Episode 289 Minisode: Don’t Let the Slip Become a Slide
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Hey, my friends. So I recorded this coffee with Colleen right after I finished reading I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy. And that book really hit me harder than expected. I didn’t really want to read it, but I’m in a book club. That’s the one thing I do for myself every month and somebody picked it. And so I read it. But listening to that book pulled me back into my own history with Disordered Eating.
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the years that I spent obsessing over calories and my weight and food. And what stood out wasn’t just Jeanette’s story, but how clearly it showed what happens when nobody teaches you how to feel your feelings, how to process your feelings, because your feelings don’t really matter. Your performance matters, your behavior matters, your weight matters, how you look matters, what other people think matters. So this episode is heavier, but it’s real.
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And I think it’s one of the most important conversations that we can have about emotional sobriety, not as an endpoint, but as a lifelong practice of coming home to yourself again and again. So let’s go there together.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober, it’s not about the alcohol.
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So I just finished reading the book by Jeanette McCurdy. I’m glad my mom died. And I remember when it first came out and hearing some things about it. And I don’t know, I just never really cared to read it. But then I am in a book club. It’s my one social outing of the month. I’ve met some women and I’m really enjoying it. Third Thursday of the month, I look forward to it. And this book was chosen for next month.
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and I got to skip the part where I had to decide if I wanted to read the book because I’ve already decided I want to be in the book club and that’s kind of just what we’re doing this month. And so I downloaded it and I listened. And as somebody who has dealt with severe eating disorders, I was bulimic from the time I was 13. I mean, I remember my first attempt at throwing up my food, I was eight.
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They called me string bean Colleen. I was the skinny, pale weakling of a second grader. And I think I had heard about bulimia on like Sally, Jesse, Raphael or something. And I have no idea what was happening in my mind, but somehow I ate a hot dog at school and I remember trying to throw up. And then I remember babysitting. I would have been like seventh and eighth grade and, and
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being in someone’s house where they had all the snacks, which I didn’t have access to in my house. My parents didn’t buy, quote, junk food. And that was twofold. It was partially because we couldn’t afford it. I I grew up in a home where we had everything that we needed, but there was a budget, you know? And snacks and pop just weren’t part of it. My mom cooked a lot of things from scratch.
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And while I can’t say we weren’t allowed to have junk food, it just wasn’t available. And then the second reason was that my mom did believe in whole healthy food. You know, she cooked most of our meals from scratch. She made cookies. She didn’t buy cookies. I took my lunch to school and oh man, I coveted all the other people that were eating the school lunches. I wanted to eat the hot dogs and the pizza and the cookies and all of that stuff.
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And I was stuck with homemade peanut butter and jelly and a handful of chips and a cut up apple. I mean, I should have called CPS, right? And so when I would babysit, I would be in homes where it was like 1985 gone wild. They had cable and they had cupcakes and they had bags of candy and they had soda pop. And I would just go wild. You know, I usually babysit kids. They weren’t
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babies, you know, so I was just there to make sure that people were, you know, in the house doing their homework. And I would just walk around the kitchen and open drawers and then stuff stuff in my face. I mean, yeah, that’s what I did. And then, of course, I would feel so bad about it, both because I was taking food that wasn’t meant for me. And I was overeating.
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that that’s when, you know, in seventh or eighth grade was when I began to kind of regularly purge what I was eating. And of course, I found this behavior to be disgusting. I wanted to be anorexic. I was just a failure at anorexia. I would try to starve myself and get eight or 10 hours into the day and then, you know, go binge because I was so hungry. And the story I was telling myself was that I was just smarter.
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I was gonna be able to have my cake and eat it too because I knew how to throw it up. And so while I wasn’t proud of being bulimic, as you might imagine, I did find all of the hacks. And I don’t wanna be gross here, but it is gross and it’s also the truth. I would drink enough water and liquid to make sure that the food wasn’t too heavy in my stomach and it would easily come out. I would mark the food.
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which means I would eat my vegetables and the good stuff first and then mark it with a carrot or something bright so that when I saw that part of the food come up, I knew to stop so that I could keep some nutrients in my body. I always brushed my teeth. I used antacids to neutralize the liquid in or the acid in my throat. I mean, I was a chemistry major in college. I also swallowed a lot of
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fiber supplements. I’m not sure where the logic was there, but I feel like it was to move food through my body faster so that I wouldn’t absorb as many calories. And I got really good at the skill of bulimia. I could be in a bathroom with all of my friends, go into the stall and eject my meal in one single purge, right as I flushed the toilet so that nobody could hear. Unlike Jeanette,
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where she’s ramming her fingers down her throat, and her throat is bleeding and her teeth are falling out, and there’s spittles of vomit clinging to her arms when she comes out, and her mascara is running, and it’s just gross. Like, it wasn’t gross. I could do it and not leave a trace of evidence. Of course, I was living in a hell of my own making. My food obsession was all consuming.
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And it wasn’t even just about food. It was about my physical appearance. I was obsessed with the number on the scale. I let the number on the scale define me. One number would say whether I was doing it right or wrong, whether I was good or bad, whether I was worthy of love or whether I was a piece of shit. The number on the scale told me if I was trying hard enough, if I was succeeding or failing.
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if I was a good or bad person, if I was worthy of acceptance or rejection from my peers. And I now understand it was because I had no skills to process my feelings. You know, I felt like I didn’t have any control or power in my life. I was at the mercy of what my friends thought and what my parents told me I had to do and who I was supposed to be. And somehow I got it into my head that if I was
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and skinny and looked, I guess, a little frail, that that would make me somehow beyond approach, reproach, or beyond other people’s judgment. I was so sensitive, you know, I didn’t know that my feelings about other people’s feelings were still my feelings, and I couldn’t fix other people’s feelings. And so I suffered greatly when I thought somebody was mad at me. And so,
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I shifted my focus to something that I did feel like I could control so that maybe I didn’t have to care as much. Maybe if somebody was mad at me, but I felt like I looked good on the outside, then I could tell myself, well, they’re missing out or they have no right to judge me. Look at them, they’re overweight. I thought that by controlling what I ate and how I looked to a micro psycho level,
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that nobody could hurt me, that if I was the perfect weight, and let’s be honest, if I was a little underweight, that that was my ultimate get out of problems. Like people would love me just naturally, they would want me, they would forgive me if I said something stupid or I was too obnoxious or too needy, because they’d have to, because I was so tiny and adorable. I was kind of spotless and clean, like I was walking around as proof that
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I’m not lazy. I’m not gross. I’m not disgusting. I’m not taking up too much space and I am in control. I do have my shit together. Just look, here’s all the evidence. And of course, as self-sabotaging behaviors do, this also became a way of avoiding other feelings in other areas. You know, I just went numb. I remember working with a therapist for a while who showed me that
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Honey, you purge, binge and purge at the same time every day. Like I would get up in the morning, I would take all four of my kids to the gym and I would work out really hard and then I’d get the, I had little ones, they were going to preschool, I’d get everybody dropped off and then I’d come back home sometime around, I don’t know, 10, 30 or 11 and I would sit down at my computer almost like I’m in a trance.
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and shove my face with all of yesterday’s leftovers, because I always cooked big meals like my mother, I passed that along to my kids. And then I would just lose myself. then it’s like, then I would purge. And I remember it feeling like such a relief. I can remember if I was home alone, I would allow myself to scream as I purged into the toilet. I had so much anger and anxiety and
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feeling stuck and frustrated. I mean, of course I did. I was a mom with four little kids and I was tied to their schedules and I had no idea how to meet my own needs or that I even had any needs because look, I’m so small and thin and I do all the right things and I’ve made everybody homemade stuff and I’ve got everybody’s backpacks. I’m doing it all right. And I had no idea the kind of pressure that I was under was kind of coming from my own head, my own set of expectations, my own perfectionism.
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And so I would have this release at least once a day. And then often again, when I’d put kids to bed, I’d go through the cycle again where I’d overeat and over drink and then purge it all and go to bed thinking like I had the cheat codes. mean, duh. I was embarrassed that I did not grow my eating disorder. You know, a lot of teenagers, a lot of girls did it and talked about it. I never admitted I was one of them, of course. But I kind of just assumed that with motherhood,
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you know, at some point I would grow out of it, but I never did. And so here I am pacing myself in my mid thirties going, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. And I thought that the only way to heal it would be to be okay with gaining a bunch of weight. Like it just never occurred to me that I was dealing with emotional problems, that there was any sort of solution, that the reason I was doing this had nothing to do with how I look or how much I actually weigh.
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I thought it was just my way of managing my weight. And we’re all taught in this society that that’s an important thing to do. I knew I wasn’t doing it in the healthiest way, but I mean, what are my options here? And my healing journey began when I stumbled upon what I thought was the answer, and that was to become vegan. And while I now understand that I upgraded my
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Disordered thinking around food from bulimia, which you know not good I Upgraded it to what I now see is orthorexia You know, it’s very similar from the alcohol problem where you’re obsessed and you’re identifying yourself as a drinker and then you Become obsessed with becoming a non-drinker, but you’re still playing the alcohol game. I was still playing the food game. I was just
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doing it in a much healthier way. I was reducing harm on my body and it was a very important step in my journey. But then I became obsessed with food rules and not eating anything that comes from an animal. If it ever had eyes or it ever touched anything that had eyes, then I wouldn’t be able to eat it. And those rules kept me safe from the bulimia because I was no longer eating really dense.
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carby, starchy, not as healthy for you foods. I was eating mostly vegetables. I knew in my mind that I was never gonna be significantly overweight from a diet based on salad and grapes. So I could give myself permission to not constantly be counting calories. I was counting nutrients. I was doing it right. I was making sure I got enough protein and enough fiber and all of the micronutrients.
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antioxidants and minerals and enzymes and phytonutrients. But I’m not going to lie. I had just switched vehicles. one point, bulimia was what was going to get me to, you know, keeping and maintaining a nice figure. And I had just switched vehicles and I upgraded for sure. But I still was obsessed with food and the size of my body because I still didn’t know how to control or deal with my own emotions. And so
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The reason I’m telling you about the book, I’m Glad My Mom Died, is because when she finally gets into therapy and actually sticks with it and she starts facing her emotional experience, she starts learning how to pay attention to the thoughts and to the feelings and to sit with the discomfort so that she can process them instead of being held hostage by all the disordered thinking.
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Her therapist introduces this idea of don’t let slips become slides. And as I listen to this, it just reinforced the approach that we take with changing our drinking and our disordered thoughts about drinking. It normalized the fact that you’re not going to change all that overnight. And slip-ups, setbacks, are an important part of the process.
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But what happens to people with eating disorders or any sort of thinking disorder, any sort of self-sabotaging behavior, is that we tend to get caught up in our mistakes. And then we use them as reinforcement to the idea that we can’t change, that this is bigger than us. And whenever we make a mistake, we end up struggling to move on. It’s that perfectionistic mentality. We want the all.
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of success, we want to get it all right. And we can’t tolerate the discomfort of knowing that we are less than perfect. I mean, that’s how we get into these situations, right? And the therapist was explaining to Jeanette that it’s not the slip that’s problem. Like we want to reduce your purging over time.
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And we’re going to track that and you’re going to be doing all this other processing and introducing new thoughts just like we do in this program. But the first thing, the first thing that has to change is you have to stop beating yourself up because you’re only adding shame onto the natural guilt and frustration that you feel when you fall short, when you aren’t able to stick with it. And the guilt and the frustration are helpful.
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because you can use them to learn and motivate yourself to keep moving forward. But it’s the shame that keeps us stuck. Shame is paralyzing. And when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the shame spiral, we end up making more mistakes that cause more shame. Shame begets shame. And that’s how a slip becomes a slide. And so we have to stop telling ourselves
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for the thousandth time, this will never happen again. This can’t happen again. I’m never doing this again, because it will happen again, because you don’t change habits overnight. There’s a reason that this behavior has come to be, that it’s served a purpose, that it’s become a habit, and it has nothing to do with the food or the drink. It’s the disordered thinking, and it’s the inability to process your emotions, and it’s a lack of curiosity about what’s really going on.
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and an inability to accept ourselves where we’re at so that we can begin to make forward progress. As long as you’re dealing with the idea that this can’t be, this can’t happen, this is wrong and I am bad, I am fucked up, I am broken, until you break that belief, then you’re gonna keep circling or as I say, in laps or on the cul-de-sac of stupidity because shame is paralyzing. And listening to this book,
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reaffirmed my approach where you have to stop letting slips turn into slides and stop trying to avoid the slips. Stop trying to avoid your feelings with good, perfect, awesome, on-point behavior. And I think it’s interesting that this approach is normal and sounds completely logical when it’s being applied to what might
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one might argue are life threatening conditions, anorexia, bulimia. Like these are potentially life threatening situations. Your next purge could be your last. Your next skipped meal could lead to a heart attack. And yet the therapist that was guiding Jenny to healing and that has become standard in the eating disorder industry is known to be highly effective. It does work. And
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in the sobriety industry that demands perfection, where you have to quit drinking. It’s an all or nothing decision, because if you don’t change, you will crash your life. You will hit rock bottom. Is why we have an epidemic of addiction. Why so many women are struggling in secret. Because we think that the solution to the black and white mindset and all or nothing thinking.
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We think the solution is just to go with the nothing. When in reality, facing your emotional experience when you have a slip is the most transformational part of your recovery. You have to stop seeing yourself as somebody who is dysfunctional in response to your own dysfunctional behaviors and start seeing yourself as the person who is capable of rewiring your brain, repatterning your nervous system, processing
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the shame that is locked inside of you, that is robbing you of energy and clarity and forward motion. And while I’m not going to recommend this book, like, oh, you have to go read it. If you want an inside look at how disordered thinking develops, it’s a great it’s a great read because you can see all of the stuff that she suppressed over her life because she wasn’t given permission by her mother and she didn’t give herself permission to acknowledge the truth.
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that she knew that something was wrong, something wasn’t right. She was not being given autonomy. She was not being respected. She was living someone else’s dreams. And she suppressed all of that. And that’s what happened. So it’s an excellent walk through the development of disordered thinking. uh Hers is much more obvious because her mom, Dunne, told her that she should become anorexic.
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So not all of us came to it quite that directly at such a young age, but I was eight first time I tried it. So Evidently, it’s deeper than any one learning from a parent It’s our culture that defines us by our weight that defines us by our performance that Assigns us value based on the value that we bring to other people and I don’t care how wonderful your parents are I had wonderful parents
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Nobody escapes childhood without unprocessed emotions. And if you were raised in a home like I was, where I was told to stop crying or I’m going to give you something to cry about, and I have wonderful parents, they just didn’t know how to make space for my feelings. And they taught me that happiness is something you just fake. Put on a smile and get out there and do your thing, which is good, good advice. But it must be coupled.
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with empathy, that there’s nothing wrong with you for feeling the way you are. There’s an appropriate place and space for you to express your feelings, but you don’t have to swallow them and suck it up. It’s okay to not be okay. That doesn’t make you a burden. That doesn’t make you weak. That doesn’t make you needy. Your feelings aren’t permanent and they don’t define you. And you can’t avoid them by acting like they don’t exist. And at the same time, you don’t fix them by wallowing in them.
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There are processes. And that’s what we’re here to do in the next chapter. Learn how to be our own best friend. Learn how to allow ourselves to know the things that we’ve suppressed into our subconscious, not so that we can see it as truth, but so that we can just see it as one of those things that we used to think, and it no longer applies. And in the book, it took Jenny a couple years to become free of episodes of binging and purging.
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And I just think the book is a beautiful testament to what is possible when you get the right support and help. She takes you on the journey from herself as a young child, and you have a lot of compassion. You can see how she ended up where she ended up. She was just trying to survive. She was just trying to do the best she could. She was just trying to make the people around her happy. She was operating on the belief system that was handed to her. You can see how one would end up with a
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alcohol and bulimia and dysfunction and codependency in her relationship. She talks about all of it. You can see how she got there and it doesn’t matter. What matters is understanding that you don’t heal overnight. And the most powerful thing I took away was the brochure her therapist handed her with some work on don’t let slips become slides. The takeaway message was you can’t avoid the slips, but you can.
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avoid the slides. And that’s how you crawl out of this whole one learning experience, one processed emotion, one win at a time.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.