Exploring Your Values for Eating Disorder Recovery & Long Term Wellness

Why values are important

On the recovery journey and for long-term wellness, values are important to uncover because they provide a sense of direction and play a crucial role in cultivating our voice and agency. If we or our families have been disempowered or if we've felt like we didn't have choices, a voice, or were always acting out of survival, we then experience a disconnect to our power and agency. Consequently, we then struggle to understand and identify our values; what's important to us.

Without taking some time to pause and explore our values, recovery and navigating life in general can feel even more overwhelming or frustrating because values connect us to long-term goals, motivations, visions, and meaning-making.

How to explore your values

A trusted friend, family member, or therapist can help you explore your values, or you can do so on your own.

I couldn't name my values and had no idea what values were, so I had to start exploring values with a literal Google search, “examples of values.” Values are broad concepts like "family," "love," "justice," "art.” It's also helpful to explore what this looks like in your day-to-day life and what you would want it to look like. A value then gets specific, and we can identify when, how, and where we act on the value, like deciding on a monthly donation to a cause close to your heart.

Values are already present & getting creative with values

The good news is, our values already exist, somewhere, in our lives. They might be unconscious to us or hidden under trauma responses, old connections, and associations, or unbalanced, but they are present.

For example, family. Families may be a large source of stress, but we may still decide we value family. With skills and boundaries in place, we may get to enjoy this value rather than continue old patterns and associations with this value. We can also empower ourselves to define what this value means for us rather than any imposed meaning.

Or take art, for example. We may realize we value art but then notice we don't practice or know how to incorporate it into our lives. A good question to ask would then be: how can I bring art into my daily or weekly life? What kind of art? What do I consider to be art? What does that look like for me?

There’s a sense of empowerment that grows with learning, understanding, and acting on our values. Values are your values because they are meaningful to you, and they need no other reason.

Values for long-term wellness

Over time, you'll be able to cultivate a relationship with your values and get to know them well. Over time, honoring and practicing your values contributes to a long-term sense of empowerment, agency, and authenticity.

Hope this was helpful & thank you for reading!

Lindsay Valley

Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)