A Dialogue on Self-Discovery

A Long-form Q&A on Eating Disorders and Recovery

Q: Feedback to intuitive eating oriented dietitians (me lol) who support patients with ED. I've worked in PHP and IOP and now outpatient and would love to know. I've blocked it out of my social media because it doesn't seem represented any more as intuition-led at times.

I'm also just curious about your experience with RDs, especially because I admire you and watching your rawness has helped me with m own disordered relationship with food and body.

I have my human hat on here first, not my dietitian hat.

A: I love this! And I love and appreciate your human hat.

Here are my thoughts:

YES to intuitive eating, but I feel that trying to teach intuitive eating in PHP and IOP is a wash. I’ll explain why and share a bit more about my own process. When I was in treatment (residential, PHP, IOP), I never had a great relationship with my dietitian. It was always very superficial. She would tell me what to eat, I would eat it. I think *because* treatment is so condensed, there are significant limitations to actually creating longterm, sustainable change.

My experience in treatment was:

Eat more “fear foods.”

Eat more, period.

Write down your red, yellow, green. Etc.

This changed my weight, but it didn’t change my relationship with my body. Nor did it acknowledge the fires. I like to say that Ed is a firefighter, and Ed will always be present as long as something in our system is on fire. My own fires were the result of unhealed trauma.

So, intuitive eating didn’t really matter if I wasn’t healing that trauma. I was still on fire, and as long as I was on fire, I wasn’t going to be able to inhabit my body safely. Let alone get to the sensitive, nuanced hunger and satiety cues.

I think that intuitive-eating dietitians can be very helpful if they understand that eating disorders require more than just diversifying the plate. If dietitians are only talking about food choices, they’re completely missing the point. Intuitive eating requires healing intuition, and intuition can only be healed when we process/release our shame binds.

When we restore the inner voice and inner knowing; address our trauma and create an ability to be in our bodies.

Q: Do you feel like you are fully recovered or will always struggle on some level?

A: I feel like I am more “recovered” than I thought I would ever be, but I’ve also completely changed my perception of recovery.

First, I don’t see it as a destination or as a box to check. I don’t believe in the “sick” vs. “recovered” paradigm. I believe that recovery is a process of returning to wholeness, and I created my own word for that journey: Uncovery. Because to return to my sense of inner wholeness, I have had to uncover all of the stories, memories, and emotions that created the pain, flight, and separation.

So, am I “fully recovered”? No, probably not. And also, ask me, “Are you a fully enlightened being who is never triggered, never anxious, and never separated from your authentic essence?” I would reply, “Definitely not.”

I don’t believe that I will always be struggling. But I do know that I’m a human being. Fallible. Vulnerable. When something in my life triggers certain feelings, my Ed may come up to offer a buoy. My work and my healing rests on trusting in my ability to cross rough waters without the buoy. Here’s an example:

Powerlessness is a big trigger for me. As a survivor of sexual assault and abuse, this makes sense. If I encounter something that triggers a feeling of powerlessness, I would understand if Ed came in. I don’t conflate “recovered” with never, ever hearing/feeling Ed again.

Instead, I believe that recovering is: understanding what role Ed plays with compassion, disentangling myself from what it thinks I need, tending to what I actually need, and choosing an alternative way of swimming. To continue the metaphor.

Most importantly, this is done without any expectation of perfection.

So… I am free. I am happy. I am nourished. I am genuinely so well. A clinician would say that I’m recovered. And, all of the above.

Q: What does recovery look like for you? 

A: In addition to everything I’ve mentioned, recovering looks like getting to know the most authentic version of myself. It looks like readily using IFS to understand my parts and giving each part a voice. It looks like uncovering repressed, unprocessed sexual trauma and gently healing it. It looks like learning to trust my body and viewing it as more than an object. It looks like acknowledging that my blame and frustration were misdirected; it was never my body that was causing me pain. Instead, my body was patiently holding the pain that I wasn’t psychically prepared to feel.

Recovery looks like incorporating thoughtful plant medicine journeys when I have the space for adequate integration. It looks like unblending myself from the social and cultural structures that keep women small. It looks like retiring old perfectionistic tendencies and releasing shame binds. It looks like genuinely enjoying food for how it nourishes me and for how it tastes.

Recovery looks like recognizing mortality and life’s unpredictable, precious, finite nature. It looks like prioritizing my time, energy, love, purpose, peace, and family. And most of all, it looks like a continuous process. A work in progress.

A steady journey inward, onward, and upward.

Q: Better post baby? I’m hoping my mind will shift away from this obsession after pregnancy.

A: Yes, and — I don’t think that pregnancy and postpartum substantially changed my relationship with Ed or my body. I understand well: these periods are triggering for many women who have experienced eating disorders and/or body image dysmorphia.

Which is to say, these periods are triggering for most women.

While I readily acknowledged the beauty of carrying and birthing a baby, mine was also a traumatic experience. After nearly losing Ember Rae and spending time in the NICU, my body was no longer a safe harbor. For me, nor for her. In fact, the self-blame that is so intimately intertwined with my Ed returned a few measly minutes after giving birth.

How could it not? Looking back, I can certainly recognize that the blame wasn’t mine to hold. But talk to any new mother: are we not teeming with self-analysis and self-abandonment? Are we not striving for some idyllic picture painted by media and society of the perfect mother? We hold ourselves to benchmarks that very few women actually attain.

So, instead, the portal of motherhood ushered me into the deepest healing. The act (and gift) of Being a Mother; versus the process of becoming one. Let me explain:

By now, you know that the word “recovery” has never worked for me. Despite the magnetism and power of language, this word has always seemed to fall short. “Recovery” denotes a return in one way or another, but a return is not always possible or even desired.

I’ve felt this in many arenas, many spheres of my world. One of the most notable being motherhood. In our society, there is an extraordinary amount of pressure placed on a woman to return to her pre-baby self. Whether the focus is on her body, her personality, her mood, her relationships, her sexuality, her hobbies, or her schedule — the expectation is the same.

“Be who you were before, and all will be well again.”

But I’ve learned that we will remain trapped as long as we assume this of ourselves. Unfulfilled. Anxious and depressed. Not because we are undeserving of great peace and deep rest, or of pleasure and sovereignty; but because there is no place to return to.

The very second we crossed the threshold into motherhood, we entered a fiery initiation. Our past selves burned off in the flames. Striving and stretching to step back into that old world only leads to suffocation from the smoke. Only locks us into a place of suffering.

The truly miraculous occurs when we permit ourselves to be born anew, with our child. The rebirth is immediate, the growing pains are inevitable. But so too is the transformation. With time, we see that the concept of returning or recovering our maiden selves is inconceivable and not at all our one, true desire. For it would mean forfeiting the deep love, meaning, and connection we are now immersed in at all minutes and hours of the day.

Our culture has yet to adopt a warm welcoming of a permanently changed woman, and that is okay — it need not detour us from embracing and embodying it anyways. There is immense joy, awe, reverence, and passion here.

I am the mother of a daughter. Sometimes the weight of that responsibility leaves me breathless. But in the best, most liberating way. We are each, my daughter and I, simultaneously, growing and becoming women. And my recovering?

It’s for her.

I want her to be free, which requires me to be free. My ability to model freedom, joy, awe, reverence, passion, and vitality will become her unconscious benchmark. My ability to be embodied will inform hers. It’s all, always connected.

So, the portal of motherhood inspired me to live differently. Obviously that is an oversimplification, but it’s true nonetheless. The road to deep healing started with my daughter’s gaze and burgeoned into a commitment to be someone different. Someone authentic, liberated, and true.

That is how my relationship with my body improved.

Q: Does lack of communication with yourself lead to relapse?

A: In treatment, many clinicians ask their patients to create a “Red, Yellow, and Green” recovery plan (briefly mentioned above). Utilizing CBT skills, patients identify the behaviors that have the potential to incite relapse.

Green behaviors fall into the safety zone, while yellow behaviors indicate slippery territory. Like red flags, red behaviors mark danger.

If I consider this model, I would say that absent self-dialogue would fall into yellow. If it’s left to build over time and if an individual doesn’t feel resourced in other ways, it can contribute to a slip. That’s typically because the lack of communication may require some type of numbing and/or avoiding.

For many of us, a desire to numb and/or avoid is a fairly reliable trigger for Ed. It’s also worth noting: behaviors that fall into the yellow are plentiful. So, a lack of communication would be one of many factors present. While it could be a general contributing factor to relapse, it doesn’t demarcate “recovered” from “relapsed.”

Q: How did you go about getting your voice back while uncovering?

A: You can read more about my process in this essay, The Road to Finding My Voice. You can also listen to my process in this podcast interview.

Q: Is there a process you follow when you get trigged and shut down your inner voice?

A: Yes, and it’s messy. Completely imperfect. While I’m more likely to freely vocalize my thoughts, opinions, and needs nowadays, I’m not that aforementioned enlightened being. I’m most triggered at home, with my dear, doting husband. In other relationships, speaking up is fluid: my inner voice is clear and confident. However, where intimacy and love are greatest and therefore my fear of loss is particularly sharp, my voice catches.

Sometimes, it’s lodged in my throat; other times it’s completely dislodged from my awareness. It hides somewhere in the deeper crevices of my mind. I’m certain that I have remnants of a lifetime of voiceless there. Fragments of things that were locked up instead of let out. Sitting and collecting into some psychic layer of dust. 

If and when I don’t immediately share what needs to be shared, it may still take me time to circle back around. It could be an hour, or it could be a day. Whatever the time frame, my process is three-pronged:

I acknowledge.

I get curious.

I dive in.

Here’s an example: On Saturday morning, Joe suggested we get a head start to the gym. He had a phone call at 10:00 AM that would require him to be home and ready at his computer. We were standing in the kitchen, barely woken up. Droplets of ice cold water were still running down my skin from the cold plunge. Our daughter was fast asleep in our bed, her body curled into a ball as if I was still wrapped behind her. She had joined us after a midnight asthma attack, to which I was the medicine administering parent.

The coffee was brewing, a steady trickle into the carafe puncturing the silence that followed his question. Caffeine had not yet been ingested. Not one sip.

I briefly told him that I was exhausted from a week of rushing, and was hoping for one morning at a slower pace. Then, I suggested he go without us; we would catch him there in passing.

You could call it a tiff. Or a disagreement. Whatever its name, we butt heads. He preferred to jumpstart the day and spend time together, and I preferred the slow burn of a Saturday morning even if that meant separation.

He didn’t know that I had expectations for the morning — that I had mentally planned coffee in bed, quiet conversations after a week of chaos, and a piggy pancake soiree (thanks to Pinterest). In my head, the morning was perfect.

Yet, there he was: audaciously throwing my piggy party to the gutter.

We ultimately negotiated, reworked the schedule, and got our butts into transit; but it wasn’t until hours later that I finally shared what had originally frustrated me. It seems silly, doesn’t it? Cliche, even. An overstimulated mom needed a slow, quiet morning and dad was ready to go-go-go. Nothing about this trigger was monumental, but I clammed up nonetheless.

I didn’t immediately launch into the details of what I had envisioned for our Saturday morning as a family. It felt silly, childish. So, I swallowed it and admittedly came off as uncooperative.

I used the time at the gym to mentally check in with myself. I acknowledged that I felt triggered because of mismatched expectations. Then, I got curious about the amount of emotional investment I placed on this mental image of an ideal morning.

I realized that there was a deeper unmet need beneath it all: I missed my husband, and I wanted slow, intentional time as a family. As soon as I made the connection, I dove in. The only way to get that need met was to vocalize it with the person it involved. I told my husband and he offered immediate understanding. We swiftly moved on and promised each other two slow mornings over the long holiday weekend.

As I reflect on it, my process sounds like a condensed version of Tara Brach’s R.A.I.N.: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. If you’re not familiar, I’m overjoyed to make the introduction. For my own process, the act of diving in always requires restoring my voice and putting it to use; thus shifting my posture from self-abandonment to self-expression.

I’m choosing to combine the following two questions, as they can both be answered with one reference: When trying to restore your cycle to have children, what did that look like for you; and do you still have any residual hormonal issues?

A: You can read more about my process in this essay, Lightning Strikes Twice.