Healthy Eating - A Memorable Lunch
My neighbor, Jody, transformed part of her front yard into an organic vegetable garden. Two rectangles about 15’ x 6” bounded by wood framing are devoted to her “farmette”. The median between her sidewalk and the street has wooden supports for the tiny tomato plants that are starting to reach for the sky.
I walk past her house at least twice a day and sometimes four when I walk my dog, Winston. (He actually should take up more space in this blog because he is a co therapist in my practice as well as a friend in my life.)
Jody, who loves Winston (everybody does), and I chat when her gardening time and my Winston walks coincide. I love gardening too, but my garden is flowers, bushes, trees and citrus.
Yesterday, a golden spring day, brisk, clear and filled with gorgeous scents, Jody and I talked, she from her garden and me from the sidewalk with Winston in tow. (He’s what I am starting to call a “Corgier”. Trans. Mixture of Corgi and Terrier. 27 pounds of gold and white shaggy energy, proud curled up tail, big brown eyes and a grin that lets everyone know he’s looking at the bright side.)
Jody and I spoke of gardens, of the scent of her sweet peas, and the scent of my jasmine, honeysuckle and orange blossoms exploding in my garden. She asked if I’d like a bouquet of sweet peas.
I responded, “Yes, There’s no other possible response to that question.”
She cut about a dozen flowers and before she gave them to me asked, “Would you like me to cut you some greens for a salad?”
“Yes, please. That would wonderful.”
She said, “You can go on with your walk while I cut them. I’ll have them for you when you get back.”
I said, “I want to watch you cut them. That’s part of the wonderfulness.”
She smiled. I smiled. Winston continued smiling, but by now was lying down realizing our walk was at a pause.
In a small brown paper bag Jody tenderly placed red romaine, sorrel, radicchios, cilantro, green lettuce, spinach and fresh sweet peas. She laid the red, purple, white and pink flowers on top. She presented me with this gift that was full of beauty, caring and natural wonder.
I felt the life energy of the soil that nourished and supported the growth of these living things that were full of the nutrients for life. I felt the life energy of this woman who made the potential manifest.
I felt and thought about how all life supports all life. I thought about how all life must feed on life and how we humans need to embrace this fact with our hearts as well as our minds. I thought of the giving generous nature of soil and I thought, It’s about love. It’s about life loving life and offering our lives to one another for the benefit of all with no demarcation about species or form.
Feelings given words and validated by the blooming spring day continued. We humans need to expand our awareness of what actually is alive. The love and ongoing generosity of life giving to life includes the life force of air, sea, sun, moon, rock and stone. We need to cherish, honor and respect it all for healthy life and healthy eating to be possible.
My lunch from that salad was exquisite – an all encompassing experience in healthy eating.
Transition to WordPress
In eating disorder recovery work, daily life and blogging, if all goes well, we develop and grow.
Growth inevitably involves change and the process of transitioning from one way of being or living or working to another.
So here I am, in the midst of public transition and change. I believe that I can offer more to people seeking information and support about eating disorders through WordPress.
So I’m learning the new blogging methods required, changing categories so they are more clear for you, and figuring out with my web designer and my WordPress for Dummies how to make this new system work.
Technorati is a big help once it’s connected properly. My biggest challenge is to achieve a free and relaxed enough feeling with the technology so I can speak to you about issues around eating disorders that I consider compelling.
This blog and I are developing during this transition. I wish for you something similar: a growing positive developmental change as you transition into more of the life you find fufilliing.
Catch 22 in Getting Effective Eating Disorder Treatment
Calling for Help
Many people with eating disorders call or write to me asking for help. They often face a dilemma. I wonder about the people who don’t call or write because they may be in a state where they the dilemma prevents them from reaching out.
Positive Opportunity
Here’s how it goes. A woman of any age or social or economic or educational level says, “I’m suffering. I can’t live this way anymore. I need help.”
Okay. That sounds good to me. The woman realizes her eating disorder makes a fulfilling life impossible. She has reached the limit of her tolerance for pain. Her denial system is breaking down. She is ready to commit to the deep and sustained psychological work that can result is deep and sustained recovery. The next step is to discuss her experience in detail to determine what kind of treatment would best serve her given her life situation. Then I refer her to professionals in the field who I think may be a good match or she makes an appointment to see me if that seems right to both of us.
Opportunity Glitch
But. She goes one. “I feel so guilty and ashamed. I try to stop this and I start again. I was better for a week (or a month, or two days, or five months) but then I started again. I have to stop being so weak and just do it.”
Uh oh. Now she is succumbing to symptoms. Guilt, shame, sense of personal failure are symptoms that accompany an active eating disorder. If those symptoms are given power she will continue to attack and criticize herself. She will refuse treatment because she feels certain that she should be able to stop her behavior from strength and will power.
She doesn’t appreciate the fact that she is trying to stop a symptom through will power in much the same futile way as a person who attempts to use will power stop lung congestion or a fever. Will power cannot cure illness or disease. The belief that she can use will power to stop her eating disorder is one of the symptoms of an eating disorder. This is a powerful dilemma.
When her will power fails to stop or cure her eating disorder she will feel more guilt, shame and fear. She certainly will experience more suffering. And that can cause her eating disorder behaviors to increase. This is the road to despair.
She continues. “I don’t want anyone to know. I can’t tell _______(my husband, parents, friends, doctor). Can you help me?”
Wanting to keep her agony a secret is part of increasing shame. It’s also related to keeping up a good front to others. She does this because she is afraid other people will be disgusted with her if they knew the truth of her life. She fears that they would pull away. She would then be more isolated, alone and afraid.
This fear of instilling disgust in others and therefore making it necessary for them to abandon her is also part of the symptoms that accompany eating disorders.
The Catch 22
She asks for treatment which would hopefully include symptom reduction. But those symptoms prevent her from getting the help she needs. A woman needs to get past some of her symptoms on her own in order to reach out for effective treatment.
Getting Through the Obstacles
The good news is that she doesn’t have to cure herself before she can enter treatment. That doesn’t make sense and is not required. Her pain will push her to seek help.
If she hears often enough that some of her feelings are symptoms she might entertain the possibility that this might be true. She might rally her courage despite her fear and shame and risk putting herself in a healing environment. With a competent and caring mental health professional who understands people with eating disorders she can begin real recovery work.
She doesn’t have to believe that some of her feelings are symptoms. Wanting to believe may be enough to get treatment started. That desire to believe breaks the lock on the dilemma.
When that lock breaks and real treatment begins she can start making her desire for recovery a developing reality.
Eating Disorders: Reversing Short or Long Relapse
I’m in the middle of attending a great conference at UCLA this week end. It’s “Adult Attachment in Clinical Context: Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview.” Superb and gifted researchers and clinicians are gathered to discuss and share information on the latest neuroscience findings, the reasons why humans bond or do not bond well with each other, how human relationships can harm and heal, and the powerful healing force of human love, compassion, stability, flexibility and reliability.
As I participate in this conference, surrounded by clinicians dedicated to learning and fostering healing, I feel richly held. I am free to let my mind relate what I’m hearing and learning to people who, in some way, live with the experience of eating disorders.
Here’s what I’ve come up with after two days of the conference. Perhaps more will emerge after tomorrow, the last day.
Changing Our Brains
The joyous or painful or frustrating reality is that we humans can destroy, create, and change neural functioning in our brains. In other words, we can improve. We can deteriorate. We can change – for better or worse.
The research coming out of neuroscience provides evidence that particular circumstances over time can alter brain activity and even brain structure. See Dan Siegel’s work and Allan Schore’s writings.
Power of Love and Kindness
The good news is that a durable, kind and informed relationship with a trustworthy and stable person over a considerable period of time will actually create conditions where a person’s brain can change for the better. This is one of the great and wonderful powers of long term, in depth psychotherapy with a trustworthy and focused psychotherapist.
This is also why loving, trustworthy, stable, reliable and empathic parents produce secure, loving and self confident children.
This is also why a loving, trustworthy, stable, reliable and empathic aunt or uncle or grandparent or teacher or neighbor can contribute to building a secure base in a child who has problematic parents.
Love and kindness as well as focused attention and knowledge creates an environment in which new ways of seeing the world can become permanent. The developing child or the adult patient not only develops trust for the parents or the therapist. She actually develops the capacity to trust, to be more optimistic, to recognize good opportunities and act on them.
Power of Negative Influence
We can also put ourselves in circumstances that destroy trust, not only in a relationships but in the brain’s ability to trust at all. One of the tenets of 12 step programs is: stay away from lower companions. The people around us affect our sense of ourselves and our brain functioning.
Stress and Relapse
In a stressful environment where fear, pain, ridicule, shame and unpleasant surprise are continual, we will adapt in ways to care for ourselves. If you are a person with a history of an eating disorder or an active eating disorder this can mean going back to old coping mechanisms like binging, purging, “spacing out” and hiding.
You can also reinforce this negative condition yourself by pummeling your mind with negative critical judgments about yourself. This too affects neural pathways, synaptic connections and your view of the world. This can reinforce eating disorder thinking and behaviors.
Difficulty in Getting Relapse Recovery Help
In such a state you will find great difficulty in recognizing opportunities for help. Even if you do recognize such opportunities you may lack the trust and self esteem to reach out and ask for help. The longer this situation lasts the more ingrained your eating disorder style of living will become.
Meaning of Relapse
The return of eating disorder behaviors or feelings or both signal that either new growth is necessary or achieved progress is undermined.
This is a time for you to look for relationships, behaviors and circumstances around you which are negative, isolating, critical, demanding, frightening or composed of unrelenting stress. The return of the eating disorder is an attempt to cope with these circumstances. Noticing them is the beginning of restoring your recovery path.
Effect of Short Term Negativity
If you experiences harsh negative circumstances momentarily genuine recovery will stand. If
you experiences such circumstances for a longer period, you will be stressed but can most likely rely on your newly internalized strengths and self confidence powered by your more developed neural mechanisms.
Effect of Long Term Routine Negativity
But, if you experiences such circumstances as part of a new normal routine in her life, regular and unrelenting, your brain can adapt to the situation and create entrenched patterns. What begins as a temporary state can become a permanent trait. Here we have the relapse stretching out into what seems an intractable way of living and being.
Relapse Recovery
However, even if this happens you can still take action to put yourself in a loving, kind, healing environment where you can once again allow her heart, mind and brain circuitry to heal and develop along the pathway to health. Yes, a relapse, even a long relapse, can be reversed.
It’s truly amazing and wonderful to learn how putting ourselves in relationships filled with love, compassion, empathy and focused attention will not only allow us to build good feelings but actually change ingrained patterns of negative feelings thoughts and action. We can actually help each other evolve, even at the neural level, toward health.
Who would have thought neuroscience would bring such a message, backed by scientific evidence, of hope and loving direction?
(In addition to Siegel and Schore’s work, I recommend, for those who are up for some heavy reading, The Development of the Person. When Drs June and Alan Sroufe discuss their research following individuals from before birth to To their 30’s I’m always inspired and find myself filled with teary heart felt appreciation for them and their work.
Bias Confession from an Eating Disorders Specialist
My patients and readers live their own lives with their own agendas and values leading the way.
My Bias
However, I am not neutral. I want, with all my heart, for you to live long healthy lives. I want you to be well, to have love, joy, satisfaction, confidence and a genuine liking for yourself as you proceed onward to a feisty, interesting and healthy old age.
I especially do not want you to break your own hearts.
Reasons for Entering Psychotherapy
People who come to my psychotherapy practice or writings need a reason to make that entry. Primarily, you come because you have an eating disorder. You also come because a person with an eating disorder is in your intimate circle. You may also come because you know someone who benefited from my work and want those same benefits for your life.
Mostly, you come because you experience emotional pain and frustration in their lives and have a spark of hope that maybe another way to live exists.
Ending an eating disorder is a step, a major step granted, but still a step toward creating and living a better life.
Establishing Goals
In my practice, my focus is on the whole person sitting in front of me. I see the energy poured into the eating disorder. I get a glimpse of what might be possible for you if that energy were directed toward living a more full life. When we share that glimpse we become a team of two with the goal being to send life energy to life. That means dismantling the eating disorder mechanism and removing the need for the protection given by the eating disorder.
Our mutual goal becomes creating a psychological, emotional and spiritual normal that allows your genuine life potential to unfold.
Priority of Your Goals
My job, as I see it, requires me to state my bias and let you know that your best choice is one that comes from your beliefs, not mine. You also need to know that I will support your living based on your values, not mine. But neither of us will make or honor decisions based on the distorted thinking and value systems that are hooked to the eating disorder.
Goals Based On Eating Disorder
A free and healthy person faces difficult choices in life. If an eating disorder doesn’t exist, then an automatic and artificial guiding system doesn’t take over the decision making by default.
For example, you don’t stay home and binge or use instead of meeting with friends. You don’t binge and throw up before meeting a potential employer and therefore meet that person in a partially numbed condition.
If an eating disorder isn’t there then decisions about school applications, career choices, pregnancy (to conceive or terminate), relationship choices (positive or negative), commitments of any kind, are based on personal agenda and personal values. These must belong to the individual, not me. And neither of us want them to be determined by an active eating disorder.
Discovering and Honoring Your Genuine Values
I do my best to make my bias clear so that you are free of any sense of obligation to please me. More importantly, my stating my bias helps you sort out what you she thinks you are supposed to choose based on the agenda and values of others, including the entire culture, as opposed to what you deeply value.
After all, in the end, you lives your life. And a satisfying life is one that is based on living according to your own true agenda and values.
Sometimes self sacrifice is based on deeply held and honored values known and appreciated by you alone. I believe a person needs to be free to make such a choice.
However, if an eating disorder is in the way, choices involving self sacrifice can be blurred or seen as required with no possibility of flexibility, change or even a vague sense of the option to say, “No.”
If you is oblivious to her your values or put the demands of an eating disorder before your own highest priorities you can make a choice that will immediately or eventually break your own heart.
As an eating disorder fades you are challenged to listen and learn your own truth. I stand for your listening t0 and honoring your own unbuffered self, mind, spirit, body and heart. When you can do that, you are on your way to living your real life. That is a joyous and satisfying way to live.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
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