us beyond the sum of our features. When we allow that spirit to shine through us, we are beautiful-no matter what we think we look like.
I got you. We are going to do this together. I love you so much and care about you. Thank want you to be happy.
I especially relate to this part;
I had an eating disorder and was self-judgemental about it for a good third of my life, so I know how it can really mess with the mind and be emotional 
Look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you genuinely love yourself for who and where you are, you forgive yourself, you are there for yourself from hereon, and you deserve to move on! We can consciously break the chains where family couldn’t. Big hug and all the best Stella 
you’d are such a beautiful person on the inside! I am very very honored and blessed to know you 
this is huge!! I didn’t know about this. I knew eating disorders were more than just weight related… that there was definitely an emotional and mental component. But I didn’t know about how having an ED can almost rewire the brain and decrease or eliminate hunger cues. Sooo the fact that u are experiencing this is AMAZING 
I’m really happy for u!