Hello dear hearts,
I hope this finds you well. As you know, I always want to bring you not only practical recovery and non diet living support and tips, but share the deeper nuances of intuitive eating, health and trauma recovery.
And to give you a heads up, this post is essentially a free ebook and mini session. If you are just a skimmer, you will miss out, so I hope you take the time and take advantage of this free training for healing.
Before we dive into 3 of the ingredients I see make all the difference between surface work and deeper, embodied recovery, I want to share some news so that you know what’s happening over here….
Community is super important, in life and in recovery. Why I am sharing that is this.
I am so thrilled to share that a dream I have had since my own recovery 22 years ago is happening.
Over at Attuned Eating for Attuned Living, my online IE and ED recovery group center, the atmosphere has become what I wish I would have had.
One of love, grit and a place where people of all ages, shapes and sizes are rising to the challenge of cheering each other on, no competition and honoring their fears but still understanding there is no way around, just through.
If you are interested in learning more, head here
And for the professionals, the same is happening. On April 10th, the 4th installment of Non Diet and Decoding Counseling Skills Training starts. If, as a professional, you are hungry to help your clients to get unstuck and give them the best service possible, you won’t want to miss the community and deep dive counseling skills you didn’t learn in school. Our clients deserve it.
If you do not get my professional newsletters, you can get them here so you don’t miss the details.
Finally, before we move on, something that I have learned both personally and professionally is that if we don’t learn to regulate our flight/fight/freeze, or survival responses, we will perpetually be reactive to life in the present based on past hurts and overwhelm. It’s the reason why we often know what we need to do but can’t change our behavior and will-power often isn’t enough.
This year, you will be seeing lots more education for both professionals and non-professionals about:
- how our survival systems drive diet culture and disordered thinking and behaving and why cognitive information doesn’t fix it
- what we can do to feel safer in our own skins
- how professionals can use a more body based approach to help clients more holistically work through health challenges and body image struggles
Thanks for hanging in there with me through all of this. It’s kinda like the movie previews. I hope you enjoyed what is to come and let’s now move on to the show!
This week’s thoughts are about what really good somatic nutrition/IE/body image counseling is about whether you are doing it with me, someone else or doing your own work with people you trust.
Yes, your desire and effort, the tips, the experiments, the dialogue, the education and relationship are all the pieces that make progress happen toward a more peaceful relationship with food and weight.
But I wanted to go even deeper with the actual meat of what is underneath what actually works.
As humans, to feel like we have some locust of control in our lives, some competence to go out and trust we can accomplish things and keep hope when things aren’t going our way, we need to know we have three things:
CHOICE, SAFETY and LOVE
Let me show you how these intersect with food and body image issues.
We will start with choice.
Once we realize that the crud that happened to us as kids wasn’t our fault, we realize we can separate from the past and have choice.
We we look back and see, oh, how could I have not believed that thinner was the only way to be when every adult colluded with that and I didn’t have an advocate? Now I can have compassion for that trapness and choose a more humane way of seeing my own and other people’s bodies. I CAN widen my view of goodness. It’s always been there.
And with food and from the IE and health at every size lense, we see that no one can be our food expert but we can be guided by non-controlling others about how to choose how to eat based on our body’s feedback, not rules. We have choice.
SAFETY
Without safety, we cannot explore life fully. We believe everything that doesn’t go our way means things will fall apart. Lack of safety causes hypervigilence with food and people.
It’s the basis for why when our weight fluctuates, we run back to dieting, binging or purging.
Because food is intertwined with nurturance, we reject or cannot get enough of food because of defense against inconsistent or inadequate nurturance.
Its literally a relationship issue.
Which is why eating disorders or chronic dieting rarely get better with time or on their own. If a misattuned relationship with people was part of the root of our eating issues, it makes sense that to build safety in our systems to eat “normally” we need to build relationship with consistently present and compassionate people to repair both nourishment issues. Food and people.
When this can happen, SAFETY happens.
LOVE
What more can I say. People flourish in love Parental love. Brotherly/sisterly love. Friend love. Mentor love. Pet Love. Romantic love.
If you know that you are loved without having to earn it, why in the world would we try to starve and run and hide behind masks?
We wouldn’t.
To be honest, I have yet to see a person that struggled with food and body who did not have experiences of conditional acceptance or love. Love may have been there, but what was felt more was lack.
This causes a distorted lense as adults that assumes that acceptance or care will ONLY come from the right labs or weight labels on doctor’s notes, clothes sizes, muscle definition and external appearance of having it all together.
So, our jobs, as I describe in the videos, is to start to break the spell of lack by staying present to where love is, going toward it daily and to eat and move from that life affirming place.
I understand there is a lot to digest here. You may need to focus on one ingredient at a time. You will know if you pay attention to your inner wisdom which one resonates and you need to pay attention for now.
I recommend you also for your study to watch the videos below then pick the one that matches you right now and spend a month cultivating it with how you approach recovery with food and your life.
Video 1 CHOICE
https://www.facebook.com/tracybrownrd/videos/353462378710005/
Video 2 SAFETY
https://www.facebook.com/tracybrownrd/videos/789193511446150/
Video 3 LOVE
https://www.facebook.com/tracybrownrd/videos/500824850443640/
Thank you very much for being a part of this community. I know the work I put out there for you isn’t a “dine and dash” kind of social media. I want to make quality material that creates real change. We need to slow down and really see each other because when we do, we feel safe. When we feel safe, we can literally “rest and digest”. When we do that, we heal.
Much love,
Tracy
PS: I would love to hear your experiences of how you’ve noticed that choice, safety and love have accelerated your healing or if you’ve realized you need more. I’m here to chat: http://bit.ly/tracybclaritycall
