Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 08: Dawn Brockett - Anorexia
48 Plays2 years ago
Forget what you believe you know about anorexia and listen to Dawn. She opens a window into the psychology of anorexia. She shares the social pressure she was under as a child, and how it affected her growing up. She explains why she felt like she needed to take as little space as possible. We also discussed what her path to recovery was and what she does to make sure she stays in a psychologically healthy state.
The song Dawn selected is What's going on by Marvin Gaye.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Greetings
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Sylvain Bietro, and you're listening to On One Condition, a podcast to raise awareness about health conditions by listening to people who leave them every day. Today, my guest is Dawn Brockett, and we're going to talk about anorexia. Hi, Dawn. Nice to receive you on the podcast. How are you? I'm so well, Sylvain, and I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:27
Speaker
No, thank you. It's a pleasure. And I really appreciate you taking the time.
Favorite Song and Its Impact
00:00:33
Speaker
So before we go into the topic, as you know, I like talking about songs. And I've asked you to choose a song that means something to you or that just makes you dance. So what song is that? My favorite song of all time is Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. And why is that?
00:00:57
Speaker
Oh, for many reasons. First, the song itself is absolutely beautiful and inspiring in terms of how to view the world. But I also love the backstory. So Marvin Gaye, of course, was a Motown artist and had become a bit of a sex symbol throughout his career. But he had a lot to say beyond the beautiful songs with that gorgeous voice that he was singing. So when he wrote the What's Going On album,
00:01:26
Speaker
the Motown record, when Barry Gordon was not very excited to record it because it was, you know, it was a social justice album. So he had to fight very hard to be able to put that record out. And it is, you know, it is such a solid part of his legacy is beautiful. And I just I love the conviction that he had in, in recording that entire record, but the song itself, I can never listen to it without feeling inspired.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, I get that. It's one of my favorite Marvin Gaye songs as well. It's interesting because it's a strong message, very strong song, but at the same time, not aggressive in the way he delivers it, but the message is still on point.
00:02:12
Speaker
beautifully said. Thank you.
Recovery from Anorexia
00:02:15
Speaker
So today we're going to talk about a condition that you suffered from anorexia. But before we go into that, I understand that you're fully recovered. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah, I haven't been acutely ill for
00:02:38
Speaker
a bit more than 20 years at this point. From a physical perspective, I think the psychological journey is ongoing. But yes, so that I'm in a very good place. I'm very comfortable speaking to it at any level. I don't think that that carries any risk. Okay, thank you. So why don't we start where you think anorexia started and started affecting you? When was that?
Factors Contributing to Anorexia
00:03:08
Speaker
Sure. There have to be multiple factors. There's certainly a genetic one, so I guess that starts us at the very beginning. There are neurobiological factors as well. Structural, in terms of the function of neurotransmitters, things behave a bit differently in the brain of the anorectic, both pre and postclinical, and certainly during the acute stages.
00:03:29
Speaker
But I think the, the environmental or kind of social story of anorexia, I believe it starts probably for any of us who experienced this very early on. And I can get into that where gender roles and kind of what your, how you're supposed to show up in the world, you know, that is, that is set from a stereotypical perspective by age five. And there's data showing that that I'm happy to speak to.
00:04:00
Speaker
So I think the template was poured early on. I grew up in a very strict religion that had a lot to say about what I was allowed to wear and do and say. I had a parental figure that certainly weighed into my development
00:04:19
Speaker
of anorexia. So it's hard to pinpoint a specific moment at which it began, but the physical decline, the part of anorexia that is the eating restriction, which is I think what people tend to focus on, though I would argue anorexia is restriction across the board and has a lot more to do with a number of other things. But the part of
00:04:44
Speaker
The part that we all relate to is the moment of anorexia, the starvation phase.
Complexities Beyond Eating Issues
00:04:49
Speaker
That started for me when I was 15 years old. Okay. So you're saying that the eating side of anorexia is just the visible one, but there's much more to it than what we see. Is that right? That is how I see it.
00:05:12
Speaker
Okay, so how do you think that's affected you then?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just to be really clear, the eating side is a critical piece. It is the diagnostic piece. It is the piece that runs the risk of ultimately killing you, right? Anorexia has all psychiatric illnesses. It has the highest mortality rate. So it is a critical part of the journey. The reason I say it's a bit more and speaking
00:05:48
Speaker
to your question of how does that affect me or how has it affected me, which is an ongoing effect, is that the starvation of oneself almost to death, it is a complex monster in
Self-Worth and Societal Expectations
00:06:04
Speaker
one's head. It is not simply that act of starvation. It is not some extreme version of willpower. It's far more complex than that. So how it's affected me, it really has to do with, I think,
00:06:16
Speaker
the stories and the beliefs that I integrated very early about myself. And of course, like I said, there must be a genetic and other triggers, but from an environmental or socio-environmental perspective, I essentially came to believe that my worth, my value was calculated only in the perspective of
00:06:44
Speaker
how others benefited from it. For example, in my family with my father, I think that my worth and my value was calculated only in as much as I made him look good. I shined my accomplishment lights on him. I think society does that to women as well. Here's where I will stop and say,
00:07:06
Speaker
anorexia affects women to men at a rate of 10 to 1. So I think when I start to dive into gender, that is part of why I do think that is a piece of the story. Yeah. And does it affect women as they are going through puberty more, or can it affect women at any point in time?
Puberty and Onset of Anorexia
00:07:34
Speaker
So yes to both of those. It does affect women. The typical, the more common age of onset is right around the age of puberty. We unfortunately see cases that are starting much earlier. And certainly some will start a bit later, but the vast majority of folks will kind of begin their eating restriction journey, whatever was happening psychologically before then.
00:08:03
Speaker
at about the onset of puberty. So going back to you said that it's about the way you value yourself.
00:08:21
Speaker
And you mentioned your dad, for example. How did you feel and what led you, led those feelings to take over essentially your own perception of yourself? And what led you to then to the extreme of anorexia and the eating disorder?
Adolescent Constraints
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question, Sylvan. So I say in my book, anorexia is not about control, which flies in the face of probably everything you've ever heard. And I'll speak to that why I think that it isn't.
00:09:05
Speaker
And actually really is about shrinking to the space that you feel like you're allowed to take up in your life. And that space as it's defined, you know, is defined and controlled by others. So it is, it is a shrinking of oneself physically and otherwise. So kind of tying
00:09:27
Speaker
From your current question back to the previous question, I want to share a little piece of research. I had the pleasure of being in conversation with Dr. Amy Petty, who's a social psychologist out of Harvard earlier this month on this topic. And she doesn't study eating disorders directly necessarily, but a lot of the work that she's doing has great overlap in this space, and we were discussing that.
00:09:53
Speaker
She and her team at Harvard knew that our stereotypes are set about the age of five. That's about the point that we are determining who one is and what they're capable of and how we should interact with them from a stereotypical fashion.
00:10:09
Speaker
She wanted to understand how that affects gender and literally taking up space in the room. So her research has a lot to do with how you hold yourself. And I realize we're getting a little bit away from anorexia here, but it ties in beautifully. So just track with me for a minute how you hold yourself in space. Has a lot to do with how you feel about yourself and what becomes then possible for you.
00:10:35
Speaker
So in this research, they worked with four-year-olds and six-year-olds on either side of the age of five, of course, with 32 art-posing dolls. So these wooden, genderless art-posing dolls that you can form into any shape. They hold that shape, obviously. They posed 16 of them in this very open, extended arms and legs, kind of space-taking,
00:11:02
Speaker
these space-taking shapes, and they pose the other 16, and these contracted, restricted, kind of controlled, small shapes. No other identification of any kind, and asked the kids to identify the boys and the girls. So at age four, the majority of these kiddos said, oh, those constricted shapes, those are girls, and the open shapes, those are boys. By the age of six, it was 100%.
00:11:34
Speaker
And I think this is profound. What I find interesting about that research is that by the age of five or six, we have integrated this idea that women are to be small and are to shrink and to literally take up less space in the world. And men are to grow and expand. And that is a dramatic
00:11:58
Speaker
belief to integrate so young. And I believe that if you fast forward that belief through all of the ongoing continuing societal pressures, add puberty where everything grows and expands, right? Socially, psychologically, intellectually, certainly physically in married ways, there is expansion, there's growth. I think that it is no shock
00:12:27
Speaker
that the onset of anorexia tends to be right at that point where a young woman, and of course sometimes a young man or other genders, but generally a young woman is going to be expanding and beginning to individuate herself away from everyone else in her life. And I think that combination of taking up space and becoming individual is stunted and halted
00:12:56
Speaker
in the anorexia, in the anorexic process. And I think there are very specific reasons for that. I believe that explains my experience and many others with whom I've had the pleasure to speak far more honestly and with a lot more integrity than does the myth of control.
00:13:21
Speaker
anorexia is not about controlling, which is the party line right now, you know, if you went into therapy today, you'd be very likely to be told that that is the issue. Your life is out of control. And this is an exercise in establishing control. I found that to be false, fairly insulting, and simply not beneficial to the therapeutic process. Okay. So it's, it's a lot around the pressure of society then and the pressure of your environment. Is that correct?
00:13:52
Speaker
I think that's a big part of it, Sylvan, and the way that that shows up sometimes is in the pursuit of perfection. Obviously, there is a pathological process happening within the anorectic brain and it is not purely social pressures because not all of us are anorexic. I have to really clarify that. It's not just fashion and social media and these other things because it's about 1% or slightly less of
00:14:13
Speaker
women who become an arts again fractional percent of men who do and And you know, most of us are exposed to a lot of the same Stuff that runs the risk of making you feel pretty badly about yourself. So obviously there there's a lot more going on here pathologically But yes Okay, and so when you look back at you personally
00:14:39
Speaker
How did you feel when you were growing up that you think led you to anorexia?
Family Dynamics and Childhood Reflections
00:14:54
Speaker
I'm sorry, I know I'm hesitating, but I don't know if I should say that you became anorexic or if it was something that you feel like you already had anyway.
00:15:06
Speaker
Oh, yeah, what a beautiful distinction how it felt growing up and did I feel like I kind of came that way? I think, like I said, there obviously is and it's been demonstrated a genetic component. There's a neural structural component. So I think I was I was built with the possibility. But how I
00:15:27
Speaker
how I became that way and how it felt growing up. Well, that's such a beautiful question. In many ways, I had a fabulous childhood. I am among the very fortunate. We had no money growing up. I was approaching abject poverty. But I had a mother who is extraordinary and loves to the deepest level.
00:15:57
Speaker
two older brothers who are kind and caring and wonderful humans. My father's a bit problematic. He's diagnosed with narcissistic sociopathy. I think that definitely had an impact on me as a child. But yeah, I don't have a tragic childhood story. I'm very fortunate. I escaped any variant of sexual assault. The CDC just released a report that
00:16:25
Speaker
high school girls in the US, nearly 14% of them have been forced to have sex and 24% have created a suicide plan. That was just released recently data from the fall of 2021, which is terrifying. I was fortunate to really escape a lot of what a lot of people contend with. So I think how I felt growing up was in many ways, I felt free.
00:16:56
Speaker
And I had a childhood in Montana primarily where I spent a lot of time outdoors and in nature and the food that we ate was either grown in the garden or hunted. I had a childhood that was probably a bit more similar to maybe some of my age cohorts grandparents or something like that, milk from the dairy and very physically active. And my mother was a teacher and my father
00:17:23
Speaker
professional photographer and did other odd jobs. I was very fortunate in my childhood. I was able to have some stability at home and to escape a lot of the terrors that
00:17:40
Speaker
you know, that unfortunately are visited upon a lot of our children. And of course, this was pre social media. Yeah. So I'm 43 years old. So that was kind of how I felt going into and I bring up childhood because that's kind of, you know, those are the years. But as I, as I developed into
00:18:00
Speaker
early adolescence. Again, at that moment where the natural course of human development leads you into this individuation process, which is uncomfortable for everyone. The adolescence and everyone that surrounds them, right? It's not an easy thing. What I found when I got to that point was I was just surrounded by walls. It was going to be
00:18:26
Speaker
very difficult, nearly impossible for me to have anything akin to a normal adolescent development process. And those walls were built by an extremely stringent religion, a father who took up all the space in the room, and then a number of social pressures around simply very high performance expectations of being exceptional in many ways.
00:18:58
Speaker
So I'm trying to picture that and it's interesting the fact that you called them walls because I imagine that it can be walls of like physical walls but also psychological walls. So did you find yourself that
00:19:24
Speaker
you felt like you wouldn't be able to achieve what you wanted or have the place you wanted in life. Is that right?
00:19:32
Speaker
So beautifully said. Exactly right, actually. That's exactly right. Yeah, but the walls were psychological. What I found was, and I'm going to give just some really simple examples, and there are some very, you know, very, much more complex ones, but due to the nature of my religion and, you know, that I grew up in, and I no longer abide by that, and just a general sense of kind of control over my life, when I
00:20:02
Speaker
when I raised the prospect of going to prom, for example, which would have been the first school dance I would have ever attended, it was a hard no. Absolutely not. The person I wanted to go was a devil by the fact that he would be able to go with me. Those kinds of walls. I was very high achieving in many, many ways. I had the highest ACT score in the history of my school. I had a fourth point from the moment
00:20:29
Speaker
grades were cap track of I am state champion in golf and you know, first chair in music and all these things. But it felt like that was all that I was allowed to do. And if I was going to do anything
00:20:42
Speaker
independent, socially independent, that was never going to be allowed to happen. Those are the kinds of walls that I was faced. Certainly, I wasn't allowed to date or to dance or to listen to music. There were these incredible structures. And where I did have freedom, it felt like we're in the areas that reflected really well onto others.
00:21:12
Speaker
that felt very much like my value was not intrinsic. And I was not allowed to direct it. Or as you said, you know, to make some of those decisions or choices along the way of who and what I might be interested in becoming.
00:21:27
Speaker
It felt to me at the point in which you begin to engage those options and start to cobble together your identity. Mine had been fixed for me. And the only possibility I had was really just to step into that. And unfortunately for me, I guess, and of course, it'd be unfortunately for me, but at the moment, that wasn't the identity I wanted to embrace.
00:21:50
Speaker
No, I can imagine. And there's always this part of purity where you distance yourself from what your parents have told you and try to build your own thinking. So I imagine that having all those constraints
00:22:08
Speaker
must be very, very hard. So if you don't mind, I'd like to talk about the eating side of anorexia.
Anorexia as a Response to Constraints
00:22:22
Speaker
I'd love to. Can I pause you for one moment and just go back to the one thing you just said and then I want to get into the eating side. Sure. That natural desire to separate yourself from
00:22:32
Speaker
from those around you. That is adolescence. That is individuation. And those constraints, as you described them, such a great choice of a word. That, I believe, is part of the experience of anorexia, is that at the point of individuation, you meet up against those constraints. And the restriction process is specific to the anorectic process, though I think many others can relate to this.
00:23:01
Speaker
Rather than having that normal adolescent pushback, the rebellion as it's often called, the anorectic shrinks. She doesn't push back. She doesn't fight back. She doesn't create the space in which she can individuate. She just begins to shrink. She recognizes, okay, this is the world in which I'm allowed to live. And the further I get away from those walls, the safer I feel, the quieter the voice in my head is and the voices around me.
00:23:30
Speaker
And it is that shrinking that I am very interested in because it is, I know we're going to get into the eating side, which is important, but it is not only food that she restricts. She restricts everything that brings her joy as well as anything that could possibly be a problem for anyone else. So she just kind of
00:23:55
Speaker
goes into the space that has been prescribed for her rather than having that natural adolescent process where you start to kind of push the world away from you a bit so you have a bit of room in which to kind of move around, grow, figure yourself out. So that's interesting.
00:24:18
Speaker
So when you were just explaining this, I was thinking that it sounds like there's a need to comply with the external pressure, but then also take away, you said, I think, what brings you joy.
00:24:42
Speaker
And so do first of all, is that the right description? Yes. And I can I dive into that just a bit? Yes, yes. So this need to comply and this, you know, abdication of joy. One thing I kind of only barely touched on, but it is core to the experience of anorexia. So forgive me for only just now getting here is not from a schizophrenic or hallucinatory perspective.
00:25:13
Speaker
It feels like there is a, the experience of NRCF feels like there is a voice in your head. It is an integrated voice. It feels like you, um, almost like a rumination. I think any of us who have, you know, dealt with anxiety or something like that, we can, we know what that, that ruminating voice feels like in your head, but magnified that.
00:25:35
Speaker
exponentialize it in terms of just its relentless quality and make it the meanest person you can imagine on the planet. That's the voice of anorexia in one's head and that is that even more than the external social pressures is what you're complying with and that is the joy suck. So I think that the voice is
00:25:58
Speaker
a compulsion, but it's also an integrated... I would sometimes feel like the things the voice was saying, which it was just me and my own brain, but it sounded a lot like what others had told me was possible for me, and then just that a bit pathologized.
00:26:21
Speaker
and made it quite a bit more cruel. So the psychological experience of anorexia is one of compulsion to be complicit with what that voice is demanding and what that voice demands. Sometimes it'll be called ED ED, eating disorders. This is very well understood in the eating disorder world that that voice demands your behavior, which is
00:26:52
Speaker
highly pathological and essentially point to in the direction of death and that'll take us to the eating side of things. But yes, I think you're absolutely right with the activity of being complicit and I just wanted to tie in it as a compulsion to be so.
00:27:09
Speaker
Okay, so when you think about the eating aspect of anorexia and how it affected you, from, and I'm just going to assume something here, but from an external point of view, because that's the only thing that you can see, it must appear to be an extreme point that you reach.
00:27:37
Speaker
But from your point of view, was this an extreme point or was this more of a continuation of what was already happening? Yeah, I feel like it's both. Let me explain that. And tell me if I'm hearing the question incorrectly. I recognized on one hand the extremity of the behavior and the extremity of the point to which I got.
00:28:08
Speaker
I know we talked about this before, but I'm very careful to not, and you're not asking it, but I just want to say to the viewers, I'm very careful to not share numbers, whether on weight or calories or anything like that, because I know that those become goals for others. And I think on my journey in sharing my story, I am insistent upon first doing no harm. What I will say is based upon the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria, I was severely anorected for years.
00:28:38
Speaker
I did see that it was very aberrant on one hand, because in contrast to others, it's obviously very different, but that just did not matter at all to me.
00:28:51
Speaker
On the other hand, it was never enough. So whether it's a matter of, did I notice that the food intake was aberrant or that my physical appearance took on a very skeletal form? I absolutely saw that in the mirror. I didn't look in the mirror and see an obese person, for example. But I still saw places where
00:29:20
Speaker
in my own pathological mind, I needed to shrink. So it was both, I could see it, but it was simply, I still had in my head not gone far enough. Okay, so it's something that you had to carry on because of the shrinking? Because of the compulsion that exactly because of the need to shrink and the compulsion to shrink because there, there must be some belief in the anoreptic mind that
00:29:50
Speaker
you can shrink to the point where you will be left alone, you know, where you will somehow shrink to a space small enough that no one can get you. And that, you know, ironically, maybe from there you can create a world that matters to you. And of course that's not what happens. You shrink until you die. But I think the compulsion is that if I can just get away from the voice and the external pressures,
00:30:16
Speaker
enough to corral my own brain in the direction that it wants to go. But of course, it's a false hope in terms of the shrinking, providing that stability.
Family Reactions to Anorexia
00:30:30
Speaker
There's great hope in anorexia, but the answer does not lie in the shrinking. No. How did your family react?
00:30:42
Speaker
differently based upon the person. So, you know, my mother was an absolute angel. I think the first thing I want to say really to families have interacted because oh my heavens, you are in a very difficult position. It is so hard. It's frustrating for everyone, including the person with anorexia for sure.
00:31:04
Speaker
but for the family too. And it can certainly feel impossible. So my family reacted with a lot of care and concern. My mother would have literally done anything to change the trajectory. She's religious, so she
00:31:26
Speaker
was beseeching constantly in intercessory prayer, and that was her way of dealing. And she was supportive of me in every way that she could think to be. Friends would, just as an example, get rid of these muffins that I would occasionally eat. And when it
00:31:45
Speaker
became clear that I would occasionally eat these muffins because they met whatever criteria I was putting them up against. Friends started trying to literally fit everything they possibly could with any nutritional value into those muffins. My brothers, I think, were
00:32:03
Speaker
paralyzed, you know, which makes perfect sense to me. And, and at the same time, you know, especially my oldest brother in his own way, very supportive, my father, you know, my father was true to form, right? The diagnosis, the diagnosis held with his narcissism and sociopathy, I, you know, somehow made the entire thing about himself. And I,
00:32:27
Speaker
that infuriated me. And that was definitely the distinct part of my process that shows up in my writing about it. But yeah, I think and we were really just an immediate family, the extended family was pretty distant when I was growing up. So that's kind of how my family reacted. Okay. And I imagine that at the time you were not in a position where you could explain to them why you were feeling this way.
00:32:56
Speaker
Oh, Sylvan, I had no idea. Everything I've said, I've discovered later. Yeah, I had no idea. I only began to understand the drivers behind my anorexia a decade or more after my physical recovery. And that is its own story that we can certainly begin to mine if you'd like. But yes, at the time, no, I had none of these insights.
00:33:24
Speaker
So how did you, what was the path to recovery for you then?
Recovery Journey and Psychological Healing
00:33:31
Speaker
I feel like there are different stages, of course, in any kind of recovery. And the one that seems to be really closely focused upon it and understandably, is the physical recovery. And that matters because anorexia does have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. So that physical recovery is critical.
00:33:56
Speaker
So there was that process, of course, to get back to, you know, a weight stability that had the hope of, you know, homeostatic behavior, you know, so we were no longer worried about sudden cardiac death or something like this.
00:34:11
Speaker
That was a kind of two belts of anorexia, one starting with the age of 15 and one starting a kind of a slight recovery between high school and college, which I credit now just to whatever I needed to do to make sure I could go away for college because I needed to get away. So I think I recovered well enough to earn that right.
00:34:35
Speaker
you know, which is a funny, funny, funny thing to say, because, you know, I put myself through college entirely. But just to, to have the
00:34:45
Speaker
I don't know, the blessing, I guess, of everyone in my life that I wasn't being hospitalized. I was able to kind of go out into the world without everyone going into sheer terror. So I had a slight recovery between high school and college, but my weight stabilization ultimately happened probably in my early 20s. And then from there in terms of recovery,
00:35:10
Speaker
I thought for a moment I was fine, right? Because the focus with anorexia is on the food and the weight and that begins to be the definition of recovery. But oh my goodness, that is just, just the beginning. The relapse rate obviously with anorexia is so high because I think recovery all too often ends there.
00:35:30
Speaker
And you've only just begun. You haven't even addressed the underlying cause at that point. So I thought I was fine early 20s. That's behind me, those terrible years behind me moving forward into this life I was going to create. And I realized pretty quickly, I was wrong that the predatory mind essentially was still around.
00:36:00
Speaker
you know, continue to continue to haunt me. So the psychological process then began. And I would say I feel, I feel recovered. I put that in scare quotes, kind of whatever that means at this point, I feel very, I feel safe. Yeah. From the illness. And at the same time, I do not have enough arrogance or hubris to assume that I am that I don't also need to pay close attention to those things that keep me
00:36:27
Speaker
in a psychologically healthy space to make sure that I never slip back into that way of thinking. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. I've heard of people having like set rules or set pillars that they
00:36:50
Speaker
abide to, to remain on the right side of a mental health condition? Does that relate to you? What do you think keeps you on the recovery side? I relate to that so strongly, yes.
00:37:18
Speaker
I think of them as rituals or routines. Okay. And I think someone could look at that and say, Hey, isn't that controlling? Isn't that what I find is
00:37:30
Speaker
Again, the psychological experience of anorexia is a voice that is integrated with yourself as not hallucinatory or delusional, but it is relentless in its constant speech. And it is constantly insulting you and compelling you toward the pathological interactive behaviors. What I find with routines and rituals is it gives me something to hold on to outside of my head that has these particular rituals have been
00:37:59
Speaker
validated in my world and I know that they are positive for me and they give me, you know, structural stability to my time and, you know, stability to my thought process and I find those to be very comforting. So for example, I have my tea ritual every morning or I have my yoga ritual every morning or, you know, kind of just generally the way that I do things and
00:38:26
Speaker
I think the literature calls it cognitive rigidity, which is probably to a certain extent true, but like anything, we have our, I call them our superpowers, right? We have behaviors that are
00:38:39
Speaker
unique to us in some way that can be pointed in any direction. So I have remarkable discipline, and I can discipline myself into complete and utter self-stervation, or I can discipline myself into the behaviors that are beneficial to my wellness and continued healing. But yes, I do think that those pillars are, I relate to that strongly.
00:39:02
Speaker
Okay. Okay. That makes sense.
Writing 'Unrestricted' and Gaining Insight
00:39:07
Speaker
So I'd like to jump ahead to the present now, if that's okay. So you have recently released a book, and I'd be really interested in understanding why you wanted to write a book about your experience.
00:39:31
Speaker
I didn't start out writing a book about my experience and it became that. Back to something we were just talking about earlier, once I was weight stable in my early 20s and had reached the
00:39:49
Speaker
the psychiatric definition of recovery. People were no longer concerned about me because it wasn't visible what was happening anymore. I also thought I was well. I also bought into that myth. Then I learned pretty quickly that I still was met with these incredible psychological challenges.
00:40:14
Speaker
Then later in my 20s, I had an experience that we probably don't have time to go into. Now, it doesn't really matter, but essentially, I had an experience of something taking up a lot more space in my life than it should have. I'm just leaning in on me in every way. I started to have familiar thoughts. They didn't necessarily go so far as behaviors, but I know the Antarctic thought process. I'm very familiar with it. It just made me nervous.
00:40:44
Speaker
to feel those thoughts again. So I sat down to write to understand how I got there in the first place. I thought I don't have the privilege of taking for granted, but I wouldn't do that again. So I need to understand how I got myself to that devastating place in the first place to ensure that I never go there again. So I was writing for myself.
00:41:11
Speaker
It's something that I do frequently. I have bookshelves of journals and it's kind of how I, I'm repeating myself a bit, but how I understand how I feel about a certain thing or what I believe or what have you. So the first several years of writing the book, it took me 10 years to write the book, was just my own internal process.
00:41:32
Speaker
I had been writing so much and kind of really getting into the theory that I paused at, which we've already discussed, that my wife said, gosh, you seem to really enjoy this. Why don't you go to a writing retreat and take a week to just kind of go head down on this? And I didn't even cross my mind. I thought, well, that sounds amazing. So I did. And the folks at that writing retreat really felt like I had a book.
00:41:58
Speaker
And that the book needed more work and certainly to become what it ultimately did become. And so I changed the tone of the book. In fact, this is an interesting story. The woman who leads this particular retreat was my first editor as well. And she said to me, I think it's kind of profound. She said, as I read your work, I'm hearing two voices coming through. You have the young woman who is ill,
00:42:26
Speaker
And you're able to express that with such transparency and candor. And at the same time, on occasion, you flip over to this other voice that is almost professorial in nature.
00:42:39
Speaker
And this voice knows things, right? And she said, you're asking a lot of your reader flipping back and forth between these two experiences. She's a licensed therapist as well. And she said, I recommend that you integrate these voices first in your own head.
00:42:57
Speaker
and then in your writing, which was profound. Because in my writing, there were moments where the vulnerability was too deep or I just kind of wasn't ready to go there. So then I would switch to my knowing mind and I would do these little mini lectures.
00:43:14
Speaker
Um, because that made me feel safe. So anyway, so that added to the writing process, uh, a couple of years, but it was also a powerful process for me just to, I think take kind of some of those final steps that probably most people taken out of lessons toward the individuation. I kept writing. Um, it is now a book titled unrestricted how I stepped off the tight rope, learned to say no and silenced anorexia.
00:43:40
Speaker
published by Heritage Trumpet and it launched earlier this month. The title itself is very meaningful to me. I came up with it while doing the dishes actually. How I stepped off the tightrope is that refusal to abide by the perfection criteria that we've integrated. Many of us and certainly the anorexic experience is a pursuit of a deadly perfection.
00:44:09
Speaker
Learn to say no is all about establishing those boundaries and beginning to actually delineate your space and hold it against, you know, whatever onslaught there is against it. And silencing anorexia as a recognition, I actually, a couple of people along the way said, shouldn't it be beat anorexia? And I said, yeah, I know. I'm not even sure what that is. But silencing anorexia was in response to, as I've shared that idea that anorexia is a voice in your head that compels your behavior.
00:44:39
Speaker
And if you can separate yourself from it, feed in every way that you feed, not just with food, yourself, starve in every way that you starve, not just food, that voice, then you can have a chance of coming into the full experience of who you are outside of those dictates from others.
00:45:02
Speaker
Yeah. It's interesting because I knew the title of the book before we spoke. But now we've had this discussion, I understand it much more. And I love the image of a tightrope because what you've described feels like a tightrope in a way. So yeah, very, very
00:45:27
Speaker
well done on the title of the book. So I think we're probably going to have to finish on that, but do you feel like it's been a therapeutic way to write the book for you?
00:45:44
Speaker
I've been asked if it's cathartic or therapeutic, and I think for me, it's been more informative. So in my early 20s, when I just started to feel well, I started speaking quite a bit about my experience, very raw, very fresh. That was cathartic. Fast forward through this 10-year writing process. I'm sure there's a therapy to it, of course, and I think simply keeping it present
00:46:14
Speaker
and up is actually very helpful, that the anorectic mind and probably other mental illnesses, I only speak about anorexia because that's what I know. It thrives in isolation. So I think keeping it visible is probably very therapeutic. But for me, the writing journey was far more informative. I came out of that writing journey understanding
00:46:44
Speaker
a lot about what I believe anorexia is and isn't what we are from a therapeutic perspective doing well or poorly. We've essentially made no advancements of any outcomes related advancements in the entire history of researching anorexia. So I was able to just kind of better understand myself and the disease state through that process.
00:47:13
Speaker
Okay, interesting. Well, I think that's all we've got time for today. Unfortunately, I think we could carry on talking a lot because it's extremely interesting.
Conclusion and Finding Peace
00:47:26
Speaker
But before we go, I have one question that I like asking at the end, which is, what is your happy place? So a place where you feel at peace?
00:47:41
Speaker
What a great question, Sylvan. I feel at peace when I have space and occasional solitude. And I'll take a physical place as well, but my happy place is one in which I can exist without feeling as though expectations from others are changing.
00:48:09
Speaker
how I get to exist in the moment. And I realize that ties in very closely with everything we're speaking to, but it does. And that's very significant for me. That is truly on a day by day basis, my happy place. So where I am right now, in a remarkably natural setting, those are always happy places because nature has a way of kind of getting out of your way, not demanding a lot. I think if I had a single happy place, it would probably be
00:48:38
Speaker
at home. Truly, I live in Boise, Idaho on a little farm slash ranch and my wife and I, we've created a very spacious, gentle place to be and it is the place I'm always very happy to return to. Sounds amazing.
00:48:59
Speaker
Well, thank you very much, Don. It's been incredible to talk to you. I feel like I understand Anorexia much better and I'm grateful for your time, but also it's great to hear about your book and I wish you all the best with the book and I hope it helps people understand better as well. Thank you, Sylvain. That's the idea. Thank you for listening and thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.
00:49:29
Speaker
Thank you.