- Hey everybody, happy Thursday!
This is the first video on my new phone.
I got a new phone and so I'm trying to figure out
how it even works, but it's much like my old phone,
just a little bit bigger.
So, if it's Thursday, where am I at?
I'm on Twitter, so if you've asked your questions
using the #KatiFAQ, I found 'em.
I've already talked to some of you
and answered some of your questions and messaged
with you, wow I'm really tight on this frame here.
I have three questions that I'm gonna answer today
as well as a journal topic that I came up with myself.
I think you're gonna like it 'cause I already like it.
I'm excited about it.
First question says,
"Hey, Kati, how can you break out
"of a binge/purge/restrict cycle?
"I don't know what to do anymore."
I actually picked this 'cause I know that a lot of people
who are in recover from an eating disorder really struggle
with this cycle because one thing leads to the next,
to the next, to the next.
There are a few helpful, yet simple tools
that we can try to put into place
to stop us from getting caught in that cycle
where we feel like,
"Well now I've done this and then I can't do that."
Before we know it, we've been doin' it
for days and days and days.
The first thing that I always encourage my clients to do
is get a dietitian or a nutritionist,
have a meal plan,
follow it strictly for a couple, maybe a month,
until you feel better apt to notice your hunger
and fullness cues.
Because sometimes it takes us a while to even figure out
what is hunger and fullness and how do I know to eat
before I'm so hungry
'cause I feel like I've been restricting
and then I'm triggered by then and then I'm binging
and ahhh.
It can take us a little while to get in touch with that.
The Intuitive Eating workbook that I've talked about,
there's a book called Intuitive Eating workbook.
You can check it out and they talk about that too
on your hunger and fullness scale, from one to 10.
I have my clients also do an emotional scale
from one to 10 and kinda of relating those.
So that's the first thing is
to see a nutritionist-dietician so we can get better
in touch with how our body feels.
Now if you're like,
"I'm already seeing a dietician-nutritionist,
"but I'm still doing this,"
then the second thing I would encourage you to do is
to talk to your therapist about it because that means
that it's not just the food portion,
where we're feeling too hungry and then we binge
and we feel bad about it and then we compensate,
it's more about the emotional level,
like noticing your one to 10 for emotionality that day
and what's going on.
Then my guess would be that there may be a little
of some extra stuff goin' on in your life
and things are happening or you're feeling
really stressed out or out of control,
or maybe you've been triggered lately.
That would be my guess that that's going on,
so I would encourage you talk to your therapist about it
because we know that it's not really about the food,
but when we're in recovery and we're struggling
to cue in with our hunger and fullness,
then it could be a little bit about the food.
So those are the two things that I would recommend,
talking to your therapist and working
with a dietician-nutritionist to get better in touch
with that.
That tends to slowly, keep in mind slowly,
it's a process, not perfection,
slowly get things more, I don't even like to say
under control, but more in a recovery stance, OK?
Hope that helps.
And if any of you have tips and tricks on what helped you
get out of that cycle, let us know below, as always.
Question number two.
"I feel detached from my emotions.
"How can I engage more?
"Inside I know I'm sad, angry, et cetera,
"but I'm never able to express it."
There are a couple easy, quick tools and things that we
can do to help express.
It's hard for a lot of us to express it,
and for some people, we feel like they express it
way too much.
Those people like scream in their cars and flip people off,
they're like bounding with over-filled emotion.
So what's a healthy way to feel our emotion,
express it and actually, even be able to recognize
what it really is we're feeling?
Now, the first thing that I have clients do is
just name some emotions.
We're gonna make an emotion list.
You've all seen those things.
I used to have one on my fridge that was like a magnet and,
"How am I feeling today?"
And you move the little block around, like,
"Today I'm feeling sad.
"Today I'm feeling exhausted.
"Today I'm feeling super excited, today,"
whatever.
I want you to make lists of different emotions,
as many as you can think of.
Keep going through 'em, I don't care,
because these are words that you know, terms that you
associate with emotions and I want you to write them down.
And then, 'bout three to five times a day,
depending on how often, how much time you have,
I want you to recognize how you're feeling.
I want you to check in with yourself.
Maybe have an alarm that goes off on your phone that's like,
"Br-oink" and people are like,
"What's that?"
"Oh, I'm supposed to text someone."
You don't have to tell then what you're doing."
You go into your list and I want you to associate
at least one of those emotions
with how you're feeling currently.
That emotion could even be blah.
I feel blah sometimes and that's an emotion,
that's a feeling, I feel it.
And that can help us start understanding what emotion
it is that we're actually feeling.
Because expressing it is the next step.
We have to first be able to recognize what it is
that we're actually feeling in ourselves
in order to express it because she says that she's
never able to express it.
And then, we're gonna practice at home.
'Cause everything we have to start small,
we have to start in safe environments, we have to start
with little steps until we start feeling comfortable
enough when we're out to be like,
"I'm annoyed, I gotta go.
"I can't deal with this anymore."
And we're OK expressing that annoyance and being that way,
and it's all OK.
So I would encourage you, when you're checking in,
if you're at home, if you have time, if you're alone,
if you're in your car and it's a safe place
and no one's gonna see you, be around you, whatever
and you're fine.
When you notice what emotion it is,
you circle in there, you're like,
"I'm feeling frustrated."
Then I want you to pretend you're kind of an acting class.
I want you to express what frustrated looks like.
I want you to show me what frustrated looks like.
Is it like,
"Uh, uh!"
Do we stomp our feet, do we pound our fists?
What do we do?
I want you to pretend and practice expressing it.
And then, do a second expression that's like,
"What would I do if I was in public
"and I felt really frustrated, but I had to show it?
"I still had to show the emotion."
What would that look like?
And it helps for us to do an extreme version
and then a tamed down version and to feel what that's like,
to recognize, to attach an expression to the emotion.
So I feel this way and I act this way.
The more we do that, the more in touch with our emotions
we get and I know this sounds really silly
and it's a really long process,
but I promise you, it really, really helps.
We're learning little by little how we are feeling,
and we're learning how to express it in a overtly dramatic
fashion and then in a way that it can be used
in our regular life.
We're getting used to that feeling because I find it's
often the lack of experience expressing things
or when we were younger we expressed things,
and in our family or origin, they're like,
"No, we don't do that, that is bad.
"Stop doing that immediately, you're embarrassing me."
Or whatever, so we learn to stop.
And it's because we haven't done it in so long,
we feel really nervous about it and we don't really know
what we wanna say or do or how or what if people
get offended?
Practicing it, thinking about it, learning about ourselves
really helps give us that confidence so that we can
some day very, very soon,
feel something and express it in a real way
and it will be OK.
We'll feel more normal with the way
that we feel our emotions the way we express them, OK?
Now question number three.
"Hey, Kati, will I ever lead a normal sex life?
"I was sexually abused as a child for six years."
"He is the only person that I have had sex with,
"even though it was rape.
"Every time I'm with someone and it gets sexual,
"I freak out and I can't go through with it.
"I'm 26 now and I'm so embarrassed that I've not
"had a sexual relationship,
"but I don't know if I'm a virgin or not.
"Will this be like this forever?
"I feel no desire to have sex, really,
"but I just can't go through with it,
"and my relationships fail because of it.
"I would love to have kids someday,
"so should I just force myself one time when I'm drunk
"or something?
"I don't know what to do.
"I don't talk about this 'cause it's so embarrassing.
"No one knows."
I want to talk about this because I know that many
of you struggle with sexual abuse in your past.
I've mentioned to you over and over
the Courage to Heal workbook.
It's amazing, I love it.
I know some people aren't so crazy about it,
but it's something that I've utilized year after year
and I find it really, really helpful.
Now, are you a virgin?
I say yes.
I always tell my clients that if that's something
they desire, if they feel like they want their first time
to be in a loving way with someone they care about,
you're a virgin.
Rape is not your choice, it's not taking your virginity,
it's not something like that.
If that's they way you wanna view it,
then I would view it that way.
Now should you just get drunk and have sex with someone
just to get it over with?
No, let's not do that.
I've had clients try similar things like that
and it almost re-traumatizes us and we really don't wanna
put ourselves back in that position to have it
a bad situation again,
to have something traumatic happen again.
Now what we can do is really work on our own recovery
from the sexual abuse and it takes time.
When we finally do decide to have sex with someone
in a loving way it may take us many tries at it.
We need to have someone who is willing to work with us,
who understands, who we can talk to about our past
before we even attempt at sex,
and they're OK with where we're at and they understand
and they're willing to listen and to support us.
Now I know for many girls, they're like,
"God, finding a good guy anyway, Kati, is just crazy
"and you're asking for a lot."
But I promise you, if a guy cares about you,
if he wants to have sex with you, he wants to fall in love
with you, he wants to be with you in general,
he will listen, he will do his best to understand.
But we have to be able to communicate it to them.
That's what you're gonna have to journal about,
you're gonna have to process through in therapy about,
you're gonna have to start working on your past.
I know that there's a lot of embarrassment and shame
that comes a long with it
and that's why the Courage to Heal workbook is so great.
Towards the end, she talks about how to then have a healthy,
happy sexual relationship and how you may have to start
and stop and you may have to tell them,
"I can't do this right now.
"May have to come back to it."
And they have to be very patient with you as you can
recreate a scenario in your life that's healthy, happy
and loving, including sex.
It can take a little bit of time.
The more we can work with our mate on it
and find someone that wants to lovingly understand
where we're at and meet us there, it's be amazing.
It can be wonderful.
There are people out there who will be patient with you,
who will listen.
But it's important, on the other side, for us to do the work
as we process through it so that we can even
actually contemplate having sex.
'Cause like you said, you don't even have any thoughts
of it right now and that's very, very common
to almost feel like we're asexual, like sex just ah,
it's just not gonna happen because of what's happened
to us in the past.
So work with your therapist.
I wouldn't focus so much on finding a guy right now,
oh, the light went out, I guess it must have got too hot.
Because we never know, right?
They have to meet us where we're at
and you may just not be there yet, OK?
Now the journal topic today is something that I love,
love, love and it's because I was going through my desk.
Shawn and I got new furniture a while back
and I've been going through all my stuff.
I found some old coloring books, hey!
So I want all of you to color!
Share your coloring photos.
Get some new crayons with like the perfect tip
and everything's perfect and the paper hasn't been torn.
It hasn't been put in that horrible crayon sharpener,
and make some beautiful coloring art.
I love to color.
It's so cathartic feeling the crayon on that paper.
Let's express ourselves through coloring.
And then share your photos 'cause I love it
and I'm so excited and I can't wait to get a new box
of crayons, yay!
OK, I love you all.
Tomorrow is finally Friday.
So I'll see you on Facebook, so ask your questions there
using the #KatiFAQ.
Bye!