May 27, 2019
How To Help A Friend With Bulimia:
In this interview, Shags shares his family's journey through bulimia. His experiences and wisdom can be useful to not just family, but to anyone you consider your friend.
Below are the notes I take for all my interviews ...
First I re-listen to the interview.
While I re-listen to the interview I take notes.
These are my notes. They are typed up while I re-listen to the interview, so sometimes I miss a punctuation mark or two.
I find that I learn best when I can take notes. I find that it doesn't matter so much about spelling, as long as I am jotting down concepts.
I encourage you to do the same. Take out a pen and paper, and jot some notes. Then email me (jared@weightlossenlightenment.com) any questions you have. You may also send your email directly to Steven at his Money Addiction Counseling website at https://moneycoachshags.wordpress.com/
How To Help A Friend With Bulimia Notes:
3 Warning signs of Bulimia:
- First, scars on hand.
- Second, dentists can tell about erosion on back of front teeth
from purging acid from stomach.
- Third, always getting sick after meals
Blameless Conversations:
- This concept I found particularly refreshing. I was very happy to hear that family dynamics and familial relationships were part of Shag's family's healing.
Oftentimes in doing research and learning on how to help people with eating disorders, I only hear about things the person can do themselves.
For example, mindfulness and listening to hunger are things an individual can do, but these healing practices are not familial.
However, blameless conversations were both healing and at the familial level. In context of this post, the familial dynamics can also be seen in relationships or with friends.
The three steps of a blamesless conversation were to own your perspective, share facts not judgments, and to state your needs.
Shags gave a good example!
Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fade:
I had to ask Shags about this 'fade' concept. I was familiar with fight, flight or freeze. I knew these were instincts built into our ancestors millions ago to help with survival.
For example, if you instinctively froze without hesitation you might survive whereas someone else who had to "think" about freezing might not react in time and die.
But I had never heard about "fade"
Shags said 'fade' was where you disappeared.
This made total sense to me!
I instinctively knew 'fading' was my default survival mechanism.
See, I tend to use avoidance strategies. Like I have a tendency to be passive aggressive. I'm the opposite of fighting ... but I don't freeze either. I'll take action ... to disappear ...
Honestly one of the reasons I became interested in mindfulness meditation was because I could disappear ...
By following my breath in concentration for awhile ... I would disappear ...
I thought I was meditating. And I was meditating. But I was also subconsciously trying to avoid my feelings of depression and anxiety too.
It took me a long time to realize a reason I was meditating was something called 'spiritual' bypass. This is where you try to reach some 'stage of enlightenment' so that your earthly problems go away.
However, for some reason or another ...
I found my earthly problems never went away. They never faded away ...
And so this brings me back to 'fading' as my default strategy - fascinating!
There were many other nuggets of wisdom to take away.
To see the podcast version of this post, please visit https://weightlossenlightenment.com!
Finally, for Shag's Money Coaching, visit https://planningforlife.info