Tag: women

assorted sliced fruits in white ceramic bowl

Has Lockdown caused a rise in Eating Disorders?

Amelia

The media is now full of stories of body transformation tales. Tiktok has been rife for months with young women sharing online what they are eating throughout the day and showing their reduced waists. Teenagers are mimicking the smoothie bowls they see these new found influences making and are receiving messages from them about what is a healthy diet. Many of us have been without our preferred form of exercise and the last three months of winter lockdown has taken its toll on us emotionally and physically.

So now the diet companies are rubbing their hands with glee. Working as a Counsellor, and someone who was bulimic as a teenager, I am concerned for the impact on young people. They have been trapped in their bedrooms with nothing but online schoolwork to do. Everything that enables them to thrive has been taken away from them. GCSES were cancelled, their A-levels are a confused mess. Should they bother going to Uni this September? They are all in the throes of grief having lost a fundamental year in their development.

When we feel overwhelmed with feelings and emotions and our lives feel out of control, we revert to doing things that make us feel we have some mastery. What we put in and out of our mouths is a way that we can feel in control. For teenagers, their clothes and apperance is of paramount importance. So add in the teenage pressure of wanting to look good, making friends, and stepping into their emerging sexuality. The idea which is constantly sold to them by the media of changing your body shape to assist you with this can be tempting.

Woman shows off her incredible 4st weight loss in viral TikTok video after reining in 'mindless snacking'

How do Eating Disorders start?

What can often start as a desire to lose a few pounds can escalate into skipping meals. As the weight starts to drop off, you start to feel better about yourself. You may feel a sense of achievement and you attract positive comments from family and friends which encourages this behaviour. However, there can be a point when this tips and starts to move towards an eating disorder.

The lightheadedness felt from hunger becomes addictive and for many, the internal critical voice can get louder and louder – shaming you if you have detoured from your diet and eaten something you shouldn’t. This voice can become so persecutory it can take over and those suffering with anorexia feel beholden to it. Women I have worked with have shared that however horrible this voice is in their head, it is also company. Anorexia can start up when people are feeling lonely and isolated and it is as if this persecutory voice is a replacement for companionship and care.

For others, when they detour from their resticted diet, the shame can lead to Binge Eating and /or Bulimia. Over exercising or purging can seem like a quick and easy solution to getting rid of those extra calories you have eaten. Before long purging one meal can lead to purging all meals. If you are going to purge, you might as well eat all the foods you don’t allow yourself to. So biscuits, cake, ice cream can all be eaten and then purged. Again, this gives the illusion of control. You often feel deeply shamed about overeating, but then the relief comes with the purging and you feel back in control.

Eating Disorders often begin because people want to lose weight. Messages in the media and society are constantly telling us we will be happier, be accepted, and be succesful if we look a certain way. They become an addiction in a similar way to drugs and alcohol as a way for us to manage overwhelming emotions and feelings. Once an Eating Disorder takes a grip, it takes a lot of work and support to change our behaviour.

How to get support?

We have to learn to value ourselves and care for our bodies. To nourish ourselves with nutritious healthy foods and to find other ways to manage our difficult feelings and emotions. As a hidden bulimic sufferer myself for years, the shame prevented me from telling anyone. I had buried my emotions and was unaware I felt anything other than shame about being overweight. Working alongside an empathic Counsellor and processing these supressed emotions, enabled me to start caring for myself and my body.

If you are concerned about someone who is showing signs of rapid weight loss, be mindul of what may be going on beneath the surface. They may need support with the underlying feelings that are going on and may benefit from Counselling so they can share this with someone who understands how they are using their relationship with food as a way of managing their distress.

As well as working as a Counsellor, I run workshops and events throughout the year. If you would like to be kept informed of those, please leave your details below.

How is your nervous system coping with the news this week?

Amelia
anonymous woman walking near waving sea

Watching the Harry and Meghan interview on Monday night, the emotion that stood out the most for me was fear. They both mentioned so many times that they felt that had no choice because their security was taken away and they felt unsafe. The fear had a sense of being historical as well as coming from the present. Women are raging about the abduction of Sarah Everard this week. Women want to feel safe and not feel scared anymore to walk home alone in the dark.

When we experience trauma, our autonomic nervous system can become mobilised, our heart rate increases, adrenaline and cortisol is released and blood rushes to our muscles and our body goes into its fight or flight state – ready to protect us from the danger. Sometimes when the danger feels too great, and we cannot fight or run our nervous system shuts us down it freezes. Our heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature decrease and pain numbing endorphins are released. However, these frightened feelings do not lay dormant forever, and they may be triggered by certain events, sounds, smells, and memories at later points in our lives.

Over this past year we have all collectively experienced Trauma. Trauma is what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. It is an experience, not an event. We have been told repeatedly that we are unsafe and that if we leave our house and make contact with others, we may catch a Virus that may kill us or may kill another. Our nervous systems have become hypervigilant, and we have been in a constant state of survival. It is exhausting. We are exhausted. Many of us are at tipping point. Our usual ways of managing emotional distress – whether it be through the gym, the pub, dancing, social interactions, travel – they have all been taken away from us. We have been left alone with our nervous systems – many of them hypervigilent and on the lookout for threat. A young mum recently told me how her two-year- old just automatically crosses the road now when she sees another person approaching. We have learnt to fear each other.

Even Piers Morgan could not withstand the debate on TV on Tuesday morning on GMTV and had to flee from what he may have experienced as an attack. This week, several have shared how triggered they felt listening to the wind blowing in the night. How it felt like it was coming to attack them.

So, how can we support ourselves at this time?

We can acknowledge how deeply traumatic this past year has been for us. How we have been living for over a year now in a place of extreme uncertainty. All that we thought and knew has been taken away from us. In Existential Therapy, we acknowledge that there are 4 givens of existence. These include freedom, isolation, the inevitability of death, and meaninglessness. Often when people come up against one of these it can lead to overwhelming distress. Collectively we have all come face to face with these givens over this past year and many of us have had to keep pressing on. Some of us have been trying to financially support ourselves whilst home schooling and parenting at the same time. Consumed with concern for children’s wellbeing, there is little chance to look after our own.

We can find ways to regulate our nervous system and bring us back into a grounded calm state by doing some of the activities below.

1. Have a break from the news. Stop scrolling on social media. It will keep you in a place of being repeatedly triggered.

2. Get out in nature. Look up, notice the trees, the birds. the beauty around you. Take your camera out and notice the colours around you.

3. Exercise – move your body. When we get triggered, we sometimes need to disperse the anxiety flooding us and going for a run enables our body to release the anxiety and gives us endorphins which lift our mood.

4. Call a friend. Share how you are feeling, so you are not alone with it. We are all struggling with isolation at the moment and it is essential to process your thoughts and feelings with somebody else to prevent them spiraling. We often mirror the state of those around us, so spend time with those who are calm and uplifting.

5. Do a mindful activity. Baking a cake, jigsaw puzzle, painting, yoga – something that engages your mind in the here and now. Gives your mind and body a break.

6. Gratitude. Write out daily three things you feel grateful for. It is easy to see the world as very negative at the moment and we need to remind ourselves of the positive things in our life.

7. If you really feel panicky, a useful way to ground yourself quickly is to go through your senses. Name something in the room you can see, hear, smell, touch and taste.

8. Affirmations. Tell yourself that you are Safe. Our nervous system can sometimes not differentiate between our unsafe past and new safe present.

If you feel isolated and feel you need additional support from outside your home, then seek support from a Counsellor. It can often be underestimated how supportive it can be to know you have someone alongside you, really present and listening and wanting to meet you where you are right now.

If you would like to sign up to my mailing list, to hear of further events or courses I may be runnning, please do so below.

Why offer a Womens Group?

Amelia
Image result for women burkhas

Towards the end of Junior School, the divisions begin. Some girls hit puberty and as their minds and bodies adjust to the influx of hormones, other girls are left behind and may be scorned at for their “childish” behaviour. The “Popular” girls in secondary school tend to be those who act more “grown up” – wear the make- up, have boyfriends first, start drinking first. Girls often yearn to be in the popular group, and old safe friendships may be discarded in a quest for acceptance and validation. However once in, they can often discover that these friendships are built on sand and there is nothing but an Instagram picture and pout that may hold them together. We compete, we compare, we feel jealous, we put down, we scorn, we hate, we turn on each other, all vying, trying to find our place in our tribe within the school community.

A play written in 2013 by Evan Placey called “Girls Like That” follows a group of girls from when they start school age five, through to when they graduate aged eighteen. The playwriter was interested in exploring the question of whether young women oppress each other in the same ways’ men oppress women. He noted that “It wasn’t just that girls were bullying other girls, it’s that they were using the same tools that men had invented to oppress women. ”

This play may have been written in 2013, but much of what is depicted feels familiar to my school days 30 years earlier. Many women make wonderful female friendships, but when faced with a scenario which may replicate a school grouping such as in the workforce, those similar feelings can rear up again and women can compare, contrast, shame, put down and scorn each other, rather than boost each other. Often powerful women in the media can receive personal hostile attacks from other women and we learn that it is not safe to speak out or be seen.

What is so often lost for women is how wonderful being part of a supportive collective group of women can really be. Several years ago, I was in Morocco in a local Hamman and was fascinated to watch the groups of women come in for their Saturday morning ritual of bathing and chatting with each other. They left ther burkhas in the changing rooms, and stepped naked through the doorway, appearing to have no shame about their bodies as they all sat together. Washing, grooming, chatting, laughing and connecting before drying off and leaving. Putting back on their burkhas and stepping out into the dusty street outside. I was truly mesmorised and envious of the freedom these women apperaed to demonstrate with one another. This felt so contrasting with my perceptions of an oppressed gender due to their Burkha wearing.

Since then I have worked for many Womens organisations and have experienced the solidarity and empowerment that can come from being part of a collective supportive group of Women. This is not to diminish how essential mixed gender groups are in order to heal the rifts that are so abundant between us in our society. However, that is for another time….

Being socialised as a woman in our society is a different experience to being socialised as a man. From the minute we are born we are conditioned differently, if not by our parents then by society at large. Throughout most of history, women could not protect our own safety through physical, legal or financial means. Being likeable and acceptable is ingrained in us as a survival strategy and we are conditioned to be nice and to seek praise. So, what do we do when we feel angry and rageful, despairing, have needs of our own, have strong opposing opinions? So often many of us supress our feelings and ways of being as we feel they are unacceptable. Depression can take hold as it can feel easier to turn our anger inwards rather than outwards and make the changes in our lives and relationships that we need in order to truly thrive.

Women’s networking groups have risen in popularity in recent years, mainly based at empowering women in their business and the workforce. The power of female solidarity has been recognised and women are coming together from across the world to support and encourage one another to step into their authority.

My intention is to provide a nourishing nurturing space for women to come together and truly bring their whole selves. To be seen and met by one another, to share their difficulties as well as their joys. There can be something truly joyful and empowering that can come from feeling a sense of female solidarity and knowing that it is okay to bring your messiness. This is not to say that difficulties may arise as a result of our experiences in the past with other women, our mothers, our sisters, but this offers an opportunity to heal a part of ourselves that we may not be able to do on our own or in our dyadic relationship. I am often struck how within a space of an hour and a half a group of women can hold grief and despair for one another and equally have moments of pure delight and giggles. I invite you to leave your metaphorical burkhas at the door.

As Carl Rogers, the founder of Humanistic Therapy said, ” The Curious Paradox is that when I can accept myself completely as I am, then I can change.”

If anyone would like any information about the current Women’s Group I facilitate or to sign up to my mailing list for details of future groups, please click on the link below.

https://atomic-temporary-84984384.wpcomstaging.com/therapeutic-support-group-for-women/

Exercise – Why do we really do it?

Amelia

I passed a friend on the way back from the gym this morning at 7am.  She sent me a message saying, “I can’t believe you get up so early to go to Crossfit. “

I realise that to many it may seem like madness, some crazy fitness addiction, a punishing regime.  For many people, there is no doubt that it can become this and people can also use intensive exercise as a way to manage their anxiety and emotions. It can replace other addictions they may have used in the past such as drugs and alcohol, be part of an eating disorder and can work as a distraction or a form of control.  

I began running about 10 years ago and quickly noticed how dependent I became on it.  The run round the park became 5k, then 10k, a half marathon and then the Brighton Marathon.  Two weeks before I was due to run in the Brighton Marathon, I tore my calf muscle and was unable to take part.  I was gutted, but the hardest part of it all was being told that I couldn’t run for several months in order to give my calf the time it needed to heal. This took six months. I realised then how dependent I had become on running for my mental health.  How it had become an addiction that had helped me manage the difficulties in my marriage, my loss of self and my low self- esteem which had plummeted as a result of being a stay at home mum.  It meant that I didn’t have to focus on the lifestyle changes that I really needed to make, as each time I shut the front door I could leave all those worries behind me and get my fix of endorphins.  It was my substitute anti-depressant.  As a result of my injury, I had to take stock and work through all the emotional difficulties I was having at the time and make fundamental changes to the way I was living my life. I couldn’t run away from them any longer. Literally and metaphorically.

A few years later, a friend encouraged me to put my name into the ballot for the London Marathon.  Many people try year after year, so it was a complete surprise to get a place. This time I did it differently. I trained slowly and gently, listening to my body and what it needed.  When I had a twinge I rested, I had sports massages and a few weeks before the event, I took myself off to a yoga retreat. Running the London Marathon was one of the best days of my life. The atmosphere was electric, the sun was shinning and I crossed that finish line in disbelief.  I think I was in shock for a while.  Everything worked.  Nothing was injured.  I know that the reason I was able to do so was because of the way I had looked after my body and mind in a completely different way than I had those years earlier.  This time I wasn’t running away from anything or pounding the pavements in desperation to get that fix I needed to make my life more manageable.

Exercise for me now is incredibly important in maintaining my physical and mental health but is no longer the coping mechanism it once was. I go to Crossfit three times a week, regularly sea swim and try and do some yoga.  In this morning’s session, I lifted some weights whilst we swapped stories about what posters we had on our walls as teenagers (Pamela Anderson and bikes seemed to be a popular theme for the men). We discussed music and shared our nostalgia for gigs and the loss we feel with their absence at the moment. We discussed Freddie Flintoff and his documentary on Bulimia that was shown this week. The causes of Bulimia and how it is such a hidden illness for men, despite 1 in 4 sufferers being male.  We stretched. And we ate cake on the way out that someone had baked.

The physical fitness is important but equally as important for me is the connections, the laughs, the conversations, and spending time with a group of people in my community made up of different genders and ages that I may not mix with in other parts of my life.  As we all discovered in Lockdown, Social isolation has a huge negative impact on our mental health. Having an excuse to go and hang out with others regularly, check in how we are and discuss weekly topics under the guise that we are all only there to get fit, is an essential part of my self-care and wellbeing.