I have long worked on helping people dealing with relapse look at how to deal with the urge to take that first compulsive bite.  You will see this throughout this book and my other writings.  My focus was mostly on not picking up that first compulsive bite at the moment the craving hits.

We can all agree that whether we are into the food or not into the food, we still carry the disease with us all the time.  I am of the belief that while it can lie dormant for years, there’s nothing to stop it from rearing its ugly head if I don’t stay in fit spiritual condition.  That’s why I continue to do the things I was told to do to keep that disease in a permanently dormant state.

As a result, we can choose to talk to our disease – or any of the various aspects of it – at any time.  Wouldn’t it be better to try to get to know your disease when you weren’t under the time pressure of a craving, to figure out how to deal with it?

With that in mind, I decided to undertake an exercise of trying to communicate with the various aspects of my disease.  I have previously laid out a number of the “threads” I have identified in myself.  As I said earlier, any of those threads could be the one that gets triggered, based on one event or another.  What if I took the time to have a short conversation with all of them?  This is not necessarily something you will choose to emulate, but I found it helpful in understanding my disease.

Even if you don’t want to talk to the disease, perhaps think about all of the various threads I have enumerated and take some time to meditate on them.  Some people will find this exercise helpful, but others might find it silly.  Even if you don’t want to do the writing exercise itself, why not invest some time to think about the threads and how they affect you? 

I decided I would transcribe the conversations I had with the different components.  After all, they had been with me forever, and while I dealt with them at the moment they tried to elbow past the more reasoning self, I never took the time to talk to them to understand the why of their existence.

Looking at my different parts, I could then recognize that what I had previously thought was my enemy was actually a friend that comes forward to “help” me.  This friend causes the misguided urge to get me into the food when its trigger comes.  Since compulsive eating is not the problem, but the solution, perhaps I could understand its motives.