Take a deep breath and bend your ears towards Cozette and Marrow as they bravely explore the psychological forces at play in their eating disorder recoveries. Dr. Lexi Giblin, PhD and Kara Bazzi, LMFT, Opal Co-Founders, join Cozette and Marrow in their quest to use self–inquiry to learn from unwanted emotion. Shame is a starting point for both self-inquirers but the learning takes them to different places. Cozette grapples with urges to restrict food despite her motivation to recover, while Marrow reflects on how her desire to have a child played a role in her recent relapse.
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Thank you to our team…
Editing by David Bazzi
Music by Aaron Davidson: https://soundcloud.
Sound engineering by Ayesha Ubayatilaka at Jack Straw Studios
Transcription by Rev.com
Lexi Giblin (00:06):
Welcome to the Appetite, a podcast brought to you by Opal Food and Body Wisdom, an eating disorder treatment clinic in Seattle, Washington. On this podcast, we talk about all things food, body movement, and mental health. I’m Dr. Lexi Giblin, your host for today, and I’m here with Kara Opal, clinical director and co-founder.
Kara Bazzi (00:27):
Hi Lexi.
Lexi Giblin (00:28):
Hi. And we are joined today by Marrow and Cozette, who will be doing self-inquiry on this episode in a bit. Hello, Marrow and Cozette.
Marrow (00:39):
Hi, I’m Meryl. I’m so happy to be here with you today.
Cozette (00:42):
Hi, I’m Ette. Thanks for having us here.
Lexi Giblin (00:48):
So in this self-inquiry series, we conduct an Opal Self-inquiry group on the podcast. So you will learn just a little bit about the self-inquiry process and hopefully find some resonance and inspiration in the difficult questions that are posed that you can take into your own self-inquiry work. If you are new to self-inquiry, would like a refresher or would like to cajole yourself into the self-inquiry mode. Listen to my short self-inquiry overview episode before we hear from Marrow and Cozette. Let me throw out a few reminders. So self-inquiry is a core mindfulness skill and radically open dialectical behavioral therapy or R-O-D-B-T, which was founded by Dr. Tom Lynch. And in self-inquiry, we’re choosing to go towards unwanted emotions or distress in order to learn and grow. So in R-O-D-B-T, the self-inquiry process is intentionally short at about three to five minutes, and you can do self-inquiry in your head in a journal or verbally with someone else.
(02:01):
When you go into self-inquiry, you are assuming you have blind spots and you are getting curious about what you do not yet understand we can’t see. What we can’t see is a quote we go back to in our self inquiry work. So we are searching for the unexpected and looking out for old stories or patterned routine ways we have of making sense of our experiences. And we’re working to find good questions, not answers. So you’re going to hear us asking questions, but you will not hear answers unless we’re asking for clarifying questions. Good questions are questions that cause dysregulation or elicit discomfort of some sort. Could be a physical tension with those questions that are uncomfortable to consider are the keepers. And so let me just quickly break down the self-inquiry process into three steps. The first step is where you feel you identify a specific time when you experience an unwanted emotion.
(03:07):
And we’ll get to hear from Marrow and Cozette about a little bit about their context, what was happening surrounding the unwanted emotion. And this is where you feel and take yourself back into the emotional experience and then while feeling, you get curious and ask what is the learning here? And then finally you ask, what is a good question to get you back to this learning in the future? So kind, what question do you not want to ask? What question is difficult to consider? And in this series we doubled down on the power of independent self-inquiry by positioning the work in a group context on the air. So we’re multi, multiple viewpoints come to play, right? So when you do journal self-inquiry work, it’s you and you, right? And in this process we have four different people in the room who are bringing their own viewpoints, which can help elicit parts of a person’s self that they can’t see, right?
(04:17):
We’re offering more possibilities by having more people involved. Our group process around the journal work is extra heat on. And so Cozette and Marrow know that they can at any point choose to end the process if it’s too much. We want this to be helpful. Obviously the tricky thing is with self-inquiry is that helpful is also uncomfortable. So it’s like finding that line of when it’s gone, when you feel like maybe you’ve pushed too hard. We will write down the questions you’re receiving so that you can have them for later and focus on how it feels to consider the questions being posed. So we’ll be curious about the questions, how our questions are landing for you, whether they’re dysregulating or not. And if they’re not, then we might want to try a different idea to see if that jogs some new learning for you. So we’re serving those of us not doing the self-inquiry, we’re serving as provocateurs and it’s full license to ask asshole questions.
(05:23):
So we’ll be working to not validate or soothe the person doing the self-inquiry as we don’t want to get in the way of the learning that comes with dysregulation. So we’re going to let you be in whatever emotion you are in hopes that that can bring you some learning. So Marrow and Cozette have just done five minutes of journal self-inquiry work just prior to the recording of this episode. And now we’ll add to this work by a group process. And any identifying information of the self inquiries has been removed from the recording Cozette. Will you take us into your self-inquiry work?
Cozette (06:14):
Yeah, absolutely. So a few weeks ago I was looking in a mirror and I had this vivid experience of noticing my body in the mirror, noticing all of the imperfections and this wave of emotions kind of floating over me. And those emotions, unwanted emotions were fear and frustration, some anger, some sadness, and then all of that comes with some underlying shame of my body. And this moved me into an urgency to restrict and to move deeper into eating disorder behaviors, which as a person seeking recovery and active eating disorder treatment runs really counter to my goals. And then also going into feeling like a bad person because I have access to treatment and help and I’ve had access to treatment and help for a while unlike so many other people, and I’m still feeling this way, this is still happening for me.
(07:19):
And so a few questions that I came up with were just basically how does my eating disorder function in my life? What does it do? How do I find things that can replace it in a helpful way? Am I willing to give up the functions of my eating disorder to gain recovery even though I don’t know what that would necessarily look like? Why am I more concerned with my outward appearance than my inner wellbeing? Also, as a person, I don’t feel this way about other people. I don’t look at people and judge their bodies specifically. And so what makes me so special that I should judge myself? Why am I so special? And then also, do I actually believe that I can get to a state of not hating my body? Do I believe that that’s actually possible? Yeah, so that’s my self inquiry.
Kara Bazzi (08:25):
Sounds like you came up with a lot of good questions on your own as a clarifying question. Are there any of those particulars that you had the most dysregulation around with your questions that you came up with?
Cozette (08:39):
I think that some of the questions that really hit for me were what makes me so special. Just that basic one. And then also I am feeling like a bad person because I’ve been in treatment and this still hasn’t, I am still hanging onto things, so why am I hanging onto this? Do I actually want this?
Lexi Giblin (09:08):
Okay, that’s helpful because I was wondering which place we should dive into, whether we should dive into the feelings around urges to restrict or the feeling bad about having access to treatment and continuing to struggle. So questions from us.
Marrow (09:30):
Do you find shame to be familiar and comforting in some ways?
Cozette (09:38):
I have a quick answer for that.
Kara Bazzi (09:41):
What does that mean, Lexi? When there’s a quick answer.
Lexi Giblin (09:45):
Am I assuming correctly that the quick answer is yes, that the shaming shame is comforting? In some ways
Kara Bazzi (09:54):
It’s
Lexi Giblin (09:54):
Familiar. Familiar. And so if you didn’t answer that, what happens? So in self-inquiry, we just let it kind of sit there without answering it.
Cozette (10:08):
I think it makes it a little bit more dysregulating to not be able to answer or to clarify to the nth degree of exactly what I mean.
Marrow (10:20):
That to me is really interesting and powerful is the desire to explain yourself as part of that shame. We wonder, do you want to be known and seen or do you want to perform?
Kara Bazzi (10:45):
Is that dysregulating?
Cozette (10:46):
Yeah, I think it also, for me, it goes into worthiness of do I deserve to be known and seen?
Kara Bazzi (10:56):
Yeah. My question was around the special piece and something around what if it’s okay to be special or something around you’re describing shame around the specialness. What if you owned that you’re special? What if you embraced being special?
Cozette (11:19):
I’m feeling a desire to clarify.
Kara Bazzi (11:21):
Okay.
Cozette (11:23):
Is that okay?
Lexi Giblin (11:28):
Is there a clarifying question? Is that, yeah, you can clarify. Let’s see where it takes us.
Cozette (11:35):
Okay. I think that the part about being special, and I’m using air quotes, is to explain it a little bit further. It’s more about why am I allowed to judge my body and to restrict and do all of these things when I don’t see another person and judge them the same way that I’m judging myself. So why am I the outlier from that group? I don’t know if that,
Kara Bazzi (12:07):
Well, and I’m just wondering, I guess if being taking that further of just being an outlier, I’m maybe not so much specific about the experience of looking at yourself and you’re judging your body, but being the outlier. I just wonder if there’s something in the experience of being special or something where you’re a difference. I’m struggling to get there, but I dunno if Lexi any,
Lexi Giblin (12:34):
I think I’m curious, is that line of thinking at all bringing dysregulation up for you?
Cozette (12:41):
Absolutely.
Lexi Giblin (12:44):
Okay. So Kara’s hitting on something for you. Okay.
Kara Bazzi (12:49):
Yeah. There’s something about the judgment of you’re judging that you are seeing yourself differently than you’d see others. And I guess what’s the other side that feels like the more familiar story? So if that was accepted or embraced even, and again, I’m thinking about it more largely than seeing yourself in a mirror,
Lexi Giblin (13:13):
Sort of what’s wrong with being special different? What’s wrong with you, experiencing yourself differently than you do others? Sort of like what that seems like part of being human
Cozette (13:30):
Or what if everyone feels this way and I’m not special? What would that be like?
Lexi Giblin (13:38):
What if everyone feels this way and you’re not special?
Cozette (13:42):
Do I have a secret desire to be special or to see myself as differently from other people?
Kara Bazzi (13:49):
Or what if you’re special and so is everybody else? Does it take away from your specialness?
Marrow (14:00):
I like this concept of being terminally unique where you believe you can’t be understood. I wonder, do you believe you can’t be understood because you believe your experience is so unique? Do you keep yourself isolated with this belief system? I also think there’s this pull, especially in for folks who are politically aware to silence any judgments they might have about other people’s bodies and wonder or if it’s true that you don’t have any judgments about others’ bodies or if maybe they’re lurking deeper down. And what does it mean about you to judge other people’s bodies? Why is that something so firmly you believe you don’t do?
Lexi Giblin (15:08):
Is that dysregulating Cozette?
Marrow (15:11):
Yeah, I think that that goes into the challenging internalized fat phobia and all of the things that I need to work on.
Lexi Giblin (15:24):
Okay. Well that was quite a bit of heat on Cozette. Are there any other questions before we move to Marrow?
Marrow (15:33):
Yeah,
Lexi Giblin (15:36):
Are you willing to hear another question, Cozette?
Cozette (15:38):
Yeah, of
Lexi Giblin (15:38):
Course.
Marrow (15:39):
Thanks for your willingness. I really appreciate that. What if your eating disorder doesn’t have anything to do with your body? What if that’s a symptom? Okay, that’s it
Lexi Giblin (15:58):
For listeners. The nonverbal response to Marrow’s question communicated some discomfort with that question. Is that what that
Marrow (16:08):
Communicated?
Lexi Giblin (16:10):
Yes. Right. So Cozette was rolling her eyes. So sounds like now you received multiple questions there or is there one that’s particularly difficult?
Cozette (16:33):
I don’t know if there’s one specific one that I can pinpoint, but I will say that that last one caused me quite a bit of discomfort. Okay.
Lexi Giblin (16:44):
Okay. Alright, well thank you for sharing. Yeah,
Marrow (16:48):
Thank you.
Lexi Giblin (16:49):
Alright, Marrow, stop.
Marrow (16:54):
Yeah, thank you so much for going first and creating the space and showing your willingness gives me a lot of permission to move towards discomfort. Now that I have experienced your discomfort as a witness, it seems only right that I’ve moved towards discomfort, it’ll allow you to witness me in the same way. Not that there’s, whatever, there’s a train of thought there. I’ll let that train go. In the self-inquiry work, I was thinking a lot about a situation with my wife. I spent a lot of time before I knew my wife and knowing my wife working around this desire, I have to be a parent to mother. I think some people have that inclination really naturally, and sometimes it’s informed by societal pressures and heteronormativity. And I have done the work to be able to say that I desire a child from a very innate part of me.
(18:13):
So my wife and I had started the process of reciprocal IVF, which is a process that allows one partner to use their eggs and another partner to use their womb. So both parents can be involved in the biological hatching of a child, if you will. Feels very scientific, but it’s still just like a process of birth. I notice that I’m sweating already and feeling like the intensity of the weight of this, so I might get a little worly in my voice, but I trust our sound engineers and I trust my company to hold that. We started the process of reciprocal IVF and I was in a bit of a bad place emotionally, not a bad place.
(19:25):
Things were hard. I was in a new city, I’d come from a very sunny climate, and I was now living in a place with the winter again, and that was hard. And I was experiencing a lot of struggles with executive dysfunction. And my wife became aware of this and told me that she wanted to wait until I was more reliable and available as a partner to continue the process of having a child. There is so much devastation in that and also relief. And then there’s this great shame around all these effort I was putting in all this effort I was putting in to try and build stability and build a life that would be good for a child when the possibility of a child was taken off the table, even just remotely even just pushed maybe further into the table and harder to reach. I lost my shit and I didn’t find any motivation to continue stability and I lost all drive for this effort that I was putting in because if there wasn’t a child at the end of it, what was the point after that? I sort of spiraled out. I started fantasizing about using alcohol and drugs and escaping my life. And it wasn’t until I hatched a plan to leave that I was like, oh, I have fully relapsed in my eating disorder.
(21:57):
So I think the self-inquiry, I has a lot of layers of shame being unwanted emotion and this learning of, well, I don’t know what the learning is in this or what I’m drawn to as being this unwanted emotion. I think that pivot point of feeling so much shame and losing what I was holding onto as a reason for stability and wellness, that feels like where the learning is.
Lexi Giblin (22:59):
All right. So questions from us. Maybe just a clarifying question. So you’re saying that the place you came to was that the shame was related to learning that your motivation to become more reliable and your life was almost very much so focused on having a child. That was the main motivation and that is brought up shame for you that that was the central motivator in your life?
Marrow (23:46):
Yeah, I think there’s shame that I became solely focused on being a partner and a parent and not on existing for the sake of existence. And the external motivation, relying on that feels shameful, but also the shame of that not being enough, even though I had this external motivator of a partner, a child that wasn’t enough to have executive functioning that wasn’t enough to not have depression, wasn’t enough to make me, well, okay,
Cozette (24:48):
What would be enough?
Lexi Giblin (25:00):
Where did you and your wife get the idea that you would be someone other than who you are for any reason? I wonder if that’s regulating or dysregulating.
Marrow (25:31):
I think it’s both. It regulates the part of me that wants to be in acceptance, but then the parts of me that don’t want to investigate this, I feel dysregulated by.
Cozette (26:02):
I guess I’m wondering, is this a pattern behavior for you? So do you tend to shift personality traits or the way that you behave in different group settings based on external stimuli or external motivation? Does this happen often?
Marrow (26:32):
Is that a clarifying question? Do you want a response? No.
Kara Bazzi (26:45):
What would it mean if you needed external stimuli to be motivating for your functioning in your life?
Cozette (27:00):
Yeah. Why is that a shameful thing?
Kara Bazzi (27:05):
What if it just is and it will be for the rest of your life? Or what would it say about you if that was true?
Lexi Giblin (27:24):
Is perfectionism getting in the way of something you deeply desire? Does you follow where I’m going with that? As in the perfectionism of you needing to be a particular way prior to having a child?
Marrow (27:50):
Yeah, I think I, there’s like, I appreciate the dysregulation of that and I also think it’s important to note that there’s so much more pressure as a queer person because I have so much choice and power in when a child comes into my life and so much more financial strain of that to, there’s just a different layer of responsibility around it. So yeah, I can appreciate where is this perfectionism coming from? And also have the note of like, well, there’s some logistical realities around being a queer person trying to have a child, which is true to some extent for many people, queer or not, but is the nature of my relationship.
Kara Bazzi (29:02):
I also was thinking kind of back in the line of the motivation piece. If there is a question of an old story or a way you’ve, something related to your identity or how you’ve identified yourself that needs to be revised, are you hanging onto something in your identity that’s not useful for you?
Lexi Giblin (29:36):
Are we hitting on anything for you, Marrow? Yeah, I
Marrow (29:42):
Think I had a big fu reaction to the question around needing external motivation and what do I believe that says about me and what if I just do, what if needing an external reason for getting up in the morning is just part of my life and part of who I am forever and that I felt very rude, which means there’s some meat there, something juicy that I don’t want to look at.
Lexi Giblin (30:30):
Okay, sounds like a good one for you to use in your self-inquiry moving forward. So thank you to Marrow and Cozette for taking us into your brave, difficult self-inquiry work today. If you’re interested in doing self-inquiry on air with us, submit an application by clicking on the link in the episode description. And if you want a little deeper dive into self-inquiry, go to our self-inquiry overview episode. Thank you to Jack Straw Cultural Center for Sound Engineering. Thanks to Aaron Davidson for the Appetite’s original music and to David Bazzi for editing. If you want to learn more about opal’s programming, go to opal food and body.com. Until next time.
