It's The Therapy Spot with Beth Rogerson, the Build a Better You podcast. Hello, I'm Beth Rogerson, a clinical counselor and life coach for over 25 years. I want to bring what works in the therapy room to you so you can apply it in your life now. The Therapy Spot is dedicated to people like you who want to help yourself and live a better, more balanced life. So let's get started. On today's podcast, we're meeting with Amy Grabowski. She's the director and founder of The Awakening Center in Chicago. She's also a licensed clinical professional counselor. I wanted to share the benefits of using the internal family systems or the IFS lens of viewing your own personality, specifically to eating disorders. So I found Amy. Amy has just recently authored the book, Part by Part, An IFS Guide to Recover from Eating Disorders. She's the perfect person to explain to us eating disorders and how the IFS way brings healing and recovery.
Maybe this is interesting to you personally or someone you know. Many of us eat in a disordered way and can find what Amy tells us today helpful. Hello, Amy. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Therapy Spot to talk more about the internal family systems as a way of understanding and healing eating disorders. Thanks for inviting me, Beth. You're welcome. Before we dig right in, could you give us an overview on what you mean when you're talking about eating disorders? What does that mean in general? Well, I think eating disorders have become quite well-known.
Way back 30 years ago, I used to have to explain what eating disorders were. But I think that one of the frustrations about working in the eating disorder field is that people hear the word eating and think that people just don't know how to eat. And so they focus in on fixing the eating and they miss the whole point. And the point is that eating disorders are really not about eating food and weight. They are really about how a person handles anxiety. Most of my clients have a combination of a very sensitive nature.
and came from an invalidating environment or a trauma background. The eating disorder symptoms are merely how they cope with their anxiety and how they calm their body, mind, and spirit down. So what you're telling me and all of us listening is that anxiety and eating disorders go hand in hand. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. I think of eating disorders as being a subset of anxiety disorders. Anxiety is universal. Everybody has anxiety. But eating disorders are a small subset of that. With my clients, the anxiety is caused by a sacrifice of their sense of self. Whatever caused this sacrifice.
um is different from client to client and some clients um it just wasn't safe to be themselves. They may have been the survivors of what we call big T trauma. This is sexual abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, something major that happened that made them feel that it wasn't safe to be inside their body anymore. But a lot of clients don't have big T trauma. They have what we call little T trauma, neglect, ridicule, humiliation, witnessing arguments and conflict, witnessing violence, witnessing a negative environment. And in order to
please others. They decided, I can't be who I am. Every time a person is told, don't be who you are, don't think how you think, don't talk how you talk, don't look how you look, don't act how you act, a little bit of their self is chipped away. And if that is chipped away over and over and over, there becomes like a hole where their self should be. Wow. Like a hole. So that actually, I mean, you'd be missing such a big piece of yourself. It makes sense that you would be very, you'd have anxiety. You wouldn't have an anchor. You'd be trying to get your answers outside of you. So if I heard you like the way of coping in this environment where they were maybe neglected or invalidated or had a big T trauma was maybe in some ways to please others and not show up in who they were, abandoning who they were. Right. Right. An analogy that I made up a long time ago.
significant others or loved ones or family members come to my office and want me to explain eating disorders. I want them to actually kind of maybe experience it. And I came up with this analogy of eating disorders is like being a passenger way in the back of a rickety old school bus. And the school bus is filled with all these people. Some are angry, some are crying, some are fearful. And the bus is careening down a mountain, curving mountain road late at night.
in a blinding thunderstorm. Oh my God, this sounds terrible. Right, right. And that's exactly what I do. I ask them to feel that inside their body. What does that feel like? And then I say, okay, but if you look forward on the bus, you realize there's no driver on the bus. There's no self. So there's no driver on the bus. And it's, you know, fate, karma, kismet, that the bus made it around the last curve. And here comes another curve and you're not sure you're going to make it. And so you grab onto something, anything. And this is where the eating disorder behaviors come in.
Now, it's really interesting how many times I'll ask like a parent, what would you do? And most of them say, well, I would get out of my seat and I go to get to the front of the bus and I'd get in the driver's seat. And I say, what would you do in the driver's seat? And almost universally, they all say, well, I'd stop the bus. So we have to slow down the bus. And once you're in the driver's seat and you slow down and you can take it one decision at a time. Now, I live in Illinois and it's really flat here. So when I've driven in the mountains.
Oh man, I'm petrified. But you know, you just go curve by curve. You make decisions as they come up and you're not careening off the guardrails. You're going slowly. So that's the first thing is to slow down life in order to become mindful. And this mindfulness is about getting the driver back on the bus, getting that.
feeling of I am in charge and, you know, as the IFS model calls it, self-leadership. And so to take control of life from the driver's seat of this bus, so getting a sense of self is really important. So where do you begin helping people get a sense of self? Okay. Well, First, I want to just explain a little bit that when I talk about the model to my clients in the last 30 years, I kind of changed some of the IFS terms. I see each of the three groups of parts as on a continuum from the most healthy and in balance to the most extreme and unhealthy.
the parts that are in our inner world that live inside of us. And you're saying there's three sets of parts and the continuum is from very healthy to unhealthy. Right, right. And as the part in the IFS model, the three parts are called the manager, the firefighter and the exile, but that only gives them one name. So I had to have two names for each part, the healthy part, which I call the mentor, the advocate and the kid. And then the unhealthy parts, I named them the bully, the troublemakers.
And then the exiles. Okay, so there's the mentor on one end and the bully on the other end. That's the continuum. And there's the kid on one end and the exile. Okay, an exile is something we shove out, we don't want. And then you have an advocate on one side. And then on the other side, which is unhealthy, is the troublemaker.
Right. Okay. All right. So my clients tended to relate more to these words than the other ones. And then sometimes I call the self, I call it the wise one within, or I might call it the voice of wisdom. And I really encourage clients to get in touch with the wise one within or their self.
in whatever way is strongest for them. Some clients visualize their wise one as if they could see it as a person or a color or an object or whatever. Some clients feel it in their body. Some hear it as a voice, whatever, just whatever works for them. So with my analogy, the bus could only stop careening off the guardrails when there's the driver on the bus. So that's usually the first thing is I try to help them establish a sense of self. Some clients have
are able to do that from the get-go. And some clients, it takes maybe months and months and months to do that. And what qualities are you talking about when you talk about a sense of self? So if I had these qualities, I would say, oh yes, that's my wise one. What would you say that would be? Well, the way I describe it to clients is I say that this wise one within is kind.
the most benevolent, kind, warm, compassionate, wise, it is unconditional positive acceptance and regard. And that all the C words from the IFS model, which is compassion and curious and courageous and creativity and connection, calm, and there's others, but these are, you know, these, these, this feeling is one of most people kind of, you know, you can't see me on, but it's kind of like they go inward into their bodies. And not up into the head, but into their torso somewhere where like a gut wisdom lives. And people have described it in many ways, like a column of strength within. Someone said it's like a conduit to her higher power. A lot of people say they can hear like the voice of God or whatever they believe in. A feeling of this strength that you can tap into at any time. It's always there.
I kind of also describe it as kind of like the base of a pyramid. You know, the pyramids have lasted thousands of years and they're still there because of the shape of the pyramid is all its strength is at the bottom. So once we have this feeling of strength within, then sometimes it's a matter of with some clients, they just have to remind themselves to tap into that strength within or the voice of wisdom to hear the answers for whatever they're dealing with. The clients who have a much more difficult time have to then kind of calm down their other parts, the more extreme parts, in order to do that. Well, that's what I'm imagining, that you have this analogy of the bus. And so if this was happening on the bus and there was no driver, no leader, then I can see that there'd be parts that would be jumping in the driver's seat. So sometimes maybe a sad part is all you feel, and sometimes maybe an anxious part is all you feel, or the part that wants to eat, because that will calm down the bus.
So in some way, you're then helping your clients identify that they have parts. And then something must happen for your clients that they're able to then start to get this sense. Wait, I do have a self because they must not have known it. Right. Well, some of them remember having like when I describe it, they can remember feeling that and others really don't. It depends if their if their trauma was very young, if they were invalidated from extremely young ages, they may never have really allowed themselves to feel self. It may not have been safe. And then we have to. So a lot of times what happens is that a part, usually a bully would will take over.
So when a part takes over and says, I'm in charge now, I mean, imagine someone from the back of the bus just getting in the driver's seat and you can tell that they have no clue how to drive a bus. You wouldn't trust that part, that person. You wouldn't trust. So when a part takes over, the other parts know that this part doesn't really know what it's doing. And so it just, you know, maybe it creates even more anxiety. It might create fighting within rebellion, defiance. A lot of different fights go on. Inside a person we're talking about. The fights are inside the person.
Yeah. And the bully is inside the person. So you don't, if you're, if you're meeting someone on the street, you don't, they don't act like a bully to you. They're actually being a bully inside to themselves. If that's who's in the driver's seat. Okay. Right. This is all internal. That's why we call it the internal family system because it's all inside. And so the person is experiencing this fighting inside of them in this cringing, this intimidation is all inside. The one thing I do want to back up to is something you, is a common misconception is that a lot of people think that only one of their parts eats.
But all of the parts eat. And OK, so if we go back to the beginning, which is the mentor, the mentor will eat because the mentor is in balance. The mentor will eat for nutrition and health and the kid will eat for fun and because it tastes good. And then the advocates will help balance the two. That's the thing about that. Advocates are really cool parts, which is one of the reasons why I had to give them a positive name. They are probably the most self-affirming of all our parts. So they get the balance between the nutrition and the fun because, you know, all.
kid parts took over, they'd be eating jelly beans all day, and then we'd feel sick. But if you never allow yourself to have anything fun to eat, then life is kind of boring. But when they get extreme, like the kid might eat for comfort, to soothe, and then the bully might eat to punish. You wanted cookies, you're going to get cookies. You're going to really regret that you ever wanted those cookies. The troublemakers can become numbing, so they might try to numb out using food. A lot of people say,
Like just this wave comes over me and I just start eating and I don't feel anything, which is different than comforting. or they might become rebellious and say, like, it's like the troublemakers rebel against the bullies and say like, you know, you're trying to take our cookies away. Well, we're going to eat cookies and you can't do anything about it. So there's like this, that kind of thing is that all of the different parts eat for different reasons. And so when we get the, I guess you have to imagine that the most benevolent, kind, warm, strong person who does have the skills to be a really good bus driver gets on the bus and then everybody can kind of calm down. The self is the one who keeps the parts,
calm enough so that they can eat in this positive, healthy way. I know that a lot of misconception is that there's a part that eats. That was really helpful, the way you explained this. Actually, all of your parts are eating. These parts must interact with the world in the same way they do with eating. Right. Beliefs can be very perfectionistic and punitive. Even things like, oh, a paper you had to write for school had to be perfect and you made one typo. And then, of course, the kid parts or the exiles would feel worthless. Rather than just say, I made a mistake, it was like, I'm worthless. The thing about the exiles is that they hold the person's core beliefs.
the beliefs that they have developed over time, some of these are based on negative messages that they've heard over and over throughout their life. And we have to basically kind of heal those messages. You know, if a child grew up in an abusive home, they would probably have a core belief of like, if I was a good girl, mommy wouldn't hit me. Therefore I'm bad. And if people know that I'm bad, they will reject me and abandon me and I'll be all alone and no one will ever love me because a child.
doesn't see that, wow, mommy has a problem, you know? So we have to heal. I always say we have to heal the child parts in order to calm them down so that the other parts don't feel so extreme. A lot of the extreme behaviors are to protect that kid part from being hurt. Or being distracted from feeling the hurt, right? Right, right, yeah. So when you heal, basically what you're helping the adult do is to, I guess, let go of some of that belief, I mean, or transform it.
Right. I believe that all of our parts have a positive intention for us, but they don't know how to get a positive outcome for that positive intention. So let's say a very critical, punitive, perfectionistic bully. If I can get that part to talk about what is it trying to do for the client? And the more this part feels heard, the more like, okay, so it might say, well, I'm trying to make her not be such a mess. And well, if she wasn't such a mess, what would that do for? Well, people wouldn't criticize her. And if she wasn't criticized, then maybe they would like her. And you get towards this, you know, eventually they might like her. She might feel loved, you know, and it gets to a place where it gets to a real positive place. And then to ask.
So saying like, okay, so you're criticizing her because you actually want her to feel lovable. And because the part, the bully part feels heard, they often will calm down. And then if I can get the client, it's almost like the client's self was listening to this. And then I'll say, okay, client self, tell client bully how client bully makes the kid part feel. So the self will tell the bully, well, when you talk to her that way, she feels worse. She feels more unlovable. She feels...
worthless and a lot of times the bully part will be kind of dumbfounded like they never thought of that and if they can get this client you know let me do this i do this whole negotiation thing where i'll ask the bully what does it need from the client in order to you know not talk this mean way and i ask the client what it needs from the bully in order to do whatever the bully wants so for example oftentimes the bully will say well i just want her to listen to me and the client will say well in order to listen to you i need you to quit calling me names Well, I'll quit calling you names if you listen. I'll listen, but you quit calling me names. And then I always say, everybody has this skill. How would you talk to your best friend about this? If your best friend did, you know, had a typo on a school report, they'd pop right into that empathy and that compassion and be like, oh, for my friend, I'd say this. I'd say, well, that's how I'm going to ask the bully to talk to you. So we're helping the bully slide into its mentor role, which is to push the person forward in life, to succeed, to move forward, to be their best self.
And so as the bully is moving into the mentor role, and especially if it calms down this language, then the client doesn't feel so worthless. So that's one piece is working with the bully to move it into the mentor role. The troublemakers, again, the same thing. What are you trying to do for the client? And it's often either to distract them from their problems or to numb out the feelings because they're afraid that the client will go crazy or something really bad will happen.
And so as we get them to calm, you know, like as we, again, how to help the troublemakers get into their advocate roles, the exiles need to be taken, feel taken care of. So that's why I often will have the person visualize themselves as a child being held by this wise one, however they visualize that. I might even have them hold a very large pillow to their chest to kind of feel like their self, their wise one within is. holding this child, supporting and comforting this child in session, when they've done that a while, I'll have them actually switch parts so that they themselves feel that they are the child being comforted by the self. And the more we do that, the calmer the exile gets and can slide into their kid role and get playful and fun again. So this is what you mean when you say, you know, you're healing this disorder of eating.
Part by part. Although you give these names to these parts, everybody is unique with their inner parts. But this way of seeing them on this continuum, unhealthy to healthy, you move them along. That's always the same. That's really very clear. So you're saying that through this way of helping people understand their internal world and how it's working and negotiating and seeing good intentions, that the eating disorder changes and something else can happen. Right, right.
As the person is recovering, let's say that they eat to comfort themselves, but they learn how to go inward and comfort their kid parts from this wise one within, the need to eat for comfort goes down. The need to eat to punish or the need to eat to numb out, all these, the need to do that goes down. And of course, we have to teach, I teach them a lot of other ways to handle these feelings. You mean the emotional inside turmoil. Right, the turmoil, stop the fighting within, quit the name-calling, all that kind of stuff. But there is a part, and it's always easier if there's a nutritionist on the treatment team, especially a nutritionist who is well-versed in eating disorders. But the clients do have to learn how to trust their body again. The body signals for hunger and fullness. Even their body signals for rest and movement. And then learning how to eat.
mindfully from this sense of self, slowly, mindfully allowing themselves to enjoy the food, feel satisfied by the food. That's a big part because a lot of people with eating disorders fear social engagements because how in our society, how many times we eat together or go out, you know, if you're dating, you have to go out on a, you have to go to a restaurant. And if you don't, how do you explain that to your potential date? But anyway, if we can learn how to eat and trust our body and listen to our body cues for hunger fullness. then this food becomes just food, a way that we fuel our body. But if they don't have a nutritionist on their treatment team, then I have to work with those things too. I believe that eating disorders are totally recoverable. I say that I am recovered. I don't say I am in recovery. To me, food is just food. I don't have an eating disorder anymore. I don't see it as an addiction, but I believe that total recovery is possible. If a person...
gets that sense of self if you don't have a sense of self if you have no driver on that bus life is always um excruciatingly anxiety producing and but once we have that sense of self that wise one within and we have healed the core beliefs so that the exiles can just become playful kids and the bullies calm down and become our mentors and then the troublemakers calm down and become our advocates and we've learned how to eat it's no longer it doesn't even meet the criteria for eating disorders it just becomes a way of life Taking care of yourself never ends. Taking care of ourselves goes on forever. This is really amazing. This is, it feels so hopeful the way you explain all this. I'm really grateful that you joined us today and gave this perspective. And, you know, I just want to say to the audience, you also have a book out there. It's an internal family systems guide to recovery from eating disorders, healing part by part. So they can read this and be able to hear exactly, you know, they'll know what you're talking about. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for asking me.
Thank you for those of you who have emailed me with your feedback and ideas. You can support the publishing of these podcasts through my Patreon page. Goodbye for now.