Podcast Transcript

Episode 54: Recovering in the Light of the Moon: The Healing Power of Myths, Metaphors, & Storytelling with Dr. Anita Johnston, PhD

[Bouncy theme music plays.]

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.

Sam: Can a simple folktale help heal our relationship with food? Can an ancient legend change how we approach our emotions? Can a story help us access our intuition? The wise and wonderful Dr. Anita Johnston, PhD, joins us today to answer these questions. I don’t know how it was possible to fit so much wisdom into one little episode, but we’re eternally grateful for Dr. Johnston’s ability to do so. We cover so many familiar themes in recovery in this conversation. If you’ve ever felt powerless, struggled to sit with your emotions, or had difficulty being assertive, Dr. Johnston seems to have a metaphor or story to help us all see these common struggles in a different light. Here’s a quote by Thomas Mann that sums things up. I found this at the start of Dr. Johnston’s book. “Things take on a different look beneath the moon than beneath the sun. As well might be that to the spirit, the light of the moon would appear to yield the truer illumination.” Anita Johnston, PhD is a clinical psychologist, certified eating disorder specialist, and author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, How Women can Transform their Relationships with Food Through Myths, Metaphors, and Storytelling, which has been published in seven languages. She is the co-creator of the Light of the Moon Cafe, an online resource with interactive and self-study courses and a supportive community for women around the world. A pioneer in the field of eating psychology for over 35 years, she is currently the founder and executive clinical director of Ai Pono Hawaii Eating Disorder Programs, which has a residential eating disorder treatment program on Maui. Dr. Johnston provides virtual individual consultations and conducts workshops internationally. She is best known for integrating metaphor and storytelling into her training as a clinical psychologist to explain the complex issues that underlie struggles with eating and body image. I hope you join us for this illuminating conversation.

Sam: Hello and welcome back to another episode of All Bodies, All Foods. We are so grateful to share this space today with Dr. Anita Johnston. Welcome to our show.

Anita: It’s a pleasure to be here. Hi everyone.

Sam: Yay! So we would love to hear about your story. What brought you to the mental health field? Why eating disorders? Why Disordered Eating? What attracted you to this work?

Anita: A long story. It was a long time ago. I think it’s a funny thing because I have a friend that we were best friends when we were like three years old, five years old, and we hadn’t seen each other for many, many years, but we had gotten together. And we were talking, and she said, “do you remember what you said you wanted to be when you grew up?” I went, “oh, of course not,” right? And she said, “well, I do.” And I said, “you do?” She goes, “Oh, yeah. You said you wanted to be a brain doctor because you wanted to see what was going on inside people’s heads.” “Are you kidding me? I said that?” She goes, “Oh, yeah, I remember the look in your eye when you said that.” I don’t remember that. But I’m imagining and I do know I’ve always just been really curious. I grew up in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic household on the island of Guam. And so, I started noticing that things that were okay in one culture were not okay in another. I just found myself being really curious about that. My grandmother is indigenous Chamorro and that was a matrilineal culture. I became interested in women’s issues before I even knew what they were, I guess. And so that is really what led me to working with eating disorders, because of this interest. And then I happened to be supervising a psychology intern in Hawaii who was doing her doctoral dissertation on the incidence of eating disorders in Hawaii, and so we would get together and meet and we were joined with another woman who was a social worker who had recovered from an eating disorder, but she had to figure it all out herself. And so, the three of us would meet and we kept saying, “oh my gosh, there’s so many people struggling here. There should be a center for this. This is a big problem.” And after we said it for about the fifth time, we looked at each other and we went, “okay, I guess we’re it.” So that’s how it began for me, it was a mystery to be solved, one of those things you create and they come and so they did, girls and women of all ages, all sizes, all ethnicities, all struggling with their bodies. Back then, there weren’t males that were showing up. This is, I’m talking in 1982. I don’t know if you were born then, but it was a long time ago. And so I began this process, because again, I grew up in a culture where there was a lot of storytelling. I was really interested in stories, and as a psychologist, I was a trained story listener. So I just started listening as carefully as I could to see, how was it right? What was it? Why all these diverse individuals that were struggling with food and eating and their bodies? And so that began the journey many, many years ago. Now I haven’t stopped.

Ashley: That’s incredible, Anita. Thank you. I am curious, you have a book called Eating by the Light of the Moon. It has really been very influential in the eating disorder field for years. And I’m curious, what does it mean to do something by the light of the moon?

Anita: Well, actually it’s In The Light of the Moon.

Ashley: In the light of the moon. Eating in the Light of the Moon.

Anita: I remember being on an airplane when I was trying to figure out the title of the book, because my agent said, “well, why don’t you call it eating as a metaphor?” And I thought that is just the ugliest thing I ever heard. If I’m going to use a metaphor, why not put the metaphor and make the title the metaphor? And so I came up with, I was actually I was coming from Hawaii, from Guam, which is a long flight, that’s eight hours. I had plenty of time and I just had a piece of paper and is it in the light of the moon? Is it by the light of the moon? Is it through the light? Is it under the light of the moon? You could go in so many different directions and I came upon In The Light of the Moon because the moon is a symbol that’s used in cultures all over the world, across all time. As a symbol for the feminine principle which is an archetype that exists everywhere, inside of us and outside of us. And so, and it’s the archetype for the feminine principle. And so for me, what was really clear as I began to work with these folks who were struggling is: first of all, there wasn’t something wrong with them, for starters, but what was troubling was there was an imbalance within themselves between the masculine and feminine principle, which has nothing to do with gender, by the way. The language is really confusing. And why? Because we live in a culture that is so out of balance, and that this imbalance was profoundly affecting their relationship with their bodies and food. And so the moon, being the symbol of the feminine, it has to do with the recovery process of really coming home to those qualities and those attributes that create this constellation that we call the feminine. And nowadays, a lot of people know what that means, but back then, nobody did. Nobody was like, “oh, I’m going to be talking about this? Uh-oh.”

Sam:  You know, it brings me to my next question because you had mentioned that we’re sort of out of balance as a society, and in your book, I was reading through one of the chapters and a sentence stood out to me. You wrote, “our civilization has lost its moon.” What did you mean by that?

Anita: Well, think about it. We’ve talked about, “oh, it’s such a nice day. The sun is shining.” We celebrate that. But how many times do you say, “oh, is it the moon? Is it a full moon? What’s happening with the moon,” right? And again, symbolically, that represents where we’ve put our focus as a culture. The masculine principle, which is also called the solar principle, because it’s connected to the sun, it’s also called yang in Asian cultures, and that’s the part of us that is logical, linear, goal/ achievement oriented. We get a lot of applause for that in our culture. The feminine is the emotional, the intuitive, the instinctual, the relational, and that has not really been given its due in our culture. Our culture is about doing and not being, and so, in that sense, we’ve lost our connection to the moon. We want things to be steady and stable and stay the same when the moon is cyclical and ever-changing and full of nuance and more subtle connections between things rather than sharp, intense focus. So that’s what I mean by the imbalance. And we’re like fish swimming in water, right? You consume it. So of course we get out of balance as well.

Sam: I, you know, when I was reading your book, I felt like there was so much symbolism around the moon. And you spoke about this so beautifully just now, but also what came across to me was that in the light of the moon is also seeing things differently, seeing things in a different light. And I think this is so important in eating disorder recovery, because we might think of recovery one way or think about our mental health in one way, but sometimes all it takes is a therapist to just shift our thinking, help us shift a little bit and see it in a different light, so to speak. And you talk about that in your book as well. I thought, could you talk a little bit more about that?

Anita: Yeah, I’ll tell you what I’m doing in the book. Right? I’ll pull the curtain back. Because really, what I’m doing is I’m using the language of metaphor. And that’s why I have all the old stories in there because they speak in the language of metaphor. And I happen to believe that eating disorders speak the language of metaphor. Okay, let’s just start using the metaphor symbols so that a person, it’s like when you go to take a foreign language, let’s say you walk into French class, and all of a sudden, the teacher is speaking in French and giving you the syllabus in French, and you’re going, “oh my gosh, if  I knew French, I wouldn’t even be in this class. I don’t know what she’s saying.” But she’s speaking that language to tune your ear to it. So I believe that basically struggles with eating disorders are a way that we eat, the way our psyche is trying to communicate something to us, but it’s not talking in the language like I’m talking right now,-in English. It’s talking in symbolism and metaphor, so what happens though is that, again, you know we live in a culture that just focuses on the physical reality and everything that is literal and yet the eating disorder is speaking in metaphor. It’s not literal, it’s symbolic, so you have to move into that realm of understanding like what hunger is. Hunger isn’t just for food. There are non-physical hungers that we are trying to deal with either by stuffing them with food or restricting food, but it’s all metaphoric. And when you can start to crack that code, that’s when the truth gets revealed. And you can’t let go of the eating disorder. If you investigate it, it lets go of you.

Ashley: You know, I’m quite struck by what you’re saying right now, Anita, because I’m thinking of our clients that have come through program, done treatment, things like that, and how they might or not they, but like treatment, you know, traditionally has been quite literal. So looking at what exactly are they eating? What are they not eating? What exactly are their behaviors? What are they avoiding as far as behavior? And hearing you say, using this kind of like process of metaphor, I feel like can speak to them so much more. I used to lead an expressive art group at our location in Nashville. And one of the times I, it was like during fall, like in October, and I bought pumpkins for everybody. I had them paint on the pumpkins what it is that they felt like they couldn’t say out loud, you know, and I told them it could be anything. And for the most part, it wasn’t words, right? It was not the literal thing. It was images or colors or things like that. And then we went around and kind of like talked about it. And then we took them outside with a sledgehammer and smashed them. And it was so much fun, you know, and that process, I feel like those clients were so connected on a deeper level because it invited this metaphorical process. It wasn’t that literal, like, “what is this food specifically?” You know, what are you specifically eating? How much weight have you gained? Et cetera, et cetera. And so anyway, I just wanted to echo what you were saying. I loved that. And I’m curious how much more,   think you had some stories in your book about the red herring or the stars in the sky. And I was just curious if you could speak a little bit more about those.

Anita: Yeah, I’m happy to. And just to put a pin in what you’re saying, essentially what we’re doing when we’re speaking in metaphor, when we’re using metaphor, when we’re dancing metaphor, we’re using a different part of the brain and it’s part of the brain that the eating disorder does not hang out. This is why it creates opportunities for healing and recovery, because if you try to get just too literal, you’re going to be up against roadblock after roadblock.  Oh, it’s like well, “then let’s not even bother with that. There are other ways to access the psyche and there’s other ways to get into the deeper meaning of things.” And so that is what metaphor does. Now, I didn’t know this back then. I could see the lights going off in someone’s eye when a metaphor would click. Now what we know because we have neuroscience that is, that can hook you up and see what’s going on, and basically when someone gets it, when they get that insight, when they get that metaphor, there’s part of our brain called the anterior superior temporal virus, it shoots out a blast of gamma waves, which is the highest electrical frequency in the brain and is thought to be what creates the new neural pathways. Well, now, what is that? We are changing the brain, and you can do it fairly quickly. Now this is what Carl Jung understood because the metaphor impacts the psyche on multiple levels. There’s mental, where we understand the meaning and then there’s the emotional. There’s usually an emotion embedded: it could be surprise, it could be horror, it could be amusement, but there is an emotional component. Then the third realm, though, is the imaginative realm and he says this is where the transforming function of metaphor resides in activating your imagination, but most importantly, these three levels get impacted simultaneously, so it can happen very quickly, which for me is, you know, exciting when you’re dealing with someone who’s been so frustrated working with their eating disorder for so long. And so to your point, the metaphor of the red herring.  In fact, just yesterday, we were talking about a patient in my treatment program, Ai Pono in Maui, and who was basically paying attention to what other people were doing with their recovery. I said, “okay, we need to use the red herring here, because the red herring is the perfect metaphor for this. Because what the eating disorder tries to do, is trying to get you to see that the problem is over there or the problem is with the calories, the problem is with my thighs or whatever, and it diverts you from the real problem so it never gets solved.” Back at the turn of the century, the other century, in England when they were having fox hunts, and they were having contests, right? And there was a time that one of the competitors took a dead smelly fish and they dragged it with a piece of rope in the opposite direction from where the foxes were. So as a result, the opposing team lost because their dogs chased that scent, which took them away from where the foxes were. So there was a write-up in the paper about this. And ever since then, that term has been used. For example, nowadays we use it in literature. Like, okay, who killed the old lady? Is it the maid, the butler, the chauffeur? And everybody’s watching the maid because she’s weird. She’s doing strange things. She’s different from everyone. And at the end of the story, there’s a twist. It was the butler who nobody suspected. Why? Because everyone was watching the maid. So with eating disorders, the food, the number on the scale, it’s the red herring, and weight loss is the red herring. And it’s going to take you in the opposite direction of where you want to go. It’s going to take you away from what the real problem is. And as a result, you can’t solve that problem.

Sam: How helpful to have a phrase like that to use in session, in this healing relationship to talk about, to be able to identify, oh, this is a red herring again.

Anita: Yes. In fact, I said, let’s give this patient the assignment to see how many red herrings she can find in the course of a day. Again, you talked about changing your perception. So now you’re shifting it. I think you need to do that because when you enter the world of eating disorders, you’ve entered the world of paradox, and so eating disorders are about food, yes, because they’re eating disorders, right, but they’re also not about food. And the not about food is the biggest part, but in a lot of ways more difficult because it’s invisible. It’s not something we can see with these eyes, so it does require that perception shift. How do you see the invisible? Through metaphors.

Sam: This is such a common theme in recovery is the red herring. All of these things that distract people from the deeper work. And I was curious, what other themes have you noticed? I mean, you’ve worked with all of these people with eating disorders. And I remember in your book, you talk about these things as these common threads that kept standing out to you.

Anita: Yeah, well, one of them is a misunderstanding about connection. So we’re all, we’re social animals as humans, and we’re born with two very powerful drives. One is the drive for connection and attachment, because we’re mammals, we’re not lizards or turtles. We don’t just hatch out of an egg and go on our way, right? No, we have to attach to our caregivers in order to be fed, in order to survive. And so that’s why we have this really strong drive. But we’re human mammals, and as a result, we have another equally powerful drive, and that is the drive for authenticity. That is the drive to be who you’re meant to be.  To go where you’re meant to go and like to live your destiny. But what happens for all of us when we’re growing up, is these two drives come into conflict. Guess which one wins? Attachment, okay? It has to, right? We have to, so what this looks like is little kid wants a cookie and mommy says, “no, you can’t have a cookie, we’re having dinner in an hour.” And little kid goes, “I want a cookie, I want a cookie.” And mommy says, “if you don’t cut that out, you’re not getting any cookies at all.” So little kid goes, “okay, I don’t want a cookie.” This little kid knows that in order to get her needs met, she has to be the way mommy wants her to be. Now, this only becomes a problem with every single time there’s a conflict between being the attachment need and being how you think others want you to be and your authentic self, and what happens is a pattern can be created of every single time there’s this conflict, attachment and connection wins, and you abandon your authentic self, and then you take this pattern with you into adulthood. And the biggest problem with this though is that attention gets created when you choose attachment over authenticity. Think of a towel being twisted in two different directions. And eventually that tension becomes painful, and you’ll do anything to try to alleviate that pain or distract yourself from pain,and that’s the vacuum that disordered eating comes into. It’s an attempt to cope and to soothe with this pain that comes from the disconnection from your authentic self. And what I have found is that individuals who struggle with eating disorders are very, very emotionally sensitive and highly intuitive, which are amazing attributes to have once you know how to work with them. But in this situation, what this means is they’re way better at picking up on and perceiving the needs and feelings of others than they are their own, so they end up disconnecting from their authentic self over and over and over again, and then turning to eating behaviors to try to cope with the tension and the pain that that causes. That’s a long answer for your question, but.

Ashley: That was so beautifully said, Anita. I’m sitting here thinking, oh, I’ve been in this field for years and I could never have explained it as eloquently as you just did.

Sam: Yeah, I love the metaphor of the twisted towel. I mean, even a metaphor like that, you know, to be able to visualize that and know, okay, I’m feeling the twist right now. And I, you know, I’m tempted to turn to my eating disorder, but maybe I can untwist a different way.

Anita: Because it’s a skill, you see, you have to learn. So what happens is you think, “okay, I can be my authentic self if I’m by myself.” And of course, that’s one of the jobs of the eating disorder is to create that isolation, create that little bubble. And there’s a certain relief in like, “I’m going to be myself.” But then it gets lonely. But then the problem is you connect with someone else and you leave a big chunk of yourself at the doorstep. Well, guess what? Now there’s that disconnect from the self and it’s painful. And often that’s why we sabotage relationships. Cause we go, “okay, I’ve got to just blow this thing up ‘cause I got to get back to being myself by myself.” Recovery is learning how to be your authentic self and participate in relationships at the same time.

Sam: Without losing yourself. I think you had mentioned that in your book and that’s the challenge is how do I exist in a relationship and hold on to what I believe and what I feel and who I am essentially.

Anita: Wow, especially that keeps changing.

Sam: Well, right, because we’re always evolving. So yes, it’s challenging. There’s so many beautiful stories and metaphors in your book. And at one point you had said that to recover from disordered eating, one must recognize that they’re starving. But of course, this is a metaphor, they’re not starving for food necessarily. But not only that, not only to recognize that you’re starving, but to name your hunger and remember its name. Can you say more about this?

Anita: Yeah, well, first of all, I love the word ‘remember,’ because when I look at it, I look at it as RE-member, which is the opposite of dismembered. We cut off parts of ourselves, so this is that disconnect, right? And so we have to remember what our feelings are, what our needs are, because that’s part of your inner guidance system that is as unique as this, as my thumbprint, and we’re all individuals, and so remembering what it is we desire, what it is we want, while we are being respectful of the needs and desires of other people, as well, so it’s a process, I think, over and over and over, of that remembering what your hunger is. And sometimes it means, recognizing, “oh, this is what I wanted yesterday, but today this is what I want. I needed some alone time yesterday, but today I feel like connecting deeply with someone,” so your hungers can change. And that’s why it’s something at the, years ago when people had said,” well, okay, I want to know how to do this. How do I do this? Can you create a workbook for eating in the light of the moon?” I thought, oh, I don’t know, it’s what I thought about. It seems so static to me.” And so that’s why I created The Light of the Moon Cafe, because it’s an interactive workbook. So I’m in there communicating with people when they ask questions like that. You know, it’s like, “well, how do I remember what it is that I’m hungry for?” And so, then we can get down into the nitty gritty and see, okay, what’s it going to take for you? How’s that going to work out for you?

Sam: Mm hmm. Oh, yes, it’d be so helpful just to have that the interaction, rather than sitting alone with a workbook, but to be able to actually interact is pretty amazing.

Anita: That’s my idea of a good time. I get up in the morning and see what people are asking in the cafe and I can just hop on and respond. It’s so alive for me rather than just kind of saying, okay, make a list of five things. It’s not the same when there’s not that, because remember, the feminine is relational. That interaction.

Ashley: Anita, I’d like to piggyback off of what you were just discussing and ask you a little bit about emotions. We’re always talking about emotions at Renfrew and in the treatment model and how we want to learn how to approach and sit with and navigate our emotions. And I’m curious how metaphor work would come into this. Even when you were talking about the remembering and putting things back together, I’m also struck with thinking about someone that might live with a trauma memory and remembering themselves in a whole manner of how to put that together, you know? And so anyway, all that to say, emotions.

Anita: Okay, so metaphor is the perfect language for emotions. Why? Because emotions aren’t things. They are part of our non-physical reality. You can’t hold your sadness in your hands or your love or whatever it is. And so, we live in a culture that doesn’t explain to us what emotions are. So we hear things like, “you’ve got to control your feelings. You’re sensitive. You’re overreacting.” When there’s no understanding that we’ll know, first of all, you cannot control your emotions anymore than you can swim up a mountain. Right. They’re energy, they’re designed to flow, and they’re waves of energy that they come in and they peak and they pass. They’re designed to flow through our bodies. That’s why we have bodies. Our bodies are the vehicle, just like I listen to my music on my iPhone, but I need this iPhone in order to get the sound waves. The music is not in here, but I need to access the sound waves through this device. Our bodies are the device for these waves of energy that have information for us. Just like waves in the ocean, they come in, they peak and they pass. And then they’ll come in and peak and pass. And so at Ai Pono,  we’re right near the ocean, so I’ll say, “imagine if you went right down there to the ocean with your boogie board and you stood in front of the waves like this and you’re holding it in front of you, what’s going to happen? Boom! If it’s too rough of a day, you might wobble a bit, but when the waves start coming in, boom, you’re going to get knocked on your bucket. You’re going to get knocked over again until you get this idea, wait a minute, I can turn around, I can ride this wave. Oh, oops, here’s another one. Oh, I’m going to ride that one. And eventually it even gets to be fun. And when the big set comes in,” and by the way, it comes in for all of us. We’re all going to, if we’re on the planet for any length of time, we’re going to experience loss of a loved one, financial distress, medical crises, but you’ll know how to ride it. So, the gift of the eating disorder recovery, when you learn how to ride your emotions and you start to realize, okay, we’re scared of them, right? The uncomfortable ones, but when you start to realize emotions in and of themselves cannot cause damage. It’s the inappropriate expression or the suppression or the repression of emotion that causes damage. It’s just energy, and so learning how to let it move through you. So that’s why the body-based trauma approaches are so important because it accesses your nervous system where it has been shocked into like trying to hold that emotion in your body, and unblock it so that the charge can just keep on flowing through. You’re going to still have the memory, but you won’t have it with that charge. So I think this idea of learning the nature of emotions, and again, it’s part of feminine principle, that’s why we haven’t been taught about it.

Sam: Exactly. How powerful to be able to actually look at the ocean while you’re teaching this and have that visual of, you know, and every time you feel that energy flow through you, you think of the ocean.

Anita: You don’t have to see the ocean though, right? You just thought of it right there. The imaginative realm, the power of imagination.

Sam: Exactly. Speaking of power, this is a whole chapter in your book. And you mentioned two themes that you’ve observed for people who struggle with disordered eating. There is either a sense of powerlessness in their lives, but then also there can be fear of your own power. How do you help clients discover and embrace the power that’s within them?

Anita: Yeah, well I think it first comes with understanding that not all power is the same, right? Really learning to differentiate. Most of us are only familiar with power domination, big over little, rich over poor.

Sam: Winner or loser.

Anita: Winner or loser, that whole thing. And with that kind of power, what happens is we start looking at everything like it’s a pie. For example, if you and I are sharing a pie and your piece gets bigger, what happens to mine? It gets smaller.

Sam: Smaller, right.

Anita: And if mine gets bigger, yours gets smaller. So with this paradigm of power, the winner or the loser, as you mentioned, right, it sets up this competition and really puts you in scarcity mentality. When you can shift and say, okay, there’s another kind of power, that’s the power of dominion that comes from within. It’s not a pie. Is there enough air on this planet for everybody to breathe? Right? It’s not divided up. Not everything gets divided up. And the more you can start to recognize what power feels like within you. When you discover something new, all of a sudden you have a rush of power that moves through you. Get so excited, right? You go, “I got this! Oh my gosh, I found this.” So recognize, okay, that’s a form of power, but does that mean that just because you found something, that means nobody else gets, it’s like, it’s really learning how to shift out of that scarcity mentality that we have lived in maybe 30,000 years. I don’t know how long, it’s been a long, long, long time. But now is the time. Now is the time that it’s like the bubbles are popping everywhere. People are becoming aware of this and recognizing this different kind of power. So that is what the recovery journey is, right? Because guess what? Nobody can hand you recovery on a plate. It’s not something you can order like room service, right? It’s like you discover something in yourself and it may be little bitty bitty baby steps, but each one you start to discover your own power. What do you have the power over? You have the power to be aware. And that is really who we are. We are our awareness. We’re not our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, we are more than the combination of all of that. We are the awareness of that. And again, that’s another paradigm shift. And there’s a lot of power in that. There’s a lot of power in finding meaning, so when I was in graduate school, actually this is my first class I walked in, there’s this little old man and he’s speaking in this thick accent and I was trying really hard to listen. And it turned out to be Victor Frankl. I had no idea who he was. I didn’t know! And for those that don’t know who he was, he was, he wrote an amazing book called Man’s Search for Meaning that is one of the most profound books of the century really. And what he wrote about was his experience as a psychiatrist and a young man in the Nazi prison camps during World War II, where he lost everything- his wife, his brother, his parents- everything. And what he came to out of that experience was this idea that you can lose everything, everything that has ever been dear to you in your life. But there’s one thing that can never, ever, ever be taken away, and that one thing is the meaning you give to your experience, and in that meaning lies your freedom. This is the power from within. You get to decide what’s the meaning, for example, you’re going to give to your life. If you give your life as a three-act play, or you can say, “OK, her life sucks when she was born, and it sucked when she died, and it’s just a tragedy.” Or is your life story going to be an inspirational tale? “Oh my gosh, she went through this, she went through that, she went through this, and then she did this, and now other people can learn from her.” Or is it going to be a rags to riches story that you had such poverty of everything, and then you discovered ways to create something. What is your story? That’s the meaning, that’s yours. They change what happened in the past, but when you change the meaning you give to it, you find your freedom.

Ashley: That paradigm shift is so important. And just hearing you talk about it, really about that power dynamic of like the win or lose or that, that is such a big thing for us to move from. Because it really is taught to us, like you said for 30,000 years. I mean, it has been ingrained in us to see life that way.

Anita: But here’s the cool thing, and I believe this with every fiber in my being, that those who have struggled with an eating disorder and get on the recovery path are the people we’ve been waiting for. Because they are the paradigm shifters. They are the ones that start to see things differently, and as a result, can bring that out into the world. And I mean, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve seen these folks. I know what they’re doing. I get the stories back. And it’s really, really quite extraordinary.

Ashley: Yeah. That’s incredible. I would love to ask you about intuition. You believe part of recovery is reclaiming our intuition, and I’m curious what are ways someone might lose touch with their intuition or their inner wisdom? And then how can we get back in touch with it again?

Anita: The intuition is always there, but it’s really noisy in our heads. That’s the problem. It’s hard to hear our intuition because there’s just so much other stuff going on. One of the first things is learning how to slow down and seek silence. Not easy to do, by the way, okay, we have this chatter going on all the time. But there are things that help, right? Like going out in nature, right? Simple things like following your breath. By just watching the inhale and the exhale. It helps to slow things down, because you cannot command intuition. You can’t summon it. You can’t say, I need to be, I want to handle this. You have to be in a state of receptivity in order for it to show up. Now, this is hard if you struggle with an eating disorder, because you’ve got that chatter going on and then you’ve got that part that wants to be in control, which is the opposite of receptivity, right? And yet, you can start moving in that direction. If you think of the word intuition, you have to go into it. It’s what you have to go into, your body. I mean, a lot of people think that intuition is out there. No, it’s in your, but why do we say gut action? It’s in our gut. It’s that deeper aspect of ourselves, but we have to go deep within and it’s waiting for us.

Sam: Yeah, it reminds me of how challenging it is when you have an entire diet industry telling you what to do. You have so many forces around you trying to tell you what to do and where to go. And it can be really confusing and scary to trust yourself.

Anita: Totally, and that’s why, you know, you don’t use your intuition to say, wake up one morning and say, “yeah, I’m going to move to Alaska. I just had this dream about Alaska: and off you go. But you do it with little things. And the cool thing about intuition is you notice it after the fact. It’s like the phone rings and you go, “oh, my God, I can’t believe you just called me. I was just thinking of you.” Right? So you start to recognize there’s a particular frequency, a particular vibration to intuition. And one of the hardest things, and I like to work with people doing this, is how do you tell the difference between fear and intuition, because they’re very similar. So how do you tell the difference if that voice says don’t get on the plane? Is that your phobia or is that your intuition? This is something that requires paying attention to after the fact. Rather than getting mad at yourself saying, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that,” ask yourself, “how did I know not to do that?” What was that sensation like? What was that feeling like? The other thing about intuition is as you start to fine tune and really start to, it’s a higher vibration, and fear is ragged. It’s like, garbled yell, and intuition, that voices is it’s deeper and higher at the same time, right? It’s not confined by time and space, so it can break all the rules. And to just start by recognizing what’s the difference. And you do it by reflecting after the fact.

Ashley: That’s actually, that’s very helpful, Anita. And I’m thinking, are people that are listening, you know, especially somebody that might be struggling with an eating disorder, that fear voice has led so much of their behaviors and actions for so long. And so teasing out the difference and teaching them how to tease out the difference between intuition and fear is critical, I would say.

Anita: Yeah, my hero, Marion Woodman, she used to say, “If you’re listening to that inner voice, be sure you know which voice you’re listening to.” So yeah, there is this idea that we have these different voices inside of ourselves and we communicate with them and respond to them all the time. But get to be clear about what’s what and what’s coming from where.

Sam: There’s so many things we learn about ourselves and recovery and the skills that we learn along the way that have nothing to do with food and weight. And there might be some listeners out here that they’re just amazed by these concepts, and one of the sentences that stood out to me in your book, this is another skill in recovery, you wrote, “I’ve not seen anyone recover without first learning to be assertive.” And I know from working in the field for over a decade that this is one of the hardest things for people to learn and then to actually do. You know, it’s like one thing to learn the skills, but it’s another thing to actually try it out in the real world. I was wondering if you can say more, why do you think it’s necessary in recovery to learn how to be assertive and how do you help your clients do it?

Anita: Yeah. Recovery is authenticity, right? It is being in your own skin and being comfortable there. We’re not encouraged to do that, right? We’re encouraged to just go along and get along and all of that, and so what happens is then conflicts come up and we don’t know how to handle them. Again, going back to what I was talking about earlier about either abandoning ourselves for the sake of the relationship or avoiding relationships so we don’t have to abandon ourselves. So assertiveness is the skill that puts it all together. I teach people a formula because you got to start off simple. The formula is just this, “when”- “you”- “I feel because,” but you got to fill in the blanks. So when you leave your towel on the floor- now the first part is just the facts- there’s no debating the towel’s on the floor. They left the towel on the floor. Okay, we’re just going to go with the facts. So the second part is I feel, and you find a feeling. I feel frustrated, I feel annoyed, I feel angry. What is the feeling? And this is hard, right? I feel like you are just taking advantage. That’s not a feeling, right? What is the feeling? And so finding that emotion, here’s this emotional literacy we were talking about, right? So first you become aware of what it is, what’s the feeling that’s getting stirred up. You name one, the problem is we want to throw in a whole bunch that we’ve been holding back for so long, right? And so when you start, you just pick one, although sometimes hurt and anger goes together. And then the third part, and this is the hardest part, because it’s what kind of brings it all together, because it gives me the impression. So you’ve got to own your feelings. You got to own your reactions. We want to blame everybody else because it feels better in the moment, but it never solves the problem, and it’s accusatory often. So, when you leave your towel on the floor, I feel annoyed because it gives me the impression you expect me to pick up after you. You go right for the truth, but you do it in a way that you’re respecting other people, but you’re not disrespecting yourself either. It takes you to a level of clarity, and sometimes, and when you first start off, this is too hard to do. So you do it in a journal. You keep a journal and you think, “okay, I’m looking at today. What happened today where I didn’t assert myself?”  Then you try to apply the formula. “When you made that comment about whether or not those pants fit,” these are the facts, right? The person made the comment, right? “I felt hurt because, and here’s the, because it gave me the idea, because I got the impression, because it’s to me. You didn’t appreciate how hard I’ve been working on my recovery and how triggering those comments are. One sentence. So, you know, and in some cultures, talking like this is considered disrespectful. What I’ve discovered, especially in Hawaii, where we have a lot of Asian cultures where that’s the case, what I’ve discovered is, even if you don’t say it out loud, if you know exactly what you would say if you were to say it out loud, the transformation can occur. So I think that’s really important. And of course, you don’t use it in all situations. You don’t say to the sales clerk, “when I asked for your help and you walked away, I felt really angry because it seemed like you didn’t appreciate that I was such a good customer.” Sometimes you just, you know, you don’t have to bother with that.

Sam: Right. Sometimes you just let it go.

Anita: Yeah. But for those important relationships, where it’s the same issue that comes up over and over and over, it’s never going to get resolved unless you assert yourself. And essentially, it’s what opens the door for greater communication, but not by victimizing yourself. You’re not letting people walk all over you. You know, you’re being vulnerable, but not a victim, letting them know, oh, here’s the biggest part, though. This is my favorite part. So people say to me, well, “I tried it and it didn’t work.” And I go, “what do you mean it didn’t work?” “Well, I said X, Y and Z and they kept doing it.” Well, of course they’re going to keep doing it. Your goal of being assertive is not to get the other person to change their behavior. Why? Because you’re not capable of that. So don’t waste your energy. It could happen, which is fantastic, and it could even increase your odds, but you can’t count on this. However, if you understand that your goal in being assertive is to recover from your eating disorder, you have absolute 100% chance of making that, because you’re changing the way you’re responding. This is that, we’re going back to the power again, this is the power from within. So the idea is that you’re not going out to change the world. You know, that’s a tall order and I have a lot of respect for those advocates that do, but they’re not even doing the whole world though, finding a piece where they can have an impact. But I think the idea that you can change your experience by being assertive.

Sam: It’s reminding me of remembering and holding on to yourself in relationships. And it’s all connected. It’s all part of that. Being able to be in an attachment but also be authentic.

Anita: Assertiveness helps you do that.

Ashley: And I was just taking notes on literally everything they were saying. It was so good. I need to remember this. So we are running out of time, Anita, but we would love to give our listeners an opportunity to connect with you. So how can they do that?

Anita: Hi, well, you can find me at thelightofthemooncafe.com, and I have all kinds of resources there. If they want to work with metaphor, I have a food and metaphor guide that’s free. You can download it. It’s a PDF that’ll help you see what the metaphors are and the foods that you struggle with. And I have a free webinar that’s available right now. And you can go to lightofthemooncafe.com/webinar where I talk more in depth about some of these concepts and I explain if someone’s interested in being part of the light of the moon cafe community, it’s sort of like a living book club in a way, workbook. And it’s, I love doing it, so I welcome people to come.

Ashley: Awesome, thank you so much. This was so wonderful and so nice to hear from you and your wisdom in our industry. And thank you to our listeners. We’re grateful to have spent this last hour with you all. Thank you so much.

Anita: Okay, it was my pleasure.

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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