From Fear to Wholeness in Navigating Eating Disorder with Carol Park from Recovery Reconnection. Ep.56

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic:
  In this episode of Mastering Counseling, join expert Carol Park, founder of Recovery Reconnection, as we delve into the profound impact of eating disorders and body image issues. Explore how societal influences, life transitions, and personal experiences shape our relationships with food and ourselves. Discover the evolution of eating disorder treatment, considering the role of social media, cultural norms, and the recent challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through insightful discussions and real-life examples, we uncover the complexities of these issues and highlight the importance of holistic approaches to recovery.
  
• Lessons You’ll Learn:
  Listeners will gain valuable insights into the multiple manifestations of eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). They will learn about the significance of shame, resilience, vulnerability, and self-compassion in overcoming these challenges. By understanding the interconnectedness of body image, self-esteem, and mental health, listeners will discover strategies for promoting positive relationships with food, fostering self-acceptance, and navigating life transitions with resilience.
• About Our Guest:
  Our guest, Carol Park, brings over 30 years of experience as a registered dietitian and licensed professional counselor specializing in eating disorders. Drawing from her personal journey of recovery and extensive clinical expertise, Carol offers unique insights into the complexities of disordered eating behaviors and the journey toward healing. As the founder of Recovery Reconnection, Carol is dedicated to empowering individuals to reconnect with their bodies, selves, and relationships in pursuit of holistic well-being.
  
• Topics Covered:
  Throughout the episode, we cover a wide range of topics, including the impact of social media on body image, the evolution of eating disorder diagnoses and treatment approaches, and the challenges faced by different age groups, from adolescents to women experiencing menopause. We dig into the nuances of intuitive eating, shame resilience, and the importance of building supportive communities in recovery journeys. Additionally, we discuss practical strategies for promoting body acceptance, navigating societal pressures, and fostering resilience in the face of life’s challenges.

Episode Transcript

Carol Park: Earlier, social media was a game changer and still is in terms of the influence on not enough and the rise in eating disorders. We see the rise. The other thing that was a real game changer was COVID. When Covid hit, my adolescent population of eating disorders went through the roof. I was at that point already beginning to take my Fridays off to move into that place in my career, and I went back into the office on Fridays because there was such a need. I think so much of it was, as all of us, we didn’t know, there’s this massive vulnerability, which I love Bernie’s definition of vulnerability, which is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode, we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner. From interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services, if it impacts counseling, we cover it on Mastering Counseling. Thank you everyone for returning to Mastering Counseling podcasts. We are thrilled today to have Carol Park, who has been in this field for over 30 years, so she has a wealth of experience to share. She is not only a registered dietitian but also a licensed professional counselor. Thanks so much for giving us your time today, Carol.

Carol Park: Thanks for having me. I’m really honored to be here.

Becky Coplen: That is great to hear. In your window of expertise, I think, a couple of other people about the food aspect and body image, but it’s such a huge issue in our country, so I’m glad that we’re talking about it again. Your practice is called Recovery Reconnection. Why don’t you tell us about the vision for that and when that began?

Carol Park: When I thought of the question, I was like,  that’s so interesting, because when I started my practice, which would have been in the early 90s, websites, practice names, and everything wasn’t a thing. I think the first website started in the 90s at some point. When I started my website, I just thought of, I call it the three R’s. Recovery requires reconnection, but that seemed like a long name for a website to have to type out, I just shortened it to Recovery Reconnection. But I look at the eating disorder and probably our journeys in life in general as a disconnect, recovery requires reconnection. I look at the disconnect from the body, disconnect from self, disconnect from others, and disconnect from the spiritual realm of life. Again, requiring reconnection in each of these areas, the disconnect from the body, I always speak to it as the connected end of the spectrum, because you’re not either fully connected to the body, you’re not connected to the body. The spectrum, the connection to the body is self-love, self-care, self nurturing. On the disconnected end of things, it’s self-loathing, self-hatred, self-punishment, and self-destruction. That reconnection to the body which involves a lot of self-love, self-care, self nurturing, it always talks about the very same behavior, let’s say can be on either end of the spectrum. Going for a walk can be very much out of self-care, going for a walk can be very much self-loathing at times.

Carol Park: If you’re beating yourself up, I’ve got to, I’ve got to get out there and do this. Not going for a walk could be self-care. Not going for a walk could be self-punishment so that reconnection to the body then the disconnect from self. Very often, of course, the eating disorder is a disconnect from self. Sometimes it comes out that I overfocus on the body instead of feeling sad, happy, lonely, mad. It may come out as I feel fat or I feel ugly. There begins some of that. Let me try and resolve my discomfort and not understanding myself by managing my body, or over-managing it, or not taking care of it in some form or fashion, that ignoring our bodies. So that disconnect from self and then disconnect from others, we can’t connect with others if we don’t have a sense of self to connect with. We can be with others and not feel connected in the process. Then the spiritual realm where sometimes the behaviors in life become that higher power, become the thing that we may try and turn to, to feel okay, that’s where it originated, was recovery requires but really recovery, reconnection to try and reconnect in these realms.

Becky Coplen: Why don’t we talk a little bit about the practice that started in the 90s, things were very different then, but still, eating disorders were definitely occurring. I was a teenager in the 90s. I do remember hearing about a few people struggling with that, but I think it’s probably increased because we did not have social media. So why don’t you talk to us about early on, like your education and then how you focus in this area? And did you become a dietician or a counselor first?

Carol Park: I became a dietitian first and I’m not ashamed to say that my journey began with my own eating disorder. When I went to college, which would have been in 1980, and started into college, I majored in nutrition because I was in the throes of an eating disorder, didn’t honestly really know it because, as you’ve alluded to, social media was not a thing then. When I went to college, I had a typewriter, I did not have a computer, and I went to college with a raging eating disorder majoring in nutrition because of that. When I graduated from college in 1984, social media was magazines and people magazines. Karen Carpenter died from her eating disorder and was on the front of People magazine in 1984. I still have the magazine because that was, even for myself, I didn’t know this was a thing and other people didn’t either. It was like this introduction, there were not very many books even written about eating disorders. I think I could name all three of them, probably at the time when that kind of became a thing. Then I started my master’s in nutrition and started looking at the effect of purging.

Carol Park: Specifically, vomiting on basal metabolic rate is my own personal question. That was the start of my journey, it was just a lot of trying to understand myself because I wasn’t majoring in nutrition for the good of me. It was my obsession at that point in time. So magazines were a huge influence. But you only saw it at the grocery store stand, or if you bought it or had it delivered to your door that was such an influence on body image. Yes, this is now on steroids many times, right? Just social media constantly with that question of “Am I enough? Am I enough of whatever, thin enough, rich enough, pretty enough, any of them?” I feel like a lot of the work that I do is working with that aspect of shame resilience. I am certified in Bernay’s work, I’m a daring way certified facilitator, and I did her work looking at shame, resilience, vulnerability, looking at values and clarification is a huge part of where I base some of the work that I do with people today.

Becky Coplen: You said you are a daring way facilitator. When did you officially get the licensed counselor degree?

Carol Park: Let’s see. I would have graduated in 2009 from my program, and then in 2011 was fully licensed after I got my hours under supervision, etc., and then just combined those early on in the dietitian role. I started in hospital programs as a dietitian with eating disorders, then went out and did private practice with eating disorders in the dietitian role. Then I just kept running into people wanting to talk more about the other issues and I referred them back to their therapist. Then it was like,  am I practicing outside of my scope to end that internal dilemma? Then I just said, you know what? I’m going to just go back and go ahead and get the LPC credential. Today sometimes I’ll be in the LPC role, sometimes I’ll be in a dietitian role, and sometimes I’ll weave back and forth. If someone refers to me and says, I want you to do both, then I’m comfortable doing that as well.

Becky Coplen: Then just question that. Do you find even with the same client, do you make, specifically, I’m working with you as a dietitian and then possibly the next week I’m working with you as more of a counselor therapist, or do they see you solely in one frame?

Carol Park: If I’m doing both, I don’t say this week is a dietitian and this week is therapy. I blend them and weave back and forth, in and out. If a therapist has referred to me as their dietitian, then I will stay in the dietitian role and consult with the therapist, or vice versa at times. Then somebody else may be in the dietitian role and I’m in the therapist role. So we would consult.

Becky Coplen: What would you say being that you have such great experience and knowledge, what are some things that you feel have shifted over the 30 years and changed, whether it’s for the better or things that you feel are for the worse?

Carol Park: You alluded to it earlier, social media was a game changer and still is in terms of the influence on not enough and the rise in eating disorders. We see the rise. The other thing that was a real game changer, and you may have read about this, was in a lot of publications: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, COVID. When COVID hit, my adolescent population of eating disorders went through the roof. I was at that point already beginning to take my Fridays off to move into that place in my career, and I went back into the office on Fridays because there was such a need. I think so much of it was, as all of us, we didn’t know, there’s this massive vulnerability, which I love Bernie’s definition of vulnerability, which is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Talk about uncertainty. So much emotional exposure. I just think it was such a pull on us all at once. Especially adolescents who then had to be home, couldn’t be with their peers, homeschooling all of that, they didn’t know how to cope. I think a big part of that became their over-control or over-focus on food, and that could have gone a multitude of ways with eating disorders and the spectrum and range of eating disorders.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. I love that because we have a few more extended family who lived all over. It is such a challenge to start those roots in new places. I admit, I mean, sometimes and it’s not my own family in particular, but I will cry sometimes at holidays because you know these people are not together. And don’t get me started even on the commercials at Christmas. On holidays, in the commercials with military families, are most tearing up. This is real life. I can’t imagine being separated. It’s not like medical people give a lot to working certain holidays and all that. But this is often months, maybe a year or longer. So it’s huge. That’s great.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by masters counseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition in our costs, online flexibility, and more. You mentioned adolescence. Talk to us about the age ranges that you work with. Do you work with both genders or do you work with certain age groups? How do you decide who you can work with or not?

Carol Park: There are people who work with elementary age and such. I would say, teenagers. So maybe junior high school up through 70-year-olds. I also work with a lot of women who might be in my age range, which I’m in my early 60s, but also women in their 40s and 50s, because it’s not just a teenage college age disorder, because, again, all of the body image stuff and we see peaks in eating disorders. Peak of puberty, peak going off to college. These are major life transitions. For older women, what’s a major life transition is menopause. What happens in menopause? Your body changes just like in puberty. Again bombarded with advertising on social media which tells women that going through menopause hey, your body doesn’t have to change. You don’t have to gain that expected belly fat. You don’t have to gain this expected X number of pounds of weight. It would be like telling someone in puberty that your body doesn’t have to change, which it’s possible if you do disordered things like get an eating disorder to keep your body from going to puberty. You can. I do speak to the belly fat that we’re supposed to lay down in menopause. I call it our estrogen pouch because this is where you can store estrogen as your body begins to decrease, making that. It’s very protective of our brains. When we try not to go through these menopausal changes, we potentially set up future problems for ourselves in life, including cognitive disability, if you will. Menopause is another, which is why in my practice, teenagers, college-age girls, young women, and then also women who are of my own age, who yes, we still are, also are impacted by everything that we’re told we should be and have to be and that loss of sense of self.

Becky Coplen: When you say cognitive difficulties, would you say, are you connecting between dementia and those types of issues?

Carol Park: I do, and so here’s where it’s not as an MD, I don’t want to say it’s like it causes dementia, but brain fog that it’s okay when estrogen levels drop. It is more of that brain fog I can’t quite remember. Again, if we store some belly fat where the body wants to in menopause and it’s very protective in nature, we work to prevent these changes. Again, I do think we set ourselves up. We call it dementia. And again, I think you can diagnose that in different ways. And I’m not an MD. So there is a little sidebar there. But yes, I do think that we really want our estrogen pouch as we move into menopause and have that storage there. That’s actually really good for our brain.

Becky Coplen: Why don’t you just talk to us a little bit about the various types of disorders within eating that you’re seeing?

Carol Park: There’s the one that’s arfid, which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, which isn’t as much based on the body image side. It may be more based on, let’s say, for example, a choking incident that then makes one fearful of eating or there was some negative connotation. It may be that it occurs in trauma that sets up a negative connotation. It’s more the restricting and the avoidance of food that comes from that may be or maybe there’s a medical diagnosis that just makes food unappealing at some point, and then it becomes a set behavior and the person becomes malnourished. You have to work with them to restore the ability to eat. Then you have the norms that you talked about. You’ve got anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder. Then they now have atypical anorexia, which I’m grateful for because people have the idea that you have to have this emaciated body to be able to be diagnosed with anorexia, but it’s not so much about the size and shape of your body. It’s about whether you are adequately nourishing your body. The atypical kind of takes away the idea that you must be x percent of your ideal body weight. That’s done away with that a little bit more as a diagnosis. Gnostic criteria and just saying, basically, are you malnourished? Are you adequately nourishing your body? And it doesn’t have to be based on size or shape. There’s so much shame around bodies, just period in general, that builds some of that shame, resilience to be able to say, look, all of us deserve to nourish our bodies. I just refer to a lot of times as our bodies, as our earth suits, this is my earth suit, this is the vehicle that I’ve been given to navigate this life and pursue my passions, my purpose, my values. I neutralize because we’re in this toxic culture. I used to say early on in my career, “We live in a crazy culture. Now I just say it’s toxic. It’s sick. The messages around body shapes and sizes and what’s okay and what’s not okay.

Becky Coplen: Can you share with us any success stories that you feel, obviously, we’re not going to talk specifically about names or whatever unless you have permission, but what would be something that you’ve been proud of, maybe in the last few years where you felt like your practice was able to help a client?

Carol Park: Let me start with my own. I considered myself, recovered from my eating disorder to be in this toxic culture and to be able to navigate it from a place of strength coming from myself and my values and have shame and resilience. For example, I went through a difficult time in life personally, and medically all at once and I lost weight, but it wasn’t, this is a good thing. It was not. So to have people like, wow, you look so great, you can be bombarded with these internal questions, wait, did I not look okay before? What is this? Then to have a friend who knows me, but I hadn’t connected with in a while come up to me and ask me, are you okay? Because she knows me and she saw me and I knew like, this is not where my body is going to stay, but to be able to navigate that from a place of strength and not go back into the eating disorder and think, oh, I guess this is a good thing. I should try and keep this off. I should, you know what? This is not healthy. I’m trying to take care of myself. It’s hard right now and again with the crazy things that may come our way around body image and being able to stay strong. So I do believe in full recovery. You can get to the place where you can accept your own body for the shape and size it is, and be able to nourish and be.

Carol Park: I’m very much about intuitive eating for long-term recovery early on. It may not be part of things, but that and then just some of the stories that may be a family that had a teenager that came in, they had gone on a family vacation. That was a disaster because they couldn’t do the things that food was normal. On vacations, you go to meals as a family. It was truly an awful experience. And to get a Christmas card a few years later from them at the same place they had vacationed with the smiling family and the mom being able to say it was such a different experience. Thank you for your help and support in the process, or to get from a client that I worked with. A Very successful professional woman, when we started talking about intuitive eating and deers in the headlight of no, I had to control everything. There’s no way that’s happening. And to write to me a couple of years later and say that she was talking to a group, giving her own kind of personal testimony, if you will, of her own process, and then realizing it’s, wow, I didn’t think I could ever get there, and I’m there. So I always love hearing back from people. It’s always to me, that the highest form of encouragement is if a client who I worked with actually referred someone to me. I can appreciate referrals from other professionals, but from someone who you work with who refers to you is just the highest form of a compliment to me.

Becky Coplen: What advice would you give to people, maybe in the middle of these types of counseling programs, or considering going into this work, whether it’s on the dietitian or as a counselor, what would you want them to hear?

Carol Park: Sometimes I will have people interview me like they’re going through their program, and you know how you have to go and interview people? Yeah, we all had to do it. Right. So the main thing that I say first and foremost is to do your own work. It’s like really just being engaged in your own, be it in therapy or some other sort of group or growth work, or you found this retreat thing you could go to or whatever, it’s just doing your own work. And then if you’re going into the field while eating. In disorders. I would say do your own work around feeling comfortable in your own skin, with your own body, which I do tell people. I think that the best body image work we can do is the work around self-compassion. And as we know, that’s a practice, and it’s a practice around being comfortable in our own skin and being able to sit in the midst of people on their own and not feed into those, or get caught up in our own or make it about ourselves. So really, so much which to me, if I simplify and it’s not necessarily simple, but to me, self-compassion is not abandoning yourself in your pain. Just be yourself in that moment. Even if it’s not, no, but you’re great and you’re a rock star and whatever. It’s not trying to because that’s abandoning yourself too. It’s more just this is hard right now. Wow, I’m struggling here and just really being sad, but I’m here with myself. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. I’m not leaving you, I love you.

Becky Coplen: I think we’ve gotten a lot of great insights from you, and I thank you so much for giving us your time here today. Why don’t you at least mention your website in case anyone wants to reach out or be in touch with you? Remind us of that.

Carol Park: It’s Recovery Reconnection.com.

Becky Coplen: I think it’s amazing that you have stayed in this same practice all these years with the same name. You probably are renowned in Texas. There have to be a lot of people who know about you.

Carol Park: Thank you. I will say when I started again, there weren’t a lot of websites and then along the way people were like, you should change it to your name. I’m like, no, because I have SEO that’s built at this point. I’ll Google my name or whatever and find my website, but thank you for that compliment, I appreciate that.

Becky Coplen: Thank you so much for your time today, Carol.

Carol Park: You bet. Becky, thank you for having me.

Becky Coplen: Of course. To our listeners, we’re so thankful that you tuned in. I hope you learned some new things, and we’d love to hear from you in comments on social media. If you have questions or you want to explore this topic, feel free to check out Carol’s website. Please tune in next time as we continue to explore the world of therapy and counseling. Have a wonderful day! You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by mastersincounseling.org. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.