Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today’s episode is part of an ongoing pursuit of dismantling the diet industry and freeing people of the unrealistic and often harmful expectations that we can and should be perfect.
My guest today is Janice Antoniewicz-Werner. Janice is a registered dietician nutritionist. She’s passionate about helping clients make peace with food. Janice specializes in assisting those struggling with disordered eating and individuals recovering from diet culture. She specializes in intuitive eating and is a Certified Intuitive Counselor and promotes a health at every size philosophy. Janice believes eating should be enjoyable and flexible and not result in fear or guilt. Her goal is to help her clients achieve a sane and peaceful relationship with food.
Janice has over 35 years of experience in the field of treating eating disorders. She has extensive training in intuitive and mindful eating. Her education includes a Bachelor of Science Degree in Dietetics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a Master of Arts Degree in Counseling from Oakland University. She is a certified eating disorder registered dietician.
Janice, welcome. I am so glad you’re here with us today.
Thank you for having me. I am passionate about this topic. This is the season where food is available, and people feel guilty about eating but want to enjoy it, so they talk about new year’s resolutions. The weight loss and exercise industries that makes money off of that are really in the mix this time of year. You’ll be starting to see ads for weight loss programs and exercise programs.
If a person wants to do a reset and the relationship with food and exercise, this could be a really good time to start.
We both come from the eating disorder support network here in Madison. You are a strong part of that network. We talk often about the messages that people are getting about what we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to look like, how we get our power, and how we’re acceptable. The messages that so many people are getting are false and often lead to a disordered relationship with food, a disordered relationship with exercise, with ourselves.
For someone who’s never heard the phrase diet culture, how would you explain that?
Diet culture is the message that we get that thin is always better. If you are thin, be fearful about gaining weight. There are right and wrong ways to eat. The purpose of exercise is to control your body. It’s one size fits all and you’ll never measure up. The underlying message is, you’re not good enough. It’s an external control. We’ll tell you how to do it and make a lot of money off of it.
Once you’re aware, you can see how pervasive diet culture is and challenge those messages with your own internal dialogue. A peaceful relationship with food is controlled internally. You use your own hunger and fullness, how food feels in your body, how moving feels in your body. That’s an internal job.
Diet culture tells you it’s external, that thinness equates to health and well-being. Some behaviors that diet culture supports are utilizing a scale to know if you’re healthy or not, that how many times a week you’re exercising equates to health, and so does what size your pants are. We’ve been culturally conditioned into thinking that that’s what health is. Now there’s even starting to be issues with overexercising and eating too healthily or being too focused on health.
Part of diet culture is that there’s good food and bad food, which is not true either. It suggests that there’s a perfect way to eat and exercise. Really, there is no such thing. It’s ideally driven by the individual. What works for you? What feels good in your body? Include all foods that you want to eat because food tastes good.
The idea that if you enjoy eating, you should feel guilty is part of diet culture. One of the foundational pieces of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. You allow yourself to eat what you want when you want in an amount that’s satisfying without fear or guilt. To get there, you have to focus on your own internal guidance. The challenge is to block out everything else.
Diet culture and specific diets can seem science-based, but the science of nutrition is in its infancy. There is still a lot to be learned and things are changing all the time. So, if someone says this is a perfect way to eat, it’s not true. It’s much more important to know what your body needs because you’ve listened and can tell when you’re hungry or when you’re full and what foods your body’s craving.
Some of these behaviors are important for health and wellbeing, for example, knowing if you’re eating enough protein, but then the diet and the fitness industry take it so far, so that they can make money off of us. Eating enough protein is needed for muscles and hair and nails and keeping your organs repaired.
I’ve noticed that when people get to the other side, they feel betrayed. They’ve been sold these things as the way to fix their lives. Often, they’re angry about it because it takes joy from your life to feel like you’re not good enough, or to constantly be worried about what you eat or how you move your body.
Many of my clients have discussed how hard it is to be in the place of knowing that counterculture, because so many people don’t understand what we’re talking about. Once you are on the other side and you realize how dysfunctional and harmful this is, it’s challenging to have this understanding when the rest of the world still really supports diet culture or weight loss or good and bad foods and things of that nature.
There’s the internal work of coming to terms with it and being okay while you’re surrounded by it every day. It can feel a little lonely and vulnerable to be on the other side. You’re not part of that cult that everybody else is doing.
This time of year, in particular, is hard. You’ll hear people socially saying, I shouldn’t eat this or I was really bad, or I didn’t eat all day so I could eat whatever I want. That makes me sad because I know those people are trapped in that cult. Then you have to decide, am I going to tackle this? I often silently just wish them well.
The point is that most of our culture is immersed in diet culture, and it can feel lonely to be on the other side. Later, we’ll talk about ways of viewing it to help fight against loneliness and feel more connected to other people who understand this as well.
Let’s talk about the health industry.
How is the diet culture linked with the health industry?
It’s all about money. They’ve gotten savvy over the years, like changing the names of diets so they sound more like health. It’s important to stay on top of what is being said so that you can pick out the diet culture pieces. Diet culture masqueraded as health, leads to a more distorted relationship with food and a distorted relationship with exercise.
We could have another episode about the medical industry. Many of my clients are traumatized or re-traumatized by medical professionals telling them weight loss is the only path to X, Y, or Z. Pick any illness or condition you see your doctor for, and they weigh you and tell you that your size is the problem. People in larger bodies are treated differently.
The industry promotes it as wellness, but the goal is still weight loss. When people are trying to make changes, they can feel like they broke the rules and now have to punish themselves by exercising or eating healthy foods. This is all part of a deprivation scheme, so now, people start believing healthy behaviors are punishments. Healing requires establishing a different relationship with those foods or with moving your body to get on a more neutral or positive plane.
The idea that you can have it all is confounding because it breaks a lot of those rules. When people find a balance that works for them, they feel good. When people move their bodies in a way that they enjoy, they feel good. That’s the goal. Diet culture totally ignores how you feel inside. That’s an important distinction. We want to get to eating foods that are good for you because they make your body feel good and gives you nutrients, not because they’re low-calorie.
I’m a non-traditional trainer in that I’ll ask, what would you enjoy doing? You should only do movement you enjoy. You didn’t want to move last week? So many people say, ‘I was bad’ and I say, no, you just had other things going on, your bandwidth was full. It’s okay to move when you want to and focus on other overall health behaviors when those are more important.
Dr. Kelly McGonigal has a book called the Joy of Movement and she traces how different cultures move for joy and how alive and connected they feel. If we can harness moving our bodies in a ways that helps us feel more alive, that’s the path we should pick, not movement to punish or lose weight or get back on track. If the intention is to experience more joy, you’re going to orient yourself to different things than you would if the intention was to lose weight.
I also like the idea of eating and moving as self-care. When you’re choosing what you’re putting into your body, which includes all foods. If there is delicious food that you eat and enjoy, that is self-care.
The same thing with exercise. The notion that for exercise to count it has to be for a certain duration and you need to sweat, or it doesn’t count. That eliminates a lot of movement for people. Instead of what feels good and if you need to take a break because you’re tired this week, that’s good self-care. It isn’t good self-care to push yourself to do something.
I think about the brain. When we are forcing ourselves to do 45 minutes, but at 30 minutes we start to feel shut down or tired or irritable and it’s no longer fun, in our nervous system that’s a threat. What does it do with anything threatening? It’s not going to pursue that again.
Diet culture takes food and movement and makes them threats. I see so many people get overwhelmed trying to take on all of these expectations that aren’t coming from within. Their systems feel threatened and they avoid it. It becomes a negative story that there’s something wrong with them, they are not good enough or they’re lazy. Really, their brain and body are responding appropriately to something that is not enjoyable and feels threatening.
You’ve talked about thinking about intentions and goals in a new way. Can you talk more about that?
The foundation of any change is your intention.
If your intention is to feel better or to have a more peaceful relationship with food, it can be as basic as, how do you want to eat? When are you getting hungry? When you choose to eat, how does it feel in your body? It becomes a pattern, but it’s totally internally driven. Diet culture takes away from us as trusting your own body. The comparison I often use is, would you follow somebody else’s schedule on when to urinate? No.
Diet culture teaches us that hunger is bad. I think it’s really empowering to look at hunger as a positive. Hunger helps. That’s your body working perfectly. That connection can feel really empowering.
This isn’t about perfection. Your body will help you get it right if you’re paying attention to it. It is wonderful at telling you what it needs. If you make a mistake, you eat too little or too much, your body helps you. If you under eat, you’ll get hungry sooner. If you eat a larger meal, it will take longer to get hungry. You can trust your body.
It might take a while because we’re generally not used to using our bodies in that way. A perfect first step is paying attention to hunger and fullness and how they feel.
People often use the word hunger when they want to eat, whether it’s physical hunger or another reason to eat. Pay attention to that too. It’s helpful to distinguish using food for non-hunger reasons, as a coping strategy for instance. You may want to investigate other coping strategies, so you have less of a reliance on food, if it doesn’t feel good to you.
It’s a very personal thing and an ongoing process, but trusting your body is going to feel much better than trying to follow a bunch of rules that don’t work for you and lead to people blaming themselves.
There are some subtleties to intuitive eating. If a person gets sick, we don’t rely on hunger as much, but still need to eat. Often when people are stressed, they lose their appetite, but your body still needs food. The more you pay attention, the more you learn about how your own body works and how you use food. Then, you can decide if that works for you or if you’d like it to be different.
Internal trust and listening to the body can be really scary for people. What do you mean, I just listen to my body? What if I mess up or what if it’s wrong? What if something bad happens? It’s kind of an experiment. We take it slow.
Lindo Bacon talks about, that your body will take care of you. This isn’t a concept we talk very much about in our culture. The body will heal. The body will show you what it needs if you slow down and listen. That’s a foreign concept in diet culture, because it doesn’t sell anything. If you are using your own body and intuition, you don’t need to buy products online. You’re deciding what works for you.
I encourage people to be curious. Take the stress out of eating as much as possible. Ideally, eating is relaxed. It’s a natural thing. We literally do it from the moment we’re born. It’s always been there. We’re going back to something that was once very natural. That can be reassuring.
One of the first things we do when an infant cries, is pick them up and give them food. Often, it feels good, and they stop crying. It’s one of the very first things that we make an association with. Food for comfort is very natural. It only becomes a problem if it is a person’s only reliance for comfort, or they don’t feel good about it. If it is, or if you don’t feel good, look into other ways to soothe the system.
It’s okay to use food, to enjoy food. You don’t need to feel guilty about what you eat, even if you decide in retrospect that wasn’t a great choice. You didn’t fail. It’s just such a natural part of our evolution. Just be mindful about it.
How would you recommend someone pursue a health goal without becoming influenced by diet culture?
It’s helpful to look at what you think is working or not working. Ideally what we try to do with eating is balance nutrition with pleasure. You want to satisfy the pleasurable aspect of eating, but also want to give your body all the nutrients that it needs.
Historically, most people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. That’s a good one. Are you getting enough fruits and vegetables? Not because it’s a diet thing, but because they’re loaded with vitamins and nutrients. Vegetables often have a negative association with diet culture. This is your opportunity to look at what your body gets from these foods and find delightful ways to prepare them. Maybe you want to roast them in olive oil or in a way that brings out sweetness. Prepare them in a way that tastes good.
The other is fluid. Do you keep your body well-hydrated, which helps with elimination, with keeping your skin from being too dry. All of the metabolic processes in your body take place in water. Those are two very simple things that really do promote health.
The other piece is to pay attention and be curious about how you’re using food. Why do you eat when you’re not hungry? No judgment. Just pay attention.
If you’re focusing relating to food differently, try eating mindfully. A lot of eating is mindless. You might walk by some M&Ms and grab a handful, that’s not criminal, but be aware of what you’re doing and if you enjoyed it. The whole point is to enjoy the treat. When we are enjoying different foods, we are being mindful versus mindless. It is not a black or white thing. You don’t have to eat every single morsel mindfully. The idea is to pay attention so that you’re aware of what you’re eating and if it tastes good.
Another thing I find interesting, is when people who have binged on foods in the past give themselves unconditional permission to eat, they often find out they didn’t even like those binge foods.
If someone wants to just take away one thing, it’s trying to eat mindfully. Slow down and enjoy and pay attention and see what you really like and don’t.
If we’re told we can’t have something, we might want it even more. When you have permission to eat anything you want, what truly tastes good? My friend Annie will say, there’s optimal foods and go to foods, but then there are foods that meet all of your needs down to the tip of your toes. What are those foods? Are we aware of what brings us that satisfaction?
What can people do to feel better, to create a different way of existing in the world?
Creating an internal mantra or new internal narrative. That’s what they’re doing and this is okay for me.
Research shows that habits change if people feel good about what they’re doing. It releases dopamine, a feel good chemical, in your brain and your brain is like, oh, I like that, I want to do it again. So, when you are acting on behaviors that are in your interest, give yourself an attagirl or an attaboy to get that dopamine hit, because then you’ll want to do it again. Avoid beating yourself up for things, because it’s not going to put you in a position where you can easily act. Really appreciate even a little progress that is going to move you forward. Give yourself positive reinforcement no matter how small it seems.
A lot of the eating and die culture is simply habits. It’s helpful to question them and decide what you want your habits to look like going forward. Then, be specific about how you want to accomplish it. For example, I’m going to have a vegetable every day this week. I have carrots and lettuce and am going to do this with them. Then have a plan to help back you up. You’ll be more successful if you know what you want to do.
The biggest thing is self-compassion. People have an idea that the more they beat themselves up, the more they’ll act on positive behaviors. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Working one’s way out of this takes time and patience. It’s a process that works much better with self-compassion. Research even shows that when people are compassionate with themselves, they reach their goals much quicker and maintain them much longer. They also report feeling better the entire time. That helps them maintain long-term health behaviors. Self-criticism and criticizing other people doesn’t work. It just makes our brain not want to do that thing. Compassion truly does help us reach our goals. It’s not about giving yourself permission to do nothing, it’s about giving yourself permission to be human.
Janice, thank you so much.
How can people learn more about you?
They can contact me through the Madison eating disorder support network. I have a website, Janice Antoniewicz-Werner Consulting will be in the show notes. I offer services and am very happy to support people in this process. My personal goal is to help people be joyful and peaceful eaters.
I’m so grateful we have you in our community. Thank you.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today is an episode long in the making. I’m honored to introduce you to Mare Chapman.
Mare is a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher, consultant, and author building on 40 years of clinical experience and 30 years of studying and practicing mindfulness. She’s devoted to understanding how cultural conditioning trains women to disconnect from their authenticity, thereby by losing their voice and power and how mindfulness can be applied to transform these habits so women can live fully empowered, vibrant, and healthy lives. Her recently published book, Unshakable Confidence: The Freedom to Be Our Authentic Selves, Mindfulness for Women, is based on a class she’s been teaching to women here in Madison, Wisconsin for over 20 years.
Mare, would you mind sharing a little bit of your story and how you came to this work?
What’s always been true for me is that our mind creates our heaven and our hell. From early high school I wanted to learn about the mind and our thoughts. College psychology classes got me even more interested in picking this as a career path. When I was pregnant with my son, I woke up to the cultural conditioning that happens for every single woman in this country and in this world, which is so patriarchal.
My mother sent me Betty Friedan’s book, A Feminine Mystique. I read it while I was pregnant and thought, oh my gosh, I have bought the cultural conditioning hook, line and sinker. I knew from that moment on that I believe in women’s equality, that I was a feminist, and this was essential to my being.
Along with that, also knowing for a long time that power has been so abused and misused. When we’re talking about the patriarchy, it’s the male gender that has been in the dominant position for thousands of years. Domination requires subordination, so there’s automatically an unequal power base which is oppressive.
Moving forward, at one of my early jobs working in the public mental health system, I was the director of a program that’s now called the Yahara House, a unit of the mental health center of Dane County. I was in the middle management position, and I witnessed myself repeatedly giving my power away to my bosses, even though I disagreed with them; even though I had a clear vision of what we wanted to create. I could not stop myself. I would become angry at myself because I saw myself doing this, but I seemed to have no control over that habit. That sent me on a path of trying to find a method for working with our mind.
I studied with two other very prominent spiritual perspectives that had meditation practices in them. When I sat my first insight meditation retreat, that cultivates mindfulness, I really found the method that made the most sense to me. The whole intention of mindfulness, is to free our minds from the habits of our conditioning so that we can access our true nature, our wisdom and our open loving heart. Our authentic self. That brings us to today, talking about freeing women from internalized oppression, allowing them to be their authentic selves.
Before we move on, I would like to take a moment to recognize that we are speaking about this from a female perspective. Mare, you shared with me that your work orients towards people who identify as female, and works to acknowledge the historical intergenerational experiences of oppression against people who were assigned female at birth.
We work to be as inclusive as possible in the work we do, so I would like to take this moment to acknowledge that all of our minds have been unavoidably conditioned. We hope all persons listening will be able to identify with what you’re saying because gender conditioning and internalized oppression is so pervasive. Often, it’s so deep that we don’t recognize it.
A common comment that I get when I teach my 10-session class on applying mindfulness to our internalized misogyny, is that women will say, my mind does all the time, and no one has ever said this before. I thought it was just me. People are so grateful for an explanation of what’s been going on inside of them. It helps us realize that what we have been feeling is negative self-talk or self-hate, is, in some ways the conditioning of our culture oppressing us to believe this about ourselves.
When we talked about why we wanted to have this episode, you brought up the idea of naming that all of this work exists because women experience two to three times more anxiety and depression than men.
I check those statistics frequently to see if they’re changing. They have not changed at all.
Why do you think that those rates are so much higher?
It certainly is not because as a gender we’re weaker or there’s something the matter with us. I think it’s the conditioning. We internalize the misogynistic messages of patriarchy that teach us to believe on some very deep, mostly unconscious, level that there’s something the matter with us, we’re not enough, we’re flawed in some way.
Because of this, we cannot validate our own experiences as being normal and appropriate. Instead, we learn to put our awareness to the outside, to others, in the hopes that they will affirm that we’re lovable and worthwhile.
This teaches us to always be moving our attention away from ourselves to that other person, our boss, our teacher, our neighbor, or friend, parent or partner in the hopes that if we are just pleasing enough to them, if we do a good enough job of taking care of them and responding to them, they’ll validate us and then we’ll be safe and secure, and will be able to relax with ourselves.
This habit of othering creates a constant, uncomfortable, self-consciousness. Always wondering, am I doing okay with you? Are you all right with me right now? Did I just say something that wasn’t so good? Did I do something that wasn’t right? We’re always assessing how we’re doing with the other. That creates a constant state of anxiety.
Along with the belief that there’s something the matter with me, there’s a lot of negative self-talk, comparisons, and judgements that add up to making us feel not good about ourselves. We don’t feel safe. If our brains and bodies don’t feel safe, we can continually be in a sympathetic state, which can feel like anxiety, or dorsal vagal, which can feel like depression, and our resources are continually going towards finding that safety. When we don’t know that we’ve been conditioned to look for that safety outside of ourselves, we think that’s the path.
In regular psychotherapy, we go back to our childhood. I’m a big proponent and the inner child, so I’m not displacing that, but we’re still othering. We’re still going towards what person changed me at some point which shaped who I was in order to have safety. That is othering going far back into early developmental stages.
All genders learn as tiny beings coming into the world, that we are vulnerable and dependent on our caregivers. It’s smart of us to learn to pay attention to them and to figure out how to be in order to get their love, support, approval, kindness and care.
Then, research shows that around the age of puberty, there begins to be quite a shift between genders. At that point, boys begin to develop their confidence and build up their esteem. It goes the other way for girls. Unfortunately, for girls, this habit of othering becomes more solidly in place and our connection with our authentic experience goes even deeper, underground.
I was watching a video where someone was filming a group of teenagers. The person with her camera was commenting on how she walked into a room with her children and their friends and asked who wants me to order pizza? The people who identify as men shot their hands up immediately. They know if they’re hungry or not. The young women look around to each other and to the men to defer and decide if it’s appropriate to be hungry right now. You know, what a turning away from our innate wisdom and trust in ourselves. It happened in milliseconds, and they didn’t know they were doing it. One of the effects of always attending to the other person first, always thinking about them, always wondering about them, worrying about them, fantasizing about them, means that you’re not aware of your own body or what’s going on with you.
You write that over time we lose connection with what’s happening in our bodies or, if we do know and what our bodies need is inconvenient to the other, we tend to override it. We’re lost in others and not aware of our authentic experience. Consequently, we become unknown to ourselves, often unclear about what we really want, feel, or think. We get cut off from our intuition, innate wisdom, and intelligence. We react according to ‘shoulds,’ the mind’s story of how we’re supposed to be. We may say yes, when we don’t want to, pretend we’re feeling things we aren’t feeling, or want things we don’t really want. We lose our center, the anchor to ourself, and we become lost in the other. We may feel an ache or emptiness and missing ourselves. Our striving for perfection is an ever-raising bar. We can never achieve it. This bondage to perfection, profoundly limits our relationships and keeps us stuck in the cycle of suffering.
Let’s talk a little bit more about internalized misogyny and the messages that we’re getting.
Internalized misogyny. How would you explain it?
Misogyny, up until the ‘Me Too’ movement, was not really used in our vocabulary. It’s a relief to have it named because we can’t change anything about how we are or about how our society is until we become aware of it.
The way I understand how internalized misogyny works is that patriotic men are dominant. Men call the shots. Men assume privilege. In turn, the other gender is viewed as dependent, weak, erratic, often too emotional. We get messages, from the dominant group, that were not acceptable except as an attractive object to have sexual relationships with. As a caregiver for the children that we bear. Those are really our primary functions and roles in the culture for thousands of years.
There are so many ways that messages that we don’t measure up, are not as important, not as worthwhile, not as valuable, not as significant, not as intense as men, get into our minds. They get into us in an unconscious way. We learn, subtly, to hold ourselves back, to keep ourselves quiet, to defer, all the time, to the other. Misogny can be outright, but also starts happening when the byproduct of this societal view starts causing shame and doubt within women that results in women beginning to undervalue themselves and others of their gender.
Many people’s preconceived notions about how women should exist, stem from societal expectations and gender norms. It’s difficult to identify. It’s important to be conscious of this and to be conscious of our own thoughts and ideas.
I find myself projecting internalized misogyny, onto myself more than I do to other women. I raise other women up and judge myself because maybe I’m being too assertive, which is considered aggressive, have too much ambition, maybe as a caretaker, I’m just supposed to quietly be in the background, sacrificing, with low pay and no benefits. I’m talking about how we treat women overall in our fields.
Even in groups of colleagues, I do that double checking after I meet with everyone. Did I talk too much? Did I seem to know what I was talking about? Did I make space for enough people? These are good things to think about in regard to balance, but I’ve spent a lot of brain time in my 40 some years, thinking about how much I’m impacting other people.
It is so common in our conditioning that we second guess ourselves or imagine what the other person might be thinking about us and, much of the time, what we imagine isn’t positive.
When we’re worrying and wondering about the other, we’re caught up in those patterns and habits. One thing that neuroscience has been teaching us is that our brains are super flexible and responsive to experience. The conclusion is that whatever we practice grows stronger in the brain. This is how neural grooves get created. It’s important to realize that we’re practicing every moment that we’re alive, not just in the moments when we’re meditating.
It’s important to wake up to these habits of our conditioning and see them as habits, not as who we are. To encourage ourselves to come back to our present moment, our authentic experience and practice respecting and accepting ourselves.
How do we take back our power through cultivating mindfulness and self-compassion?
It’s helpful to understand that all of our minds become conditioned. No one can grow up without a biased our view of reality. It’s also important to understandthat beyond our conditioned mind is our unconditioned mind, sometimes called our true nature, our higher self, our Buddha nature. Our unconditioned mind is stable and wise and spacious and kind and loving and generous. It’s who we really are. Our unconditioned mind is likened to the blue sky. It’s vast and open. It is always here.
We could think about our conditioned mind as being the difficult weather that moves the storm in. When we’re experiencing difficult weather, our habit is to get absorbed into that difficult weather, that angry mood or feeling of shame or anxiety or self-doubt. When we’re in that difficulty, we forget that the blue sky is always there beyond the storm.
In a way, mindfulness is a practice that allows us to become more aware of the storms that are moving in, without taking it personally. To learn how to relate to that difficult experience in a stable and wise way. We gain access to our wisdom, to our blue sky nature, to our unconditioned mind.
Mindfulness is all about practice and about bringing our attention into the present moment. Learning to observe what we’re experiencing in the moment with tons of curiosity. What are we thinking in our mind, feeling in the body, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing.
We’re also learning to accept whatever it is rather than resisting or judging it we relate to it in a kind, compassionate, friendly way. This is self-compassion. Not identifying with it or taking it personally. Just seeing it as what is happening right now.
We begin to get to know ourselves, to see more clearly when we’re pulled into the habit of othering, comparing, or shaming ourselves. We learn how to notice, there is shaming happening right now. What’s the story in my mind? Given what’s happening, what’s a wise and kind way to respond to myself? What do I really need in this moment?
In doing this, we become a friend to ourselves. We begin to trust our experience, to know that it is always valid. Even though it may be uncomfortable or difficult, we stay on our own side and don’t turn against or disconnect from ourselves. It’s so important to stay connected to who we are and what our authentic experience is.
Mindfulness is truly a tool to poke holes in those clouds, to remember our unconditioned self, who is worthy, who is good enough, who is capable of working with difficult experiences.
So many women I work with don’t believe they can withstand their own emotions, so they do everything they can to avoid being present with their authentic experience. Mindfulness is a tool to work with those emotions so that confidence rises, and they feel like they’re capable.
The view that emotions are unimportant, irrational, don’t matter, and that women in general are too emotional, is part of patriarchy. We’re discounted for our emotionality, but also expected to hold all the emotions for everyone else. So much of what we do is emotional labor for other people.
Myself and a lot of my clients find themselves being so responsible for everybody else’s experience and everyone else’s feelings and thoughts.
What’s an example of using mindfulness to work with over responsibility?
If you had someone come to you and say, it’s the holidays and I’m really worried that all these things aren’t getting done, but it’s not my job to do those things.
Before I answer that question, I find that habit of over-responsibility to be one of the biggest hallmarks of our conditioning as women. Feeling like if anyone’s in trouble, I’ve got to jump in and fix it. When we’re making ourselves responsible, we believe that it’s our job to make others happy, which is impossible. Happiness is an inside job. We’re actually interfering with others learning to be responsible for themselves. Plus, being overly responsible is exhausting.
I did a session this morning with a woman who is waking up to lifelong patterns of doing everything herself as the fixer. In some ways it’s served her well. She has an amazing job in the community. She’s highly respected. She’s loved. Internally, she has been putting up with abuse from her boss and the marriage she’s been in for a long time has not been good for her. She’s been putting up with everything, trying to make sure everyone’s okay, even though she’s not. She is recognizing that the habit of assuming it’s her job to make sure everyone else is okay has been coming at her own cost, to the point where her body is physically ill.
I think we have to recognize over-responsibility as a conditioned patterned. It’s not in everyone’s best interest to continue in that habit and encourage ourselves to refrain from jumping in. Then noticing what that’s like, ‘I’m not the one to fix this’. How is that for me?
The mind might start playing stories; you’re being lazy, you’re being selfish. Guilt comes up. Can we be with the distress of not doing anything? Often our sense of self, our value is tied into that. We’ve learned to identify that as part of who we think we are.
It’s an important habit to learn to change our relationship to so that we can have more freedom. If we can’t say no, we have a hard time setting boundaries. Right now, my plate is full. I don’t have any energy for that. Saying something like that can be terrifying. It takes a lot of courage to refrain from being pulled into these habits.
I’d like to bring in the idea of compassion versus empathy and that it may be more beneficial to be compassionate, which does not involve being overly responsible versus empathetic.
There was an amazing study done looking at the difference between empathy and compassion. What they found was that when people feel empathy, it lights up the pain centers in the brain. When someone’s telling you something that’s difficult, we recruit a memory of our own to match their experience. We join with that person in their pain.
Alternatively, when we’re experiencing compassion, we feel sorrow and sympathy for their pain and also understand that this is part of being alive, that we all experience pain and suffering as part of the human condition. We recognize that this is that person’s moment of being in a difficult situation. What this researcher discovered is that compassion lights up the pleasure centers in our brain. Connecting with them in this way gives us a sense of satisfaction.
If you’re on hike and your friend falls and breaks their leg, would you also break your legs so you can experience their pain or would you help them to the car and bring them to the hospital? Empathy is breaking your leg too. Compassion is understanding, witnessing, and seeing their pain, and then helping them do something about it. From that place, we are much more viable to the people we love.
Looking at this internalized oppression to challenge the patriarchy, doesn’t separate you from your loved ones. It connects you more to your authentic self, and also connects you more to those that you care about. It makes our relationships with our loved ones much more satisfying and real.
I know other people are going to want to learn more about you. Where can we find you? I have a website, www.marechapman.com. My website has my philosophy about how I work, in individual work and classes and also has some CDs that you can download. Then, I have another website from my book called marechapmanauthor.com, which has information about my book and my Dharma talks. My book is available online.
I want to just thank you so much. I could talk with you about this for hours and hours. Thank you.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today, our theme is the subtle energy system, otherwise known as the chakras. We are going to talk about psychology and energy and ways to integrate mind, body, and spirit in our own lives and in the therapeutic relationship.
I’m a certified yoga therapist and have had many years of training in yoga and yoga philosophy, in addition to the Masters in Mental Health Counseling and my license. I want to make sure to give credit where it’s due, so I’d like to acknowledge that we’re using this knowledge, passed down through the system of yoga. These traditions date back thousands of years, coming from South Asia. This is a time for us to acknowledge our privilege as white and non-disabled people with access to resources that allow us to study and integrate these important principles.
I also want to mention that I use the work of Anodea Judith. She’s a prolific author and body-centered psychotherapist, who wrote Eastern Body Western Mind, a book about psychology and the chakra system as a path to the self. I’m borrowing from traditions that come from the East. but also, will integrate that into the West and our education system.
A lot of this is evidence-based. We wouldn’t bring this to a mental health podcast unless we have science. The chakra system is just another lens we can look through. Another way to conceptualize our being, because we are body centered therapists. We’re not just concerned with the mind. We want to talk about mind, body, and then whatever that other thing is, spirit, soul, energy. That is so important when we’re talking about healing.
Chakra is a Sanskrit word. Sanskrit is a sacred language used in yoga. Today, we’ll keep things in Western terms to ensure we’re honoring this and being very respectful of the system.
The chakra system was referred to in the ancient literature of the Vedas and the Yoga Sutras ofPatanjali. This system is thousands of years old. It’s a way for us to reconceptualize our experience. A chakra is a wheel or a disc that refers to an energy center. They can help us understand the framework of mind, body, and spirit. Chakras, these wheels or discs, are ways for us to examine energy.
What is energy? Energy could be a charge. It could be our attention. It could be our awareness. In yoga we look at it in terms of life force, we call it prana, which is the force within us that animates us. It also can be our breath.
In yoga, the belief is that we have this energy channel that is analogous to our spinal cord. The spinal cord is really the seat of our life and our main line of energy. There are other channels of energy in our bodies.
In yoga, the belief is that we have two main channels that wrap around our central channel, our spinal cord. Where those two channels intersect with the spine are our chakras. The system we’re talking about today is the seven main chakras. They store energy. They store our thoughts or feelings or memories or experiences, our actions. They direct our mindset, our behavior, our emotional health. This is such a rich framework.
I’m a body-centered therapist and a yoga therapist, the two connect. This is a way to do self-exploration.
Where might there be an imbalance in your life? Where do you notice that in your body? It’s that simple. Is there something happening in your heart center that we can identify and work on? How do we bring that into balance? This is just a framework, a way of looking at our experiences.
When I was reviewing how each chakra taps into different things that are happening within you, it was almost inspirational. That sounds like something I have noticed happening, or that feels stuck within me. Then there’s different ways of pursuing healing or just even thinking about it differently.
The chakras also associate with the nerves along the spinal cord. The locations are fluid and different for each person, but there are nerve bundles along the spine where we experience a heightened, intense energy for each of the seven centers. In yoga, when we do poses, we’re moving our spines and manipulating our energies through those movements. We can target different energy centers through a yoga practice, poses, via our breath, chanting, or dance.
I can’t see that you have an excessive throat chakra, but we can talk about what sort of physical things you have going on, what sort of emotional items are stuck for you, and then talk about ways to heal what is out of balance in your life. There’s so much literature on this. I like to take it into the mental and emotional realm too. Our goal is to help people work through their past, work through their present, and to try to live in more balance.
We can think about this in terms of psychology too. It’s kind of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is very complimentary because a lot of human development is physiological and mental, but also about our relationship with ourselves and others across our lifespan. There seems to be specific things that show up and that we work through both physiologically cognitively and emotionally around each of these zones, almost in a way that could compliment Erik Erikson or Piaget.
Typically, people who come to see me are interested in yoga and the body and a different approach. I don’t bring it up unless somebody is interested. I want people to do their self-exploration so that they can recognize when something is out of balance. We always look back at where things changed. What developmental stage? What can I do to bring balance to that?
If we can identify something big that happened to us, let’s say age seven there was a divorce or we moved, we can look at what is showing up in our systems at that time in place, and what chakra, behavioral rhythm, or inner child work is associated with that age. There’s different tools and paths to healing
There are seven main chakras centers, and we’ll start with the root.
Each chakra is associated with a:
Human right.
a color, because each wheel or disc vibrates at a certain frequency.
developmental stage up to adulthood.
Chakra One – Root Chakra
Our very earliest developmental stage. It spans from in utero to about one year old. The root chakra is our right to be; our right to exist. We’re learning our body, as babies. It’s associated with the color red.
With that root chakra, some things that can interrupt development, we might call these traumas, would be birth trauma, abandonment, neglect, difficulty attaching to an attachment figure, a caregiver major illness or surgery, an abusive environment, and intergenerational inherited trauma. It aligns with Erik Erikson. From infancy to 18 months, the conflict is trust versus mistrust. How safe or not am I? Am I safe? Trust versus mistrust is a wonderful way to conceptualize the root chakra. We have to trust ourselves. We have to trust our bodies.
What are some healing practices we can do? I always suggest yoga as a way for us to build trust with our bodies and connect mind and body. Yoga means ‘to yoke’ mind and body, to unite. We can also practice grounding. The act of feeling our feet wherever we are.
Consider the traumas that are associated with the root chakra, neglect for attachment and abuse. Those disrupt our ability to be intuitive with our bodies. We’ve talked about interoception, the process of knowing what’s happening in our bodies. Trauma at any age can interfere with the interoceptive process.
People ask me how they can know which chakra is imbalanced. There are physical ways for us to suss that out, but you have to do the introspective work. I use books from Anodea Judith and Brenda Davies. Brenda is a psychiatrist who wrote The Seven Healing Chakras. There are assessments galore in their books so you can take control of the journey yourself, which is so much more powerful than having somebody tell you where you’re imbalanced.
Chakra Two – Sacral Chakra
Physically, this is located in our feet, legs, and the base of our torso. Just under our belly button. It is associated with the color orange and with our right to feel.
Moving up that developmental channel, we’re at six months to two years. Here we’re starting to develop the capacity for emotions. Again, it lines up with Piaget, another huge proponent in child development and human development. This is the stage where children start to get to know their worlds and realize how their actions can cause things to happen around them. They’re separate from other people.
The sacral chakra talks about gaining insight into our default reactions, looking at our deeper emotions, and learning to express ourselves and set healthy boundaries. That’s what two-year-olds are all about.
Traumas that occur at this developmental stage or chakra could be, not being able to identify with our feelings, enmeshment, or sexual abuse.
How do we heal? Movement and movement therapy, emotional identification and releases, working with boundaries, treating addictions, engaging in healthy pleasures and digging into inner child work.
Our brains have a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere. The right brain is more creative, and the left brain is associated with logic and reasoning. The right brain is much more online from ages zero to three and then the left brain shows up. The right brain is all about the body and sensory. That’s how we make sense of the world. When I think about going deeper into our default reactions, our deeper emotions, our inner child work, we really need to bring the body and sensory to the table. That brings up mindful awareness and bearing witness to our body’s memories and what happens in our sensorimotor processing system. We don’t just process things through our thoughts and feelings, but through our body and our nervous systems.
Working through this chakra comes down to listening, providing for, and protecting our inner child through boundaries and gaining insight into what we need and how we can provide for ourselves.
We’re talking about reparenting our two-year-old, but we need to reparent ourselves at every age. It is lifelong work. What a blessing to be aware that it’s possible to have that healing and change.
With chakras, we can also look at other tools. We can use essential oils that help to balance those chakras, meditations, visualizations, colors. Little nods to our subtle energy system to work on bringing balance in ways that are both big and small.
Chakra Three – Solar Plexus
Located above the navel and below the heart. It’s color is yellow, the sun and it is our power center. The right here is the right to act. Two to four years old is the developmental stage for our third chakra.
When we think about traumas, shaming, controlling abuse, or a child who has to act as the parent can be seen here.
To help balance, again inner child work. Also, relaxation, stress management, exercise, building up our ego strength. We can find a lot of anger at that third chakra so we might want to work on releasing that anger or managing it with the help of a therapist or a group.
Also working on shame. Piaget talks about the same things; autonomy versus shame and doubt. How can we live into following our gut, work through feelings of shame and develop confidence. Often exploration is what leads to confidence. Learning that it’s okay to fail, let’s see what happens. Trying something new. That comes back to feeling like we’re independent, that we can rely on ourselves and that we’re there for ourselves.
When someone has a lot of anger or excessive drive or are addicted to work and are constantly on the go, we work to bring balance to the solar plexus. It’s a pretty tangible, but we have to do that exploration first. We have to do that introspection.
It’s important to remember that when chakras get imbalanced, they can be excessive or deficient. They can, we can have too much of this energy or too little. So our healing practices are going to be to balance. “Like increases like.” If we’re workaholics, we’re not going to try to exercise a bunch more or do things that create more heat. We’re going to bring in some cooling centers.
Chakra Four – Heart Chakra
Located in the heart center, this is our right to love and be loved. It’s color is green and it is associated with ages four to seven.
Traumas here are rejection, abandonment, loss, criticism, grief, divorce, death, abuse. We often have an imbalance one way or the other here.
This is the idea of being connected. People who have just very little connection to their heart chakras may be perceived as cold or unfeeling. People who are in excess may be clinging, holding on, or loving and not having it reciprocated.
If someone is in dorsal vagal or shut down, there’s a disconnection to others, and maybe disconnection, dissociation or numbing from ourselves. Getting connected to the heart chakra can help to direct love back to ourselves and our bodies and to address the tendencies to isolate or to disconnect.
What do we do to heal the heart chakra? I like to think about compassion, joy, and gratitude. Communicating with your inner child, noticing their wounds. Grounding in our adult self, and being there for that child that was hurt or left or abandoned. I like to just start with deep breathing to get us into parasympathetic.
Chakra Five – Throat Center
Our throat is the right to speak and to be heard. Ages seven to 12 years old, this is when we’re developing our voice. Anything associated with communication really lives here.
Some of the traumas can be mixed messages, lies, verbal abuse, criticism, having authoritarian parents, maybe some alcoholism in the family, or secrets.
Practicing using our voice is a big part of self-exploration. In order to speak our truth, we have to know what it that and feel safe and confident enough to articulate it.
This is the right to speak, but also to be heard. Often it is asking that we’re heard and using our words. We do a lot of communication practice in therapy, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships and couples’ work.
There are so many things we can do. Often, we quiet our voice and shift what we need to say or who we need to be in order to have the approval or support of others. Having a relationship with a therapist where you can use your voice and not be shamed or afraid that you’re going to say the wrong thing can be healing. You can speak your authentic truth and it is held in a safe container where there isn’t judgment, and you don’t have to edit or alter it so that other people are okay.
Heart chakra and throat chakra show up a lot in my therapy sessions. We need to be able to speak, but also to hear and to listen.
When we’ve got an excess throat chakra, people really like to hear the sound of their voice. Here, we may need to work on silence. Maybe some meditation and some discernment in our speech.
Chakra Six – Third Eye
This chakra is located right between your eyebrows at the forehead. Here is our right to see and be seen. Here is adolescence. We’re starting to see the world for what it is.
There can be a lot of traumas here. We may see things that don’t make sense to us; hypocrisy, invalidation, especially growing up in a traumatic environment.
Healing practices may be meditating, holding that awareness. Also, coloring, drawing, and artistic expression help bring balance because there’s a lot of input through our eyes and sometimes, we just need to play. When things start getting a bit too much, I find myself at a pottery class or weaving class or coloring. Adolescence is a time when we express creativity. It can be very useful to stop and think about, am I being seen, what am I seeing? How do I bring some balance to that?
Chakra Seven – The Crown
Located at the crown of the head or even just a little bit above, is the seventh chakra. This is our right to know and to learn. This is early adulthood when we start to know ourselves.
Some of our traumas at that crown chakra might be education that doesn’t really allow us to be curious, things that are forced upon us, perhaps religiosity, having our beliefs invalidated, having to be blindly obedient, being fed disinformation lies.
We can heal these by doing our own learning, studying, meditation, doing self-introspection or reflection, maybe examining our belief systems through therapy or with a spiritual guide. Here it’s really important to develop our own inner witness. The dual awareness of what’s happening with our minds and bodies and witnessing it from a place of compassion and detachment.
I don’t know if there’s any greater transformation than the change I see within my clients who utilize the knowledge that is out there to create change for themselves.
It feels very Jungian to me; a kind of collective unconscious that we tap into.
The interconnectedness that exists in the crown chakra, and developing spiritual relationships with self, allows us to integrate mind, body, spirit, and energy, and be that unit of peace that can then connect with others and make change. We change ourselves so that we can help change the community that we live in.
Looking back on our life and seeing the failures, the successes, and developing insight into understanding the role we’ve played in what we’ve experienced, and the insight of how we can change and how we can look at our default reactions, allows us to grow.
This is a path to self-discovery. You’re learning about external things, but you’re also doing internal work. That’s what this is all about. That’s what we do. We help other people on that journey, on the path to self. This is just one way we can look at it. It’s a way that makes it makes a lot of sense to me.
As we’ve gone through this journey, we talked about the different colors associated with each chakra. I wanted to mention that we left off with green at the heart. Our throat chakra is blue, our third eye is often like a deep indigo or purple, and our crown is seen as purple or white.
Thinking about our energy as this rainbow is a really uplifting way to conceptualize this, but it also reminds us of the mystery, right? Rainbows existed long before we understood the science, so when we think about the chakra system, it may be an esoteric conceptualization, but we’re digging into it now in these different ways that can help us understand the mystery.
Today we’re talking about Dance Movement Therapy. DMT integrates the creative process, movement, and verbal processing to help strengthen the mind body connection.
Our guest is Tara Rollins. Tara is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Dance Movement Therapist at Insight Counseling and Wellness. Tara has experience working with children and families, adolescents, and adults, in nonprofit agencies, inpatient hospitals, residential treatment centers, community centers, schools, and outpatient clinics. She specializes in working with children who are on the autism spectrum or have experienced trauma due to abuse or being placed outside of their home. Tara also works with individuals experiencing anxiety, depression, ADHD, body image issues, body-based traumas and anger management issues. Tara’s work is based on the belief that all individuals have strengths that can be used to overcome life’s challenges.
Tara, it’s so good to have you here. Tell us a little bit about Dance Movement Therapy?
The American Dance Therapy Association defines Dance Movement Therapy as the psychotherapeutic use of moving as a way to help people expand their emotional, cognitive and physical integration, creating a connection between each system so the actions of one system can facilitate the workings of another.
It’s an innovative, formal psychotherapy that uses connection of the body and the mind as its foundation and works to strengthen that connection. We work with the whole person integrating movement, their creative process, and verbal communication into sessions. It’s an eclectic blend of lots of different things.
What is the difference between Dance Movement Therapy and regular talk therapy?
Dance Movement Therapy is a body-based form of psychotherapy used for treating a diverse group of people, of all ages social, psychological, developmental, neurological, or physical challenges. We want to promote emotional, cognitive and physical wellbeing. We help clients integrate their mind, body, and emotions. Through this integration, find emotional growth and self-definition. We use movement and the creative process to help clients express emotions and experiences in a less direct, more unique way. Sessions include movement as well as verbalizations to process experiences and develop skills. We use movement as a tool for creative expression, insight and behavioral change in a supportive environment.
That’s one component of Dance Movement Therapy, and the part is dance movement. In DMT sessions, we teach dance concepts, imagery, metaphor, symbolic themes, as well as dance elements of space, rhythm, time and intensity. Then we use those elements to help clients experience new emotional states that they never developed, lost, or are uncomfortable using.
Creative dance techniques help open new avenues for expression, for insight, for transformation and we expand clients dance vocabulary and dance creativity which helps them to explore authentic emotions and develop a body language of expression. Which helps healing and processing experiences in a different way.
When we bring in the body, we’re tapping into our sensory motor processing system through posture and movement. All sorts of things come alive that we can’t necessarily tap into when we’re seated trying to think our way through it.
How did you find Dance Movement Therapy?
My mom says that I was dancing before I was born. From my first dance class, I fell in love with dance. After high school, I wanted to help people but also wanted to find a way to keep dance as a part of my life because it was so important to me.
I had a teacher who referred me to talk to the Dance Therapist at the Hancock Center for Dance and I was like, this is what I’m supposed do. It connected dance with the desire to help people. I studied psychology and dance in undergrad and went on to a graduate program specifically in Dance Movement Therapy. To become a dance therapist, you have to complete a master’s program that the American Dance Therapy Association accredits. In general, you study dance therapy theories and methodologies, as well as other areas of psychology and psychotherapy.
How did Dance Movement Therapy become a formal psychotherapy intervention?
Dance Movement Therapy started as a distinct profession the 1940s by a woman named Marian Chase. There are several other pioneers, such as Trudi Schoop, Mary Whitehouse, and Blanche Evans that continued on from her work, but Marianne Chase is the original dance therapist.
She had been teaching dance with kids of all ages and was asked to lead dance groups at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC for the patients.
Chase began to notice the positive therapeutic effects of the dance classes on the client’s health. The clients, or patients, were noticing that they were gaining physical and emotional benefits from taking the dance class.
She continued working with the clients to develop the main theories and structures that are still used in a lot of dance therapy today. The dance therapy field is also influenced by neuroscience, dance in Europe and the United States, nonverbal communication, anthropology and psychology brought together. We’ve been dancing for thousands of years, but this was creating the psychological psychotherapy lens as a specific tool.
Are there certain mental health diagnoses that Dance Movement Therapy treats more effectively than others?
DMT is effective at treating most types of mental health diagnoses because, like other creative arts therapies, it is really flexible in finding interventions that work for each client.
If a clinic, agency, organization, or even just a person, is open to the idea of this being helpful and trying it out, it can really be helpful. When verbal techniques are less accessible or less comfortable or more overwhelming, I think of my work with individuals on the autism spectrum. It can be particularly helpful for them. Also, when diagnosis affects the body a lot, for example, with people who’ve had early developmental trauma or trauma that happened before there was words.
It can be particularly successful when it’s integrated into a comprehensive treatment model that includes other forms of psychotherapy, as well as medical professions, school teams, natural supports.
How is Dance Movement Therapy used to heal body-based trauma?
We’re continuing to learn that when someone experiences some type of trauma, the body is affected. It is essential that the body is included in therapeutic work to heal trauma. Dancing with therapy can help clients, who’ve experienced trauma, work towards a connection or reconnection with their body, gain a sense of control over their body and hyper arousal or disassociation and develop compassion and provide nourishment to the body self.
We’ve also learned that when someone has repeated experiences, they internalize certain beliefs about themselves and about the world. Neurons that fire together, wire together, developing and strengthening neural pathways that affect every aspect of life. In DMT, we allow clients to have new positive experiences connecting to their body, which create new neural pathways that are self-affirming narratives to replace those older, negative neural pathways that were formed by trauma.
We have lots of props in DMT, things like dancing with music, moving with scarves, using movement props, creating movement metaphors, providing repeated opportunities for clients to experience joy while moving their body and experiencing body sensations. We’re allowing them to have positive experiences in real time, connecting to their body, noticing those sensations.
We allow clients to process experiences that are too difficult to address directly. We can touch on issues, by externalizing those feeling states, without having to directly address vulnerable emotional experiences. If someone’s feeling angry, they don’t have to talk about that anger, which could shift their state or trigger or hijack their brain into a survival response. They can mindfully and safely move in a way that expresses anger. Maybe moving in a capacity that feels like this force, this push is anger. We need to allow the body to move in a way that it wants to process those feelings and those experiences.
There’s this great body-centered therapist I follow on Instagram. I believe she’s in Australia.
She has something that is stretchy and you move around, and no one can see you. Some people call them stretch sacks. Think about being in a skin or a womb, or you’re an animal or you’re coming out of an egg.
I love the idea of how safe it feels that no one’s watching your facial expressions or your body. You’re inside this moveable stretchy bubble. It contains the experience, but also allows you to set down those parts of yourself that are self-conscious or judging what we’re doing. It looks really freeing. It also gives the sensory input of almost getting a hug from the stretch. And you can have fun with it as well. Noticing that not everything that’s connected with my body and physical sensations is negative. You can look at yourself in the mirror and laugh at how silly you look in a giant thing. It’s joy, exploration, feeling something in my body that doesn’t have to feel bad or overwhelming.
The nervous system can only play when it feels safe. So we can tell you’re in a place with that you’re feeling safe and playful and you’re moving again and making new neuropathways that reinforce that play and movement are safe.
Another thing that we do is talk about developmental stages.
There can be gaps when people experience trauma at an early age where they can get stuck or are not able to develop certain skills that they need. Our body is the one thing that’s with us from the time we’re born till to die. When we’re young movement and play are our language. DMT and body work help people move through physical experiences to go back to that time in their life and process using the language that we had.
We can’t sit down and talk about what happened when you were two, but we can put move like a two-year-old moves and all of a sudden, this wealth of knowledge and information comes up.
It’s so interesting how you can be doing something, and your brain taps into things you forgot about, and memories become clearer. For example, I used to pogo stick a lot and I found one a couple years ago and jumped on it and got a flood of memories. It’s so interesting that our bodies and movement store those things for us.
What do you think can be helpful for someone who is working on their inner child?
One thing that can be helpful is having clients create a dance journey or dance story. It’s about an early childhood experience, family of origin issue, or trauma experience. People will create a dance, to process either the whole journey or a specific part. Many clients pick music that was popular or that they were listening to when they were a certain age. They play that music and move to that music and see what happens. It often brings up body memories.
In dance therapy, we also talk about different movement qualities or rhythms that we develop.
If you looked at Erik Erikson and developmental psychology and the stages of development, we create rhythms from that time. For example, the first rhythm we develop is the sucking rhythm. Sucking is the heartbeat the infant hears before they’re born. Sucking in breastfeeding and rocking is a soothing rhythm. In dance therapy, we talk about the idea of trying on the rhythm. Trying to move with this rocking, sucking rhythm helps us connect with that part of our life.
Then, different rhythms develop over time naturally.
If we went through an idea development, you would start with the sucking rhythm and then move to the higher, more complicated movement qualities. A lot of times when people experience trauma or get stuck, they miss that rhythm. We develop and practice different movement activities. For example, with sucking rhythm, we can rock. That is sometimes you can see people doing. When we’re self-soothing, what do we do? That’s an intuitive self-soothing quality that we learned before we’re even born with our mom’s heartbeat and her breath.
If someone’s interested in trying Dance Movement Therapy, what can they expect in a session?
The structure for individual, group, or family sessions varies a lot, depending on the Dance Movement Therapist leading the session and the person or population that you’re working with. There’s not a set structure or format for sessions.
Individual sessions in particular, tend to develop based on what the client is needing, expressing, or feeling that day. We meet the client where they’re at. If you’re doing group, sometimes you need a little bit more structured, but there’s always a creative process and playfulness. We’re picking up on what’s happening in the group, what’s happening with the individual and going with that.
Marian Chase created a structure that many people like to use. There, we have a warmup, a theme development, and a closure or cool down. I use those loosely because we like to go with what’s there and what’s happening.
Warm up is what it sounds like. Start moving the body, noticing the breath, connecting with the body and starting to notice what your body is needing and wanting today? We might give some directives depending on the individual client. The idea is to help them connect with their body. Some people don’t need a lot, maybe just some music and then they’re off.
Then we have theme development, which is where we work on practicing and developing skills, expanding on or exploring themes that might’ve come up in the warmup. Based on the energy of the group, is there some common movements or qualities or specific movements that are coming up. If it’s a group that has certain themes or skills that it’s working on, we might incorporate that into the theme development of the group.
The last part is the closure or the cool-down. We’re cooling down, slowing the body, not introducing new information and helping clients to feel grounded before the session ends or reflecting on what happened. It’s a loose structure, really about meeting the client where they’re at and with what they need that day.
What’s it like for a person who feels really hesitant at the beginning of DMT? Maybe they’re starting in a place where they’re not feeling connected to their body or that their body isn’t a safe place to be. Starting this new thing with a new person and they’re just supposed to move around. It makes me want to enter freeze just thinking about it.
Even though we do use dance concepts, creative processes, and improvisation, you do not have to have any dance experience. The most important thing is that you’re listening to your body and you’re staying safe.
I usually start small and start simple. It’s not a dance class. It can be connecting with your breath and noticing what your breath is doing. Maybe a body scan, noticing what sensations I’m having in my body today. Maybe we have music, and we tap out a rhythm on our legs, or we clap together, or we tap our feet. If we’re a group, we look around and see the other people in the group, and notice what they’re doing. It’s about connecting with the body and the breath and exploring new ways to express yourself and connect with your body.
There is no right or wrong way to move. We’re not teaching you dance skills. People do create dances and have what they’ve created witnessed by the therapist or the group members, but it’s always about what feels right to your body and challenging yourself to try different movements when it feels comfortable to you.
The key takeaway of dance therapy is how do I learn to feel comfortable connecting with and noticing what’s happening in my own body. To find my own way of expressing myself. There is not a right or wrong way. That can be very healing.
What are some ways a listener could bring Dance Movement Therapy into their life right now?
Therapists, as well as people outside of the fields of therapy, can use dance and movement in unique ways. I often give clients exercises to try outside of our therapy sessions. One example is when a situation or an interaction doesn’t go the way you want, is particularly challenging, or creates a lot of anxiety, take time either to think about how I was holding my body. What was the tone of my voice? What was my face doing? How close was I standing to that person? Then, try adjusting one or more of these things the next time you’re in that situation. See if it helps make things go a little better for you.
Anybody can do it day to day. What is my body doing when I’m going into fight or flight mode or aggressive mode? Did someone perceive me as being really angry and aggressive when I wasn’t. Your body will store those patterns. It’ll have the automatic response to thoughts and feelings. You won’t even notice, but the body will shift into a posture or pattern of movement, often because the brain is trying to predict the future based on past information. It will sometimes keep an old story or an old narrative or belief alive when that’s not even our actual reality anymore.
We all have movement preferences but also need an expansive movement repertoire to be successful. For example: some people tend to move with a lot of quickness and struggle to slow down. This is really helpful when you need to get things done quickly, or you’re doing something super active, playing a sport, moving, etc. At other times, this preference might cause some challenges like when you’re trying to rock a baby to sleep or carry a fragile dish. I ask people to challenge themselves to do a daily activity with a different movement quality and see how that affects your success. I might say people move like you’re walking through honey. Move like you’re a video in slow motion.
There are all of these different qualities and they’re on the spectrum. We don’t say there’s good and bad movements. We need all of them. We all naturally have preferences to certain patterns, certain qualities of movement. You might notice your partner or a friend who tends to move with a lot of quickness or like they’re moving through honey. Think about different professions and how different movement qualities would affect your success at them. Your interactions with people, how you move and hold your body affect that.
With DMT techniques, you can shift and play and try on other qualities. Light versus heavy, direct versus indirect, quick versus slow, free flow versus controlled. Knowing these things opens another way of looking at the world, looking at your interactions. Again, it’s challenging because it’s different. And it’s okay to have preferences, but you’re giving yourself options.
You’re expanding possibilities so that things don’t have to continue the same way if you don’t want them to. Whether it’s different tools to be creative and express yourself, or process through things. Maybe different ways to interact with people or different ways to connect with your breath, ultimately, we want to find ways to do things a little bit differently.
You’re so passionate. You’re so wise, so knowledgeable. Thank you for sharing yourself with us today.
Today I’m welcoming Lieutenant Colonel Shaye Mullen Dyke, a 27-year Air Force Veteran. She is the Creator and Director of YogaFit for Warriors and YogaFit for Warrior Kids.
These trauma informed yoga programs are designed to help and empower anyone struggling with PTSD or unresolved physical and emotional trauma, including yoga teachers, mental health workers, educators, veterans, their families, first responders, and all those who help and love them.
She is also a yoga therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists and specializes in working with groups and individuals to help process unresolved traumas.
Shaye earned her Master’s in Counseling from the University of Maryland in 2003, while she was in the military and spent a year working directly with veterans returning from the Iraq War. In 2012, she combined her military and counseling experience with her love of yoga into the program she’s in charge of today.
Welcome Shaye.
Well, thanks, Jeanne. That’s a lovely introduction. Now retired Lieutenant Colonel. I retired this past year during the pandemic. It was perfect timing with the transition to being at home. I got to focus on the warriors programming and leading workshops online. It’s been busy, and yet perfectly timed so I could focus on helping people during this difficult time and to help myself.
It may be harder to come out of it than it was to go in because we don’t know. We’re walking out of the cave into a new world. What are the operating instructions? How do I walk and talk and interact with people? We all have some healing to do. Not just people with a diagnosable disorder, like PTSD.
I thought I knew mental health, but it got magnified with everybody dealing with stress. We were dealing with the unknown and the human brain doesn’t like that, it likes to predict. If you can’t produce a story that makes sense in the world, that is, by its definition, a stressful place. Our kids are struggling, I was struggling, everybody became a caregiver, I’m a homeschooler. I work from home and roles changed. In hindsight, the silver lining is we were all going through it together.
Coming out of this year, people are more willing to ask for help because stress and trauma became normalized, and everybody was talking about them. Now it’s more acceptable to say, I’m dealing with some anxiety, some depression. In fact, suicide rates dropped last year but the numbers of phone calls to the suicide hotline quadrupled.
It must’ve been a different experience when you decided to introduce yoga-based programs to military veterans. I’m guessing that there was not as much willingness to address trauma in our troops.
We started creating the Warriors Program in late 2011, 2012, because 22 veterans a day commit suicide.
We saw this dramatic increase in PTSD is because we had this thing called the surge. We sent over 125,000 troops into Iraq and Afghanistan to ‘finish the war.’ We had an enormous amount of troops deployed during the next four to six years. Then, everybody started coming home and that’s where we saw a big shift, not only in PTSD, but things like traumatic brain injuries, TBI.
It was a desperate time in the military. The only paradigm that the military has, because we’re bound by evidence-based research, the Western medical model and insurance model, was cognitive behavioral therapy, which is fantastic, but doesn’t always work well with trauma.
Then, of course pharmaceutical interventions, psycho-pharmaceutical interventions, which are great in some instances, but just a disaster, many times, for PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder.
Military wouldn’t come in and say, I want that pill for PTSD because they wouldn’t really admit it. They would come in and say, I have chronic pain. What you get is an opiate. Then, oh, I can’t sleep doc. Okay, here’s some Trazadone. Oh, I have some anxiety now. Okay, here’s some Valium. I’m having trouble focusing. Here’s some Adderall.
They would walk out, very commonly, with six to 12 medications as cocktail that either made them a zombie or, unfortunately, many overdose deaths and addictions and increased suicidal ideations.
Again, not all drugs are bad, but that was all they had. I knew yoga could help and that’s what gave birth to the Warriors program. That was not sustainable and is actually not helping anybody.
Also, you’re really not open to going to mental health when you’re in active duty because you’re judged for it. We’re trying to get rid of that, but the truth is there’s security clearance concerns. You’re the perceived weak link. You can’t hack it. You can’t cut it. That’s still there. And, that’s just a necessary part of what our military does.
People can come to yoga class and never have to self-identify or say I have PTSD, and yet they come on their mats and heal.
The motto that I live by the credo, ‘You don’t have to talk to heal. You have to feel to heal.’ Healing comes first. Talking may come second. It’s that lack of feeling that’s the problem.
Back in 2012, it wasn’t well accepted, but I knew it could help. Yoga was on every base. I didn’t call my classes, yoga for PTSD, but they knew who I was. We’re still not there but we’ve come a long way.
From what it sounds like you were teaching this to military, not necessarily like in a therapeutic way, but it was therapeutic.
Yeah. I had gotten my master’s in counseling in 2003 and started yoga in 1998 and it finally all came together. I was like, wait a minute, I know yoga could help. I knew it was mental health therapy on the mat but didn’t have the ability to explain how to people, which is really important in the West. We want to know why and the mechanisms that make it healing. We have that now, so it’s an exciting time.
If you have trauma PTSD, you should get on the mat and find a trauma informed yoga teacher or a clinical therapist, like yourself, who specializes in somatic therapies because we know exactly how and why yoga and mindfulness work. It dials into the part of the brain and the nervous system where trauma is stored. The biggest message is you don’t have to feel this way.
For a lot of people, once they hear the science behind it, they’re like, all right, I’ll give it a try. Continuing to talk about our story can be re-triggering and can add to our toxic stress load. When there’s something as accessible as yoga, that takes away the fear of treatment. You leave a yoga class, and you feel good. You might not know why, but you do.
Prolonged exposure therapy. I think for some people it’s been a lifesaver, but in some ways it kind of makes you a declawed cat. It’s a desensitization as opposed to what we do in yoga, which is integration. We’re not trying to get rid of the trauma. That is completely Western, sort of reductionist, cut it out, get rid of it. We don’t believe that. We believe it can be a source of strength. We believe in post-traumatic growth, that trauma is eventually going to be a big strong root system for you. The way out is through, and yoga gives you the skills, the strength, predominantly through breath practice and self-regulation skills. The mindfulness, stay present. Then, when I get triggered, I don’t check out, I don’t disassociate, I don’t go shut down. That’s where the healing happens.
With things like MRIs, we can now see what happens in the brain. A person who disassociates or checks out is re-experiencing, which is not productive. Instead, we trigger a little bit, but we stay present. You’re going to feel it again, you have to. Just like when you stub your toe and hold your breath, eventually you take an inhale. When you stay mindful, you own it, it doesn’t own you. It’s there still, but now you can pull up that experience when you want, and you can retell that story from a place of strength.
What are the unique ways that PTSD shows up in our military?
A lot of people join the military at age 18 because they’re not from the best situations. The average military person has an ACE, adverse childhood experiences, score of four or more. They’re coming in predisposed to PTSD.
If you’ve been through a lot of stress and trauma, one of the responses is fight. We get the fighters. They’ve been fighting their whole lives. They tend to do well, but they’re rewarded for that fight response, and it’s normalized in the military.
That creates complex PTSD. You’ve come in with previous childhood stressors and traumas and I’m going to intentionally traumatize you before we send you to war. It’s one of the few things we know we’re going to do and yet we do nothing to inoculate your nervous system or brain from it even when we know you can. That’s martial arts. That’s Eastern mindfulness, control, resiliency. We don’t do that. We train you to fight and to follow rules. We don’t train you on how to control the weapon of yourself. Control your nervous system through your breath. Control your mind. Some of the special ops and other elite forces get that training, but it should be mandatory at all basic training. Let’s make you do meditation, so we don’t send you unarmed out there to have a traumatic experience and a dysregulated nervous system.
Then, we get mad because you can’t regulate yourself and your emotions. You come home and you’re a hot mess at work, in your family, your finances, your relationships, and we’re surprised? It’s actually quite logical.
For some reason, there’s a barrier about incorporating it as mandatory training. I think it has to do with a lot of people’s notion of yoga as a religion, which it’s not. We need to look at it like training you physically, we’re training your mind. There’s some initiatives, but it’s a slow ship to turn around the whole military.
To answer your question, I think it starts before they even enter and then we traumatize you in basic training. We’ve got to because you’re going to come under fire, and I need to know how you’re going to respond.
When the firefight goes on, I need you to hold your ground and shoot. That is abnormal human mammal behavior. Your first response should be flight because that is the best conservation of metabolic resources to keep you alive and to live another day.
We have to train them over and over again to counter that. That’s a trauma. I have to traumatize you to counter the flight response. Now let’s send you into battle.
Why are rates of PTSD higher for men in the military versus civilian men?
It’s a relationship trauma most of the time that happens because your buddy got blown up next to you. It’s a band of brotherhood. I would die for you if you’re my brother or sister in the military, but I don’t have to like you. I would die for you because we’re here for the greater good. That gives you so much oxytocin. Now, you get blown up or hurt and I feel responsible. It’s a moral injury, that’s much more powerful than any physical injury.
We’re talking about chemical messengers. Oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, is a chemical process that bonds us to one another. PTSD is very much physiological.
You can’t just give somebody a pill to alleviate those symptoms. The body has to be involved and there also has to be a greater meaning. There’s so much to explore. What is the greater good? How do I fit into that?
That brings up an even bigger point. We don’t explore philosophically with our young troops, are you okay with killing somebody? Part of the Warriors Program is reading the story of Arjuna. The warrior is telling his dilemma. He’s darned if he does and darned if he doesn’t. Someone’s got to go out there and fight. Is it okay? Is it okay with my morals.
We didn’t even mention the brain part. They’re 18 to 24 and the brain doesn’t fully develop until after 24. We’ve done great damage to their brains, and they come home, and we go, what’s wrong with you? Again, surprised when we shouldn’t be.
We haven’t had the deep, moral, philosophical discussion about war. We’re just like, do what you’re told and follow orders. They do that and then come home and are like, what does this mean about me? I killed somebody. I was responsible for this.
It really comes from not knowing who they are. That is another benefit of yoga, exploring energetically, emotionally, but also philosophically, who are we? Why are we here? No matter what culture or religious tradition or political standpoint you come from, you are all welcome on the mat. Over time, that’s the inner strength that yoga gives us. That’s resiliency. If you know who you are, then in any given situation, you’re going to know the right thing to do for you. Better to explore that before you’re faced with it. We can avoid some of those moral injuries.
I also believe that we shouldn’t send people to battle until they’re 25. That level of damage to the brain is really tough to undo. Technology has gotten us past World War One brute strength. That’s kind of controversial. I think we should send them to go make peace, build a bridge, Army Corps of Engineers, something medical. We don’t need to put a gun into your hand to go shoot somebody until you’re 25.
We talked about heart rate variability as being an indicator of our flexibility to recover from these catastrophic things.
Heart rate variability is really a measure of the coordination of our nervous system with the autonomic nervous system functioning. You train people on heart rate variability, and it doesn’t lie, it shows if you’re resilient or not. We have a biomarker. Just like physical fitness can be measured, nervous system fitness can be measured. That’s what resilience is. How about that in training?
How about we teach you to train your parasympathetic nervous system, which is where resiliency and awareness and healing come from. I know we have the nickname rest and digest, but it’s much more than that. It’s the calm strength.
You’re either Mr. Miyagi in the fight or you’re John Kreese. His trauma actually made him a dangerous ineffective fighter and morally, look what it did to him. But Mr. Miyagi had resilience. That’s the difference maker. You’re connected constant awareness. You make better decisions, not reactive, scared, or angry decisions. He was calm. He did what he had to do and he’s going to recover faster. It’s not going to affect him as much as somebody who doesn’t have strength in their nervous system.
We have advanced technology inside of us. Stop focusing on the outside. Emotional intelligence is much more powerful. It’s more effective and efficient too to befriend somebody, to collaborate, than it is to fight. It makes a lot more sense. We save fighting for the last resort.
You would think it would make sense financially too, to invest in this sort of training on front and back end so that we don’t have these kids coming back with these significant health problems that are then become a burden on our system.
You have to practice it. You can’t just go through a one-week course on resiliency and I’m good. That’s not going to do it. How about starting your staff meetings with five minutes of mindfulness. De-stigmatize that. Make it normal. Introducing mindful moments in their units and squadrons every time they get together. That’s all it takes. Where we train our muscles in basic training and get stronger. We need to do the same thing with our minds. Mindfulness is so affordable and easy, and it counters the past and future orientation of trauma. It keeps us in the moment.
What about coming back? What can we do to support the military?
Talking about it more. The military has been used for social change for a long time and I believe we can use the military for good. You may not teach military directly, but you are educating your communities. Start at the schools, go teach to kids. Let’s introduce this earlier. I would challenge all yoga teachers or mental health therapists to articulate how it works. I love polyvagal theory. Teach Vagus Nerve. Teach mindfulness. Teach about the triune brain. Teach about the medial prefrontal cortex. Talk about the fight, flight, freeze response. Talk about how breath practices hack into our nervous system. People want to know why.
Another big problem with PTSD that we don’t have a good answer for in Western medicine is anxiety and hypervigilance. You know, things like tapping, The Emotional Freedom Technique is a body-based intervention that costs you nothing. Turn your Apple watch on and start tapping. Watch what your HRV does. It goes up every single time. The science behind it is clear.
When you’re stressed and traumatized your brain is listening to the emergency broadcast system. It can only tell one story at a time. Tapping is like giving it a different signal, different channels. Then it can’t tell the same anxiety story. You’re recalibrating slowly over time. Bringing people back into homeostasis.
We have things out there that are easy, everybody can do them, and affordable. There’s an app for it. There’s a YouTube video for it. I will put information on heart rate variability and the Emotional Freedom Technique, which is tapping, in our show notes and also a link to YogaFit and Warriors Trainings.
If somebody is interested in doing some of this yoga teaching or just learning more at YogaFit, Shaye has created this amazing program. I’m a trainer for YogaFit and I believe, very deeply, that this is part of our answer. This is our healing.
Here we are 2021, Warriors launched in 2013, just for the military. Now, it’s expanded way beyond that. I have military and military spouses, mental health professionals, yoga teachers, educators, parents at home, people have been through trauma–All are welcome. I think, look at what the military did for us. They’re the reason it’s here. So much gratitude for our military and what they do for us on a daily basis.
Keep following what you love right now. There’s a reason you’re doing what you’ve been doing. There’s a reason you’ve had your specific trauma. You’ve got to find that reason.
For those that don’t know YogaFit, you can come to us not knowing anything about yoga. We speak yoga, but we also speak Western science. It’s medicine. In fact, it’s really effective medicine.
I think all yoga teachers need to be trauma informed. Your words have an impact on someone’s mind. We have an energetic signature that we bring with us, and you can’t fake it. I’ve seen so much damage done by teachers who triggered people unintentionally. We have to do our own work. We have to be grounded in our own experience in order to hold that healing space for another person. We train ourselves to be able to be regulated so that we can hold that space.
We have a good group of military that comes to our studio through Team RWB. It’s very much community. Of course people get triggered, but they know they’re in a safe place because of the community that they’ve established and just the work that we’ve done at Insight as trauma informed yoga teachers to be regulated for them.
Whatever we can do to get the word out there to everybody and let them know that they have hope. We don’t have to stay in this place. Someone does care about you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. We would love it.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today’s episode is an introduction to eating disorders; why they’re a real concern and a real illness, the impact an eating disorder has on a person, and strategies for coping and recovery.
If you start to feel triggered by this information, please stop reading and, if you feel ready, pick up where you left off. If you identify with any of this information, please reach out to a therapist, contact your doctor, or tell someone you trust that you need help.
Our guest today is Alison Manley. Alison is a Licensed Professional Counselor, specializing in the treatment of eating disorders and trauma. She currently works at Northern Roots Therapy Center, a small private practice clinic in Madison, Wisconsin.
She is trained in many therapeutic modalities, including acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, also known as EMDR, family-based treatment and has specialized training in working with individuals affected by childhood trauma and neglect.
Ali aligns with the Health at Every Size principles and incorporates them into her work with her clients. Along with other aspects of intersectional social justice, she has worked in community mental health and private practice outpatient centers and has an extensive background and training in the treatment of eating disorders.
Ali is currently in the process of earning her Certified Eating Disorder Specialist credential through the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals. As someone with lived experience, recovering from an eating disorder, Ali is passionate that recovery is possible for her clients and their loved ones.
Ali, thank you for being here today. Thank you, Jess. I’m so delighted to be here with you today.
I’m so passionate about working with eating disorder recovery. It’s a very complex issue. Eating disorders have the highest morbidity and mortality rate of any mental illness. I believe that full recovery is possible, so I’m really excited to talk about this today.
How would you explain what is happening when someone has an eating disorder?
The simplest way to describe what an eating disorder is that it’s about someone’s relationship with food, their body, movement and themselves. Sometimes we get stuck on eating disorders being all about the food. While food and nourishment are an important aspect of our health, it’s also about our sense of self-worth, who we are, and all of the complicated things that happen when our relationship with food and body and movement and self is interrupted or disturbed.
Who’s affected by eating disorders?
Eating disorders aren’t a choice. They aren’t only effecting, cis-gender, heterosexual, affluent, thin, white women. In fact, eating disorders affect trans and gender non-conforming individuals at about four times the rate that we see with cis gender. Eating disorders don’t discriminate. They can affect someone of any age, any ethnicity and background. It’s also important to acknowledge that everyone experiences an eating disorder differently. People don’t fit well into neat little diagnostic boxes and it’s also common for someone to move across diagnosis.
That said I can speak to some of the more common types of eating disorders.
There’s anorexia nervosa, which is really characterized by restriction, limiting one’s food intake, having lots of rules and rigidity around food and movement. Also, being in an energy deficit, not taking in enough nourishment to adequately feed one’s body, often being at a weight that is below where one’s body is healthy. It’s important to acknowledge that is not just BMI. Someone can be in a quote unquote, higher BMI, and they can still be below the weight where their body is going to be healthiest, where they’re not going to be in an energy deficit.
Then there’s bulimia nervosa which is often seen when someone experiences a loss of control with eating and binge eating, which we might describe as eating more food than one might normally at a meal or in a sitting and following that meal by using compensatory or purging behaviors could be vomiting, abuse of laxatives or diuretics, or over-exercising with the idea that the eating disorder wants someone to quote unquote undo.
Binge eating has its own criteria as well, binge eating disorder, correct? Correct. Binge eating disorder is quite common. It is when an individual is often eating beyond the point of physical fullness or satiation, similarly to bulemia nervosa, there’s a loss of control and often a strong sense of guilt and shame.
The difference between binge eating disorder and bulemia nervosa is that with binge eating disorder, often an individual isn’t following that binge with purging or compensating behaviors.
I want to acknowledge that often there’s co-occurring mental health disorders with an eating disorder as well, for example, anxiety or depression. We can often see eating disorders as a way of trying to cope with underlying anxiety, depression, trauma, that’s showing up in the body or the mind.
That is such a truth and so important to keep in mind if you’re someone that’s treating someone with an eating disorder, if you’re someone that’s suffering yourself, or if you’re a family member. It isn’t as simple as looking at the symptoms and finding fixes for them. There’s often a lot of doubt, a lot of pain and a lot more that’s coming up when we’re working on eating disorder recovery.
Today is a brief introduction to this topic, we’ll have you back to explore specific aspects of eating disorders because they are so complex.
What do you feel is the difference between eating for health and wellness versus shifting or evolving into an eating disorder?
The difference between eating for health and wellness versus what might be an indication that someone’s starting to experience an eating disorder. One of the things that I look at is what is driving choices that we’re making with food and movement.
If we think about the experience someone might have with an eating disorder, there can often be so much anxiety and fear that underlays the food choices or the movement that they’re participating in. One thing that I would first check in with is intention. What’s my intention. Am I doing this because this food is nourishing me? It helps me feel sustained. I enjoy it. Or am I choosing this food or this form of movement because I’m trying to change my body. I’m trying to shrink my body. I’m trying to feel good enough.
We can think about eating disorders, disordered eating, and quote unquote normal or healthy eating on a continuum. I think about what’s the impact that someone’s experiencing with their relationship with food or their body or movement. For instance, are you going out on a run in the evening because you like the way that it helps you feel stronger, it helps you move your body and release some stress? I think that many of us would say that sounds like a fine choice.
However, if you’re going on a run because there’s an inner critic that’s really yelling at you for the pizza that you ate that day and maybe you’re a friend has invited you to spend some time with them in the evening but you’re saying no to that because there’s so much fear and anxiety about gaining weight, that might be more what we’re talking about with disordered eating.
We both believe it is essential to have a team. For example, a registered dietician who specializes in eating disorders or a physician who has experience treating eating disorders, because of physical health concerns.
Because of their complexity, because there are so many different pieces going on with the body, the brain, relationships, anxiety, trauma, we really need a bare minimum therapist, dietician, and primary care provider on a treatment team. Other team members could be family members, psychiatrists, friends, coaches, occupational therapists. Knowing there are so many different pieces, we really need someone with specialty in a lot of those different areas for someone to get good care.
Speaking about the dietitian piece specifically, many people with eating disorders hesitate at the idea of working with a dietician. They’ve got lots of food info and yet they still may have some quite rigid or unhealthy relationships with food. I like to think of dieticians at times as nutrition therapists, the person that’s saying eat this, don’t eat that. Working with a dietician allows someone to explore their beliefs about food, about weight and health to learn about fullness and hunger and metabolism. It’s not just having someone provide ‘here’s what you eat’, but really working on the why and the how, because our bodies are impacted by being in a state of nourishment or energy deficit. It’s really important to have a team member that’s helping someone out with that piece in their recovery.
What exactly can happen to a body as a result of restricting food, purging, binge eating, or even just being hyper-focused on very specific, good foods or healthy foods.
Eating disorders are not only emotional or mental health condition, but they impact our physical health. How so?
I’ll draw from someone’s work that I’ve found so helpful. Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani is the author of the book, Sick Enough. It details the medical complications that can happen with an eating disorder and what happens to our bodies when eating disorder behaviors are affecting us.
She describes what she likes to call the cave person brain. We’re biologically wired to defend ourselves against starvation. Historically, when our mammal brains and bodies were exposed to famine, that part of our brain responded to keep us alive.
When we’re in an energy deficit, our body temperature can drop down because our brain and body don’t want to spend any extra calories or energy keeping our peripheral limbs warm. We’ll get cold hands and feet. Also, a slowed heart rate because their body is really slowing down in response to starvation. We might see lower blood pressure and slowed digestion.
If someone is really limiting their food intake, the digestive tract slows down, so when we eat, we get really full, really fast. We can get constipated and have lots of GI side effects. One other thing that I’ll mention is that we’re less playful. We’re less spontaneous. We become more rigid, more serious, and anxious, more obsessed with food. There just isn’t a capacity in the body to play because when we’re under threat, it’s about survival.
Purging through vomiting, diuretics, laxatives are not effective ways to prevent the absorption of calories. Purging can also be really dangerous. It can cause electrolyte imbalance, which can put us at risk for cardiac problems, heart attack, chronic dehydration and kidney failure.
Another consequence of under nourishment or restriction can be loss of bone density. This is particularly important for individuals in their teens or say early twenties. If someone who is able to menstruate is not getting their period as a result of restriction, that lowering of estrogen can mean that bone density is less protected. Someone that’s 18 could have the bone density of a 70-year-old. I want to highlight this because a lot of medical consequences of eating disorders can be reversed, but we cannot recover bone density.
Let’s talk about negative body image. What would you suggest to help someone alleviate the critical voice or negative body image?
I think, just calling out diet culture. Starting with what is diet culture? Where has this come from and where have you gotten these messages in the first place?
We could say that it is a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and weight loss to higher status, more happiness, or more love. It also demonizes certain foods and activities, even rest. Diet culture oppresses people who don’t fit the narrow view of beauty and health.
Another way I bring this into work with clients is talking about body image on a continuum. If you imagine a timeline, on one end is body hate or body loathing. On the other side you have body positivity or body liberation. Then, there’s all of this in between space.
We might think about this next place on the continuum as a place of body respect, where we are tolerating our bodies and taking care of them, even if we don’t like them. If I’m looking down at my tummy and there’s a voice that’s loudly saying that is not okay, I still make a choice to nourish myself. Body respect is about how we treat our bodies even if we’re not in a place of liking how they look.
Moving along the continuum, we’ve got body acceptance. Body acceptance, is a place of still having some conflicts with what I see in the mirror, but I’m not trying to change my body.
Accepting that maybe my body needs to be here in order for me to recover from an eating disorder or to continue living a fulfilling life.
We’ve got body appreciation after that. This is where we’re really expressing gratitude for what our bodies allow us to do. I might have appreciation that my arms can reach the top shelf of my cupboard, or my legs can carry me across the room. Body appreciation is honoring the function of our bodies and centering on our values and how appreciation for our bodies can allow us to further connect with them.
Finally, we have body positivity, body liberation or body love. This is a place where we’re enjoying the body that we have. We’re not beating ourselves up, trying to change, or giving ourselves flack for changes that happen naturally with aging or pregnancy or what have you. We’re in a place of gratitude and compassion. We’re not internalizing cultural pressure to be perfect. We’re celebrating body diversity, that there is such a broad range of bodies that aren’t commonly depicted in the beauty ideal.
Talking about body image on a continuum makes it much more reachable and accessible.
We don’t have to constantly be in a place of loving every square inch of our body. It is okay to move up and down this continuum and we can be in a place of body respect or body neutrality.
We don’t have to get to body love or liberation, and that also needs to be honored.
I see eating disorder recovery as challenging our own inner critic or internalized oppressor. We can describe the eating disorder voice as the inner dialogue that’s going on and when we’re thinking about food. What am I going to eat? How much movement have I done?
For many people, the eating disorder voice can start out with something as simple as, I’m going to try and eat a little bit healthier, or I’m going to try and move more. As someone gets further into their eating disorder that voice can become really loud, really unforgiving, and really mean.
How does one begin to work with that voice?
I draw from a few different models and approaches. I love bringing in parts work or IFS and exploring where did this part show up? What is its job? What might it be afraid of? I also bring in a model from Carolyn Costin’s work. She’s the author of Eight Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder. She talks about making a distinction between the eating disorder and the healthy self. And recognizing that an individual suffering from an eating disorder, isn’t their eating disorder. They are much more complicated as a person and that’s just a part of them.
It reminds me of narrative therapy. The person is not the problem they’re experiencing.
We can often over identify with these parts and start to internalize and believe that that critical voice is our truth. That it is who we are.
For some people, eating disorder thoughts are ego-syntonic, what do you mean I have this eating disorder? For other people, it can be a relief to say, that’s not me, but I’m sick of this.
It can help to start to pay attention to what that voice is saying. Maybe notice if there are certain themes. Be curious about where those rules have come from and work on strengthening your healthy self.
In parts work, all parts are welcome. We consider that the eating disorder part has an important role and some really important things to say, that often go back to dealing with anxiety or attachment or trauma. We don’t want to demonize this part, but we also don’t want to get too enamored with it either. All of our parts have a positive intention. They’re almost always trying to bring safety and regulation and decrease distress. When we tell parts, they’re not wanted that doesn’t make them go away. It often creates a lot of internal conflict and distress. It’s not the part that has to go away, but maybe their method of trying to help.
If we can be curious about this part, we can identify that eating disorder behaviors are a way of coping and we need ways to cope. We don’t want to take away someone’s coping skills and give them nothing in its place.
If we’re working on strengthening someone’s healthy self, rather than reaching out to this eating disorder part, can we reach out to someone else? Can we practice that connection? That can be a path to healing.
The mind-body connection is an extremely important aspect of eating disorder treatment and reintegrating mind and body and healing that relationship it can be transformative.
What ways can a person begin to bridge the gap and heal that mind-body relationship?
Eating disorders are dissociative in nature. It’s a way for us to disconnect from our bodies and live as much as possible in our heads with the rules and criticism. In some ways, that can mean we experience less pain, less distress. At the same time, we’re disconnected from ourselves, from our body and our feelings. Life gets gray and dull.
One place we might start is by practicing awareness of our state. Am I hungry? How do I know? What might that tell me? We can build an understanding that our body can be a resource and a place of wisdom. Polyvagal Theory, watching the autonomic state shifts. Deb Dana said that the first step is noticing. When we can notice what’s happening in the system, we can engage with it versus it consuming us. Mindful awareness is often the first step.
Another thing that comes to mind in healing the relationship between the mind and body is the concept of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is a way of approaching food choices and eating that focuses on honoring our hunger and our fullness cues, rather than what our head or eating disorder voice or diet culture are saying. It may not be the starting place but more of an end goal.
How does a person start to begin to reconnect with their body through movement?
Principles from Health at Every Size can be really helpful. Health at Every Size or HAES is a non-diet paradigm that focuses on health and instead of diet or weight. With HAES we’re understanding that fat is not equal to unhealthy, thin is not equal to healthy and weight is not equated with success or worth or health or status.
One of the HAES principles is life enhancing movement. What movement is someone able to engage in with their body? Will this movement help with my feelings about myself? With my physical health? A good guide can be focusing on how does it feel when you engage in that movement rather than how many reps did I do? How many calories did I burn? Am I feeling embodied? Am I enjoying this? That’s what I hope to see with someone that’s really in a place of joyful movement or life enhancing movement, as opposed to exercise that might be more connected to an eating disorder rule or behavior. We’re looking at movement as a place of joy and connection to oneself.
A lot of body positivity or liberation goes back to the sixties and fat activism. There is a lot of labor that’s been done to fight for this liberation. We’re really trying to honor the experiences of all sorts of individuals; those that have been oppressed, that are differently abled, that are in queer bodies and black and brown bodies. Actively challenging the belief that we can only like or love our bodies if we’re aligning with the ideal that’s really rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism is central to the healing of our body image.
Thank you for all the wisdom you have shared with us today. This has been a pleasure.
