Podcast Transcript

Renfrew Conference Mini-Series Episode 5: Cultivating Body Trust Within the Therapeutic Relationship

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INTRO

Sam: Hey, I’m Sam.

Ashley: Hi, I’m Ashley and you’re listening to All Bodies. All Foods. presented by The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders. We want to create a space for all bodies to come together authentically and purposefully to discuss various areas that impact us on a cultural and relational level.

Sam: We believe that all bodies and all foods are welcome. We would love for you to join us on this journey. Let’s learn together.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EPISODE

Hello, my fellow helping professionals. I have a question for you. What is it like to trust yourself? What is it like to allow yourself to take up space in the therapy room? We have all probably experienced a time where we haven’t felt our own groundedness in the therapy session and in this chat with Neathery Falchuk, (they/them), LCSW-S, CGP, we will discuss their thoughts on the healing power of relationships. Their goals of exploring anti-fat bias within the therapeutic context and holding space for the helping professional as the helping professional explores their own body trust relationship, all of which is done in an effort to continue the deep connection with our clients. We hope you enjoy.

EPISODE

Ashley: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. We are joined now by Neathery Falchuk, (they/them), LCSW-S, CGP. Neathery is the founder of Ample and Rooted, an inclusive psychotherapy and training practice, specializing in eating disorders and body liberation. Neathery is past president of Central Texas Eating Disorder Specialist, past board member of the Association for Size, Diversity and Health and currently on the program committee for Project Heal. Neathery, welcome!

Neathery: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. So, your presentation is titled: Embodied Presence: Cultivating Body Trust Within the Therapeutic Relationship.

Neathery: Yes.

Ashley: Yes. So, can you share with us, what is body trust?

Neathery: What is that? (laughter) Yes. Well, I’m a certified body trust provider through the folks at Center for Body Trust. Shout out to Dana, Hillary, and Sirius. And yeah, the body trust method is reclaiming of the inherent wisdom of your body. Going back to that wisdom that we are born with. I’m a new parent to a five-month-old right now.

Sam/Ashley: Oh, congrats!

Neathery: Thank you. Thank you. Yes, and wow, so much healing in my little inner kiddo and just seeing how we are so, so born with knowing our bodies and how quickly society or other influences want to come in and strip away your own inherent wisdom. I’ve known that from a, you know, lived experience, clinical experience. But now as a parent, I see how early it starts. So, so grateful for the folks that Center for Body Trust in coming up with the framework and the process and how to come back to the wisdom of your body.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean, I’m excited that you shared that too. I’m a mother of a two-year-old and it’s just so fun, but it also is very interesting being a parent now and you’re like seeing their little brains being able to connect to their bodies and understanding what’s going on and then also seeing kind of those outside influences…

Neathery: Yes!

Ashley: …come in. Even just like, you know, culturally or even like, you know, little girls wear this, little boys wear this, like just so many outside influences.

Neathery: Oh, my goodness, yes! I mean, the process of coming back to your own inherent wisdom is also within the context of our socio-cultural systems of oppression. And so, the body trust method really names and posits that it isn’t possible for us to all inhabit our bodies without shame unless all of us can. And especially for those who are multiply marginalized and impacted by these systems on a daily. And because we are swimming in these systems, it is impossible to not have them inside of us, right? Our own anti-blackness, anti-fatness, anti-transness, anti-queerness. The workshop that I’m leading, which is tomorrow, so, we’ll see how it goes, but the hope is that we’ll really do a deep dive in our own implicit bias and anti-fatness because it’s there. And how can we sit with people, whether in a room, virtually, conference room, how can we be in shared spaces with each other when there is that implicit bias against fat people? So that’s what we’ll go through and really exploring the interpersonal neurobiology of the felt experience, felt sense, neuro exception that all of this is happening at a really unconscious level. So, you can say, I believe your body is great, fat positivity, and the felt experience can still be different if you haven’t slowed down to do the very deep layered work of unlearning your own anti-fatness.

Sam: You mentioned body wisdom that we’re all born with. So, for our audience, if you could fill in the blank, we are already born knowing what?

Neathery: Oh…

Ashley: That’s a really good question, Sam.

Sam: I’m just curious about the answer.

Neathery: We are already born knowing we are whole. I can just see my kiddo just like taking in the world and like not having that conversation in the back of, do I deserve this, am I taking up too much space? Too little space? I’ve already asked for that. I can’t ask for that. I don’t belong here. All of the chatter that comes, there’s just a knowing of, oh, I’m here. I am embodied. I get to be here, take up space and be curious and navigate the world and make sense of where I am in my own kind of space and learning and just exist peacefully. So that’s what comes to mind for me right now is, is just our inherent wholeness that we deserve love, compassion, pleasure. And that again, some of us have early experiences where the messaging is that we don’t deserve that. And that’s why we’re all therapists. We have our own wounding. We sit with folks who have had the same wounding. And ultimately, what I love doing with clients and myself and my family and friends is just a reminder of our amazing wholeness and just that we’re awesome people.

Ashley: I’m so interested to hear like how… We’re all therapists, right? So, yes, we’ve worked through some of our own healing and stuff. What brought you down this path and, and getting certified in body trust and why was that so important for you?

Neathery: Yeah. So, I am queer, trans, non-binary, fat, Latinx. And I grew up, I’m white and Mexican. So, I grew up in a kind of multicultural experience where I didn’t really feel a sense of belonging in many communities. I kind of live in this liminal space. And that just impacted my own embodiment from the beginning. I didn’t see people who were queer or trans growing up, didn’t know that, you know, it’s okay to be fat. Of course, we’re, you know, brought up in this weight centric world. So that obviously impacted my own relationship to food, my own relationship to my body. And it’s in reclaiming these identities, these, you know, important parts of who I am that I can be embodied, that I can experience the fullness of life and really have pleasurable moments and have compassion for myself and others. And yeah, that’s I, I have lived with that. I love doing that work with clients. And then the Center for Body Trust program is just such a wonderful weaving of lived experience and then their clinical experience and just putting words to the body’s knowing, lots of training programs, you know, you have a how-to guide this is more of just a putting language to something that is experienced, and it has been so powerful. It’s been so amazing to have and just know that we have the tools inside. We know how to be in our bodies. We just need to feel comfortable and safe enough. And again, it’s at that neuroceptive level, which is what the workshop will cover is how that kind of can cloud the work that we do with our clients. Even if you don’t know that that it’s happening.

Ashley: So, your presentation is really from that type of perspective of helping a clinician…

Neathery: Yes.

Ashley: …do some of their own work.

Neathery: Yeah. We’ll go through again the neurobiology won’t go and only have two hours. So I’m not going to go into a deep dive. But I will, you know, give some resources like Bonnie Badenoch’s work of again, relational neuroscience and neurobiology. And we’ll go through examples of what anti-fat bias is in the therapy room. I speak from a therapist’s perspective, but it’s absolutely present with dieticians, doctors like across the board. Um and it can be from very overt obviously experiences of weight stigma harm and also covert. So those experiences where you don’t know it because of your privilege, because of your own bias that you haven’t quite worked through. And so, give people a little discomfort. I close the conference. It’s the last one of the conference actually. So hopefully people will take that and do some more of their own inner work because it is necessary.

Ashley: It’s really so necessary when we’re, when we’re working with people and teaching them how to exist in the world, right? And not use a behavior, a symptom to, to mask or suppress or numb out if we haven’t done that work for ourselves. I would imagine that we would feel very disjointed in session, right. It wouldn’t feel congruent to our value system. And I, I just think that that work is so imperative.

Neathery: Yes, so imperative. And we’ll cover too that it’s not perfection we’re looking for, we’re still going to be humans with bodies in this world that the expectation of just being like quote healed or never having negative thoughts about your body ever again. That’s not the point. That’s not what we’re aiming for. It’s just the awareness of the harm you can do with your own bias towards fat people. And also knowing how to navigate when we have our own stuff come up and being able to model that like, okay, I’m having a tough time or there’s a stressful event happening in my life. So of course, these old neural pathways of thinking about food or my body are coming up and here’s how I cope with that instead or here’s how what I do to get back on a more values aligned path.

Sam: In a culture where there’s so much weight stigma, anti-fatness, how can people cultivate body trust? Are there any ways that people can just start this journey?

Neathery: Yes. Well, one is just going to Center for Body Trust and following their work. They have a variety of trainings for professionals and for people who are not in this field and just want the healing workbooks. They actually came out with a book this year or last year, Reclaiming Body Trust. So that’s a great place to start. For providers wanting more training with like how to integrate this with eating disorders, Ample and Rooted. We do a training for providers and diversifying your social media feed right. We are again, indoctrinated with thin ideal diet culture, so much. It’s just everywhere. So, we want to counter that just because our brains need so much repetition. It is just neuroscience. We need more exposure. So, I’ve made a profession of it. I tell clients that like this is my job, I do all of this research. I listen to podcasts, nonstop, read books. I talk about it all day. That is how much repetition is needed to start to shift your paradigm and shift your perspective of again, thin ideal diet culture-based paradigms. So, it just requires time, it requires changing something in terms of who you’re following what you’re reading, who is your support system. So that can look like therapy, dieticians, other kind of group programs. That’s something I think we need more of in our field is more community-based care. Not just that’s something you have to pay for. Ideally, it’s something that’s free and open to all people who are wanting to explore. So, it’s more time, more exposure and community. Again, relational neuroscience shows us we are community-based humans. We need each other and it shows that healing actually deepens, we actually become more embodied when we have people when we have connection and community. So, we can’t do it alone.

Ashley: So, Neathery, I know that you are addressing this with clinicians here at the conference. Thinking about your clients, how do you broach this topic when perhaps they have existed in a body that they haven’t trusted?

Neathery: Yes. Or it’s the body that they’ve been told not to trust. So, I do that reframing, I mean, first validating, of course, like, absolutely. I’m in a small fat body and so with clients who are in a larger size body than me, we talk about that difference, that power difference just in the room. What is it like to talk with someone in a smaller body? And again, wanting to make sure that felt sense of safety is there first. So at that neuroceptive level, I keep talking about neuroscience is so important, and that takes time and that takes a lot of time and again, shifting the internalized blame, externalizing it to anger on the systems, giving some education like why the BMI is BS like here’s all of my, you know, I can get on a soapbox and talk about it. If they’re interested in resources for further learning, I can send them, you know, podcast links, books, all of that stuff. But again, it’s just that reframing, it’s not you, you’re not the problem. The system is the problem. A lot of trauma work. Yeah, it starts really early. I mean, most people I think start to know or we’re told their body was a problem before age 10. So, it’s going back to those experiences when, when ready and really holding space in a, in a more, you know, safe environment. If there’s any, you know, destabilization with eating disorder behaviors, working on that as best we can. There’s a lot. We do a lot.

Sam: And the work is so needed. It’s so important.

Neathery: Yes. I think why it’s great that there’s podcasts like this out there. So as many people as possible can start to recognize this is not, you know, a rare experience, disordered eating happens rather frequently. It is just, you know, condoned, it’s just expected.

Ashley: It’s normalized.

Sam: It’s encouraged.

Neathery: It’s prescribed even. And so, I think it’s important for people to first even know like you don’t have to be holding so much shame about your body that it’s not you. You’re not the problem.

Sam: Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Neathery: Yes. Thank you all.

Ashley: Would you be willing to come back?

Neathery: Absolutely. Would love to.

Sam: There’s a lot we could unpack here.

Neathery: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, truly.

Ashley: Well, thank you so much, Neathery, and so much luck to you tomorrow. I hope you enjoy it.

Neathery: I’m so looking forward to it and for the those who are coming or came, hopefully you all enjoyed it and I promise last session of the conference will have a good time.

Sam: What a great way to end the conference. Thank you for all you do.

Neathery: Thank you.

OUTRO

Ashley: Thank you for listening with us today on All Bodies. All Foods. presented by The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders.

Sam: We’re looking forward to you joining us next time as we continue these conversations.

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