E053 - How Narcissistic Relationships Destroy Self-Esteem & Spark Disordered Eating With Kathryn Holt
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By the end of today's episode, you are going to understand how a narcissistic relationships. Destroy self esteem and spark disordered eating.
Speaker: Welcome to Heartbreak to Wholeness, the podcast helping you heal from the mindfuck of narcissistic relationships and move towards the secure, peaceful woman you want to become. I am your host, Bre Wolta, Relationship Clarity Coach and EFT Certified Practitioner. Let's dive in.
Welcome to this episode today, I am chatting with Katherine Holt. She is a depth, a psychotherapist and an author, and in part specializes with working with women in body acceptance. And in my work with clients and in my personal experience,
I've really seen disordered eating behaviors, get exacerbated and toxic or narcissistic relationships. So I wanted to further explore why.
In this episode, you will. Learn, why feeling fat is not a feeling and [00:01:00] how to begin to reconnect your mind and body. You're going to uncover the two most surprising, suppressed emotions that are linked to both eating disorders and relationship challenges.
And you're going to understand how disordered eating and toxic relationships both continue to dysregulate your nervous system and keep you stuck in unhealthy situations. And remember to stick around to the end of the episode, where I will pull an Oracle card that will offer you a message to stay anchored in this week in your healing.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the podcast, Kathryn. I am so excited to have you here.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Bre. I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 2: This episode touches really close to my heart. Most, if not all, I don't want to say all because that's absolutes, but most of my clients struggle with disordered eating and, or are in recovery from eating disorders or, or are active in their eating [00:02:00] disorder.
And the common, denominator with all my clients is that they're healing from something that was painful, confusing, narcissistic, toxic, unhealthy, somewhere on the spectrum of relationships. So Kathryn has expertise in, in body image and in healing from eating disorders. So I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.
Speaker 3: I am ready to dive in. Yeah. All of that really echoes my experience as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's talk a little bit about control and the control that we seek through food and exercise, and what that really is sort of wrapped within.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I think there's we were up to date enough with this idea.
I think most people could cognitively say and understand that the control behaviors with food and body [00:03:00] are a way of controlling something, right? I think that's kind of that's more well known. I can try to control something by controlling food, but I think what's less well known is what the control is about.
You know, control behaviors are often coming from the felt experience of anxiety, and then what's under anxiety is usually really complicated. . You know, if we, the way I think about anxiety is like a boiling pot of water that's on the stove. And if you imagine there's a pot, it's boiling away and there's a top on on, there's a lid on the top and it's making all this noise.
It's like, oh my God, that. Top is banging away over there. The top making all the noise is anxiety, and that tends to get our attention. Like, I'm so uncomfortable, this is so loud, and we do a lot just to manage that loudness. We take the top off, we might, that's where some of the behaviors come in, [00:04:00] trying to control things, but what we really need to look at is what's boiling in the pot, which is emotion.
That can be emotions that are conflicting. Or need, needs that are conflicting. Like I need closeness from this person, but they scare me. Or like needing something that, you know, is not available, um, or, you know, fear and fear can also feel like anxiety, but it's a deeper, more complicated emotional story, you know, if we feel anger, but we're taught, that anger isn't accepted, then we might feel anxiety when we feel anger versus just clear, true anger is about something or someone.
And so I just want to, I like to break that down where, yeah, we might be controlling some anger, controlling food because we feel out of control, but it's because we're probably anxious and then below that we know something or we're feeling something and that's to me like when I think about recovering from any kind of food body disconnection that [00:05:00] deeper knowing and felt experience is I mean it's essential and that's part of the Recovery, I hear echoed also in that toxic relationship process, like having to go to that emotional place, not just the cognitive, like, I get what's happening here, but how do I feel about this?
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a huge piece that a lot of people miss. They're like, I understand all these things. Why a plus B equals C and I keep doing it. I keep restricting my food or I keep going back to the person. And I love what you said about. Eating disorders being about controlling the, it's like the uncomfortability that we feel with emotion and, or something we know.
It's like, we don't, we weren't maybe taught how to sit with emotions in a healthy way. And therefore our maladaptive coping is to try to control something else to like redirect our attention. It's like, I don't know how to sit with this, [00:06:00] this anger or this fear. So I'm just going to restrict breakfast, lunch, and dinner because I know how to do that.
Right. I know how to, I know how to feel like I'm succeeding at that thing. And I remember, so I'm in recovery from an eating disorder. And I remember when my therapist, back when I was starting to just like dip a toe into, into acknowledging that this was a problem. Um, I was like, well, I want to, I want my body to look a certain way.
Like the control is about wanting to control my body to be a certain aesthetic. And she helped me start to piece that apart a little bit. And eventually after, after years, really of digging into this stuff, it was, it was coming from a deeper place of control, what we want to believe is we're just trying to control what our body looks like, but we're actually trying to control a much deeper well of emotion that we don't know how to navigate.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it's just [00:07:00] incredibly inconvenient to that or convenient. I don't, maybe, you know, it's kind of a paradox there that culturally we are congratulated in controlling the body.
And then in recovery, we have to undo all of that. And I think that's what's, That is pretty confusing when people are starting recovery, because it is true. It's like, I do want my body to look the way I was taught to want my body to look.
And That I think is quite tricky because you have to work on that, like that cultural messaging and we know that we know just through lots of research that disordered eating eating disorders are relational patterns.
It's like how we get our needs met, like you were saying, or how to satisfy needs that aren't met in relationship through different behaviors. Um, a lot of parents [00:08:00] weren't taught to actively teach about cultural messaging about the body and to say, like, you're going, this is what You know, just because you see that here doesn't mean this is what we do in our house, or there's room for all bodies, or, you know, I think there has to be like a conscious resistance against cultural messaging about bodies.
And if it's not conscious and actively resisting that, then it really, um, intertwines in a challenging way with, um, the psychological aspects of an eating disorder. Yes. And then it is, it's just like, yeah, I just want my body to be different. And it's like, well, it is your body. You have permission to change your body if you want to, but this seems different, you know, and that gets very, hard to unwind that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It starts to, to, Get messy, at least in my experience, when I needed my body to be a certain way in order to [00:09:00] feel okay. Or I needed to work out a certain number of hours a day in order to feel okay, right? In order to manage the anxiety, manage the discomfort. Like wanting to, to be healthy, wanting to exercise, wanting your body to, even wanting to lose weight, right?
Those are, those aren't, by themselves bad things, but when, when we start to obsess on them and when our sense of self or our okayness is dependent on those things, that's when we have, have shifted over to the other side of that line. And to your point about the cultural messaging, Like, if you are resisting the, the thin framed, six pack, big butt, big boobs, whatever's in style, that era, if you're, if you're resisting that, then there's also emotions that are going to come up around you being different, around you being, having a, a different size body than all of your friends or what be it, which then leads us back [00:10:00] into how do you sit in the discomfort.
Of looking different and of, of having self esteem around your body when you aren't taught that potentially by your caregivers or. Whoever is, whoever's raising you. So that relational piece is huge and, and being, having someone be able to teach us how to sit in all the shit, all the, all the discomfort, all of the emotions, all of the feelings that are coming up.
Speaker 3: Right. And, you know, there's that basic idea of attachment being like we learn to attach to ourselves when we're with someone who's attached and connected to themselves. Not that parents are solely responsible for their kids having, you know, difficult relationships with their body, but we do develop skills for how to connect with our bodies in a large [00:11:00] degree to how our parents connect with their bodies.
and how our parents talk about their bodies. You know, I, I'm a parent and I like, like cringe at all the parent blaming in Western psychology. Um, but there is some of it that's true that, you know, if parents have a difficult time connecting with their own bodies, then sometimes it's hard for kids to connect with their own.
And then there's just basic mimicking that how parents talk about their bodies. Just because a little kid is echoing their parent doesn't mean they actually might not like their body if that's what they're hearing and then saying, but it can become internalized and more familiar.
Because it's just like the water in the system that your little guppy is breathing in. It's this little fish like in the fishbowl.
Speaker 2: And same goes for nervous system dysregulation, right? If our caregiver Doesn't know how to regulate their nervous system.
They are going to teach us how to be dysregulated because they're passing that down. [00:12:00] And they're never going to be that safe place for us to go to, to for that co regulation.
As kids, we are dependent on another in order to co regulate. In order to help help us borrow some safety from someone else's nervous system when we're feeling out of control with our emotions, to be able to like, Wrap us in this safety bubble while our nervous system finds some, some safety.
But if you haven't experienced that or whenever taught how to do that, you're living in a dysregulated state most of the time. And so then when a emotion comes in, that's like, I, I look fat. It's like exacerbated because That is almost like the ultimate failure, the end of the world, right?
All of our parts are freaking out and we don't know how to manage that feeling aside from the action that gives us some sense of like false control.
Speaker 3: And I would [00:13:00] slow that down even more that the, it's the thought I feel fat, right? There is an emotion, something is happening that is making the thought, I feel fat, but fat is not, you might have a physical sensation of having, like, I can like feel, you know, this, like I have fat on my body, but.
You know, when we say that, I write about that in my book, Overcoming Body Hatred, that fat is a substitute and a lot of body based words become substitutes for the felt emotional experience. And that's part of like, that's that mental deconstruction that often has to get slowed down to such a difficult degree of like, what does that actually mean?
What's the feeling? And I have observed that a lot of the time anger that gets substituted for fat
Speaker 5: and
Speaker 3: anger, you know, serves a very important purpose [00:14:00] to, if a boundary is crossed, anger pushes it back.
And if a need isn't met, anger says, I need something. And so then to kind of like bring this back to this discussion about narcissistic relationships, I mean like what is less available in a narcissistic relationship than that,
this idea of fatness, the problem versus I'm angry. It's something happening in my life or what you're doing to me. And I'm going to make it this instead of that. Um, there's this really amazing book called the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings. And she writes about the differences between black women and white women in terms of fatness and fat phobia that I just want to.
Uh, put out there to listeners and how black women's bodies have the experience of being oppressed , but white women's bodies are disciplined. And so there's this difference between oppression and [00:15:00] discipline,
Speaker 2: no, I love that. I really want listeners to, to absorb what you said about, Like, the inability to express anger being the driver there, because like you said, in those types of relationships, in narcissistic relationships especially, there's no room for your feelings.
No less your anger. Right? Right. And if you try to show anger, you're punished or you're gaslit or you're abused or you're manipulated, right? There's a lot of consequences. And so we learn when we're in those relationships that we have to shut up and be quiet and take it and try to fix everything on the back end so that we stop creating the problem.
There's not a. There's not a safe space to be like, hey, what you did really made me angry or hey, that wasn't okay with me. I need to set this, I need to set this boundary with you. There's no, there's no room for that. So I almost have this visual of like, just like anger compacting and compacting and compacting.[00:16:00]
And the only, the only release for a lot of us in those relationships is to control something else is to redirect that anger towards ourselves, towards our body. Because if my body is the problem, then I can fix it. If the relationship is the problem, I can't fix that. Right. I feel very, that feels very far away.
We're trying to give ourselves something that we can, we can cling to. And, and that is also a distraction. From the actual problem, if I am so focused on measuring my food at every meal and calorie counting during my exercise to make sure I hit a certain number, then that takes up a lot of mental space where I don't have to think about.
How my relationship is going to shit, or how I'm being treated in my relationship, or the fact that I am being abused, or whatever is happening in that dynamic. It, it, like, it checks a lot of boxes, it [00:17:00] serves a lot of It serves a lot of band aids.
Speaker 3: Oh, for sure. It's very effective at distracting from a big, unwieldy, messy, catastrophic problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, similar to drugs and alcohol. It's just another thing. We have, we who are struggling with eating disorders or in recovery have chosen food instead of cocaine or instead of alcohol or, or whatever other substance there is.
Work is even a good distraction. I say good, you know, like it's, it's effective, but not good. Um, it's whatever we can grab onto that we can obsess over that we can spend the majority of our time. Figuring out how to get the thing instead of figuring out how to be with our emotions that are coming up because of the actual issue, the deeper trauma, the deeper emotions, the deeper anger, the deeper, all the, all the deeper.
We can't, we [00:18:00] can't go deeper. We're just staying on the surface, like running on the hamster wheel, trying to. Get ourselves somewhere, but we're just stuck, we're stuck in that cycle.
Speaker 3: And to, you know, not even to mention that when we're hungry and over exercised, we're so foggy. Yeah. You know, and again, another parallel in narcissistic abuse.
Like if there is a characteristic of being in an abusive relationship, is it not brain fog? It's like, wait, what happened? Where am I? Is that, but I said that, but. Was it like that? Was it that bad? Just that like, woo. And the echo of an eating disorder, disordered eating is so similar of , Oh, I don't really know how I feel about that because I don't have the wherewithal.
I'm not fed enough to even know how I feel about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Talk about like exacerbating our nervous system dysregulation, we are in a relationship where [00:19:00] there's a baseline level of unsafety, whether that's psychological, emotional, mental, physical, financial, right? There's a lot of different kinds of. Unsafety that we can feel. So we're already baseline there.
We're walking on eggshells. We're worried about starting a fight. We are worried if we're going to wake up and piss them off by looking at them the wrong way. We're on guard and then we're not feeding our body. So the literal chemical reaction in our body is going through and being like, we're not safe.
We don't have enough food to be safe. So it's, it's exacerbating the unsafety that we're feeling, which It's so hard because on the surface, it feels like you're doing something to, to help your discomfort, help your mind, right? Satiate for a tiny second to take the distress away, but it's actually compounding in the other direction, all of the dysregulation that your body is feeling.
And if we're not feeling safe, it's really hard for us to make rational decisions. It's hard [00:20:00] for us to make sense of our feelings, we just don't have access to those parts of our brain in the same way that we do when we are calm and fully functioning.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So then to get out of that relationship is like you're adding hurdles on top of hurdles because Your mind's not, your body's not safe.
Your mind's not safe. You can't make a plan. You can't figure out what you're feeling. One of the things that so many of my clients say is I just don't know if this is the right decision to leave. And part of the reason, in my opinion, that we can't access that knowing is because it's not because your intuition is broken.
It's not because you're disconnected. It's because you're so dysregulated. You're in such a state of survival, the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, right? We're in, we're living there that we can't access. Any other information.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So we have to, we have to regulate the nervous system to like begin to do so much, so [00:21:00] many parts that are required in order to get out of these types of relationships.
Speaker 3: Right, right. Yeah, the level of problem solving is so huge. Yeah. To get out of. A difficult relationship. I mean, to get out of any relationship, honestly, problem solving is so big, but an abusive one is a different animal. It's a totally different animal.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in wanting to focus on what the recovery can look like, what is that process like for somebody who, who has to start to look at what is happening in the relationship and what they're getting or they're not getting, and how is that, how is that represented with.
with our food and what intake we're putting into our body,
Speaker 3: well, like you're saying, and how we're talking about the way we're coping, if we're coping with something very incredibly difficult and complicated with food, then sometimes we don't go directly [00:22:00] at the food problem,
It's just why when, if someone's struggling with an eating disorder and they go see a nutritionist. It's inadequate to just see a nutritionist, you're just addressing one part of the problem, it doesn't address, the volcano underneath.
What's often needed is building some co regulation skills, building that tolerance for discomfort emotionally, somatically. I think so often with clients that I see who are in difficult relationships, so, so much of the beginning work is simply talking about how you, how people are feeling in the moment.
How are you feeling in this moment? What's happening in your body? And just slowly building the internal sense of safety to even tolerate the inner experience so that, then we can talk about that more complicated, thing that happened this morning. Well, how did you feel when he said that?
Or, oh, when you ate that, how did, what were your thoughts? And of course there's the, the [00:23:00] psychological cognitive work of working through the thoughts of, okay, when I feel that feeling, I think I'm fat, just to get to know that internal mechanism of, Oh, my protective defense is when I feel that, that very complicated, like, Oh shit, this isn't right for me feeling or knowing.
And I go straight to what's, what am I doing today to exercise? Like, that's that deeper, slower therapeutic work, that can take so much time that you know and that I know of, like, just starting to connect, so you build the capacity to even feel sensation and emotion,
And then in terms of the recovery. It's often, it's that difficult feeling that tends to lead to the recovery step, right? Like, oh shit, this isn't working for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You have to make room for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's, it's so complicated, but I love the first step being to [00:24:00] reconnect. Your, your body to your mind because eating disorders are so dissociative, right? We just cut off what the body is saying because that's all too much. And we just live in our head. We live in the analytical, we live in the problem solve like the, the do right.
The very masculine side of us, but being in the body is where you're going to find safety to start to explore the deeper well of stuff underneath,
Speaker 4: right?
Speaker 2: If we can't feel safe. We're not going to have the capacity again in our brain, literally
they have done brain scans of people when they are feeling something distressing and part of the brain that's being activated is the amygdala, which is the fight or flight, freeze or fun are survival center. It's not the emotional brain. It's not the rational brain. Okay. So we have to feel safe enough in our body in order for our body to tell our brain, like, hey, we're safe.
Let's explore some more parts of what this [00:25:00] means. Let's get curious around what, might it feel like to feel anger? Or where did I learn that anger was not okay to feel, we can start to do that deeper integration. Trauma healing really is what it is, right? But our bodies are very smart and if they are not feeling safe.
They're not going to let us access those parts of us. And I think, I don't know this to be a hundred percent true, but I think that that's part of the reason that people get stuck in talk therapy and they're just talking about the problem over and over and over again, and almost like spinning up the nervous system over and over and over and their body's like.
That's as far as you can go. Like
Speaker 4: you
Speaker 2: can't see underneath any more of the layers of the onion here. So somatic work and experiential work is really helpful for the body to feel safe so that we can make more progress in the therapy or in the coaching that we're, we're doing.
Speaker 4: , I agree with all of that.
Speaker 2: And I know part [00:26:00] of what happens when we start to look at our stuff is having to take accountability for the parts that are ours, right? So in, in looking at a relationship, having to have that moment of Oh yeah, I, I allowed that to happen in the sense of I didn't set the boundary, I didn't speak my needs, I didn't leave after the first 50 red flags, right, whatever it is, not saying that you're fully accountable for abusive behavior or, or otherwise, because you're not, but we have pieces of accountability that we Take in these relationships and we have to have a, a reservoir of safety to even be able to access that in order to heal from these relationships or in order to leave these relationships in general.
Do you have anything else around, around that? That's helpful for listeners.
Speaker 3: You know, there is, we know so much about the nervous system now, which is amazing. And yeah, therapy psychology for a [00:27:00] long time, did not know that depth psychology really sees symptoms as soul, that even in that state of dysregulation, it's something in our soul like seeking expression.
So I think I often take a stand for the places in our psyche that are not healed because of that perspective that, you know, where we're dysregulated is where we're kind of wild. And in therapy as a, from a depth psychological perspective, we need to make room for like those out of bounds. Out of the window of tolerance, like those out of bounds experiences to then even find safety. There are archetypal, like you could imagine, that dissociation as a particular, God or goddess that just sort of like takes us over and lets us leave for a little bit to [00:28:00] find respite.
Or, the part of us that might freeze as, a confrontation with Medusa of some kind. I well, this is in my work, like, imagining into and working with those images, Paradoxically helps find regulation, cause they're contained, they're brought into the imaginal realm. They're given space to unfold in a pretty different way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it, it gives you something to like something tangible, if I can see the, the dissociation as Medusa or as another, another archetype, then that helps me personify that. feeling in a way that then I can get curious about that feeling. So I'm seeing some parallels because I, I use parts therapy along with my, um, EFT tapping work.
And it's the same, same theory. We're going about it in different ways of like, how can we personify The [00:29:00] experience, how do I personify the, this, the dissociation and then therefore be able to ask that questions or get curious about that part and what that part is offering and how they're trying to help,
it might not be the healthiest adaptive option, but they learned it somewhere. So it helps us to, to like orient ourselves within our dysfunctional habits, if we can see them as archetypes or parts, and then be able to, to see how they're all working together in a bigger goal, a bigger system.
Speaker 3: I will complicate this a little bit by saying that the archetypal psychology perspective is quite different than that Gestalt parts work perspective in that.
We're a psyche, we're a collective unconscious. And like when I say a Medusa experience in a, the archetypal psychological perspective [00:30:00] is that it's not a part of me, it's an experience of an archetypal. It's like bigger than me. It's not my part actually. It's like the larger ndi,
It's very different. The, What's interesting to me about that, though, is it gives reverence to a larger collective experience. And, it connects us to something sacred, less individualistic, less, based in like, what do I need only?
And while recovery from, abusive relationships, eating disorders is so much about what do I need? What do I need? And go get it. It's a, holding both , what do I need? And knowing it's not all, I'm part of something bigger. I'm not just disconnected, floating in outer space. Like I'm like, there's context to my dreams.
There's context to this [00:31:00] dysregulation. Like there's something meaningful here. And even if it isn't all about me and what I need, I'm participating in a larger psyche. And I think that's quite reparative too. Yes. And that there's a sacred experience
Speaker 2: what might be an example for listeners of what that looks like in, in being able to identify an archetype and see sort of its, its position in our, universe?
Speaker 3: From an archetypal psychology perspective, it's kind of an everything, but what we call complexes in depth psychology are, what we call triggers and kind of normal pop psychology is and our complexes are these clusters of thoughts and feelings that are highly emotional.
And so when you, you might've heard like a mother complex of like, it's what we think of as a trigger, right? That complex in depth [00:32:00] psychology has a core that is archetypal.
And so the energy that activates the trigger. is thought of to be archetypal. So this thing that I got from my mother that , makes me dislike this part of relating to other people, you know, being very general here, isn't the archetypal core would be maybe like the great mother, the capital M mother or something.
And so it's not just about my personal mother, although obviously that informs it, but there's a larger, archetypal experience when we think about our triggers as something transpersonal, as something spiritual. Like there's a spiritual dimension to these triggers that if we can imagine into them as the capital M mother, that can start to lend some curiosity.
to what we're going through.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know very much about depth psychology, so this is fascinating to me. Thank you for explaining it. [00:33:00]
Speaker 3: Yeah. I want to
Speaker 2: think of,
Speaker 3: well, I'll share that in my book, I write about this archetype, Echidna, who is a goddess, monster figure who lives, who is banished to this cave under the by the gods.
And she's the mother of all these monsters that you might have heard of Cerberus, the Hydra of Lerna, Sphinx. And when I was doing some research, when I was in finishing my PhD around this, the idea of a cultural dieting complex, that we have this obsession with dieting that doesn't work.
Like that's always interesting. It's, we know research shows dieting doesn't work. We gain more weight than we lose. Like it just doesn't work, but it's, we keep going back to it. And so I was researching that through a depth psychological perspective. Like why do we keep doing this thing that we know doesn't work?
And I had this dream [00:34:00] of a woman, this like beautiful woman who's kind of a model in the dream and half of her was this huge like serpent sea creature. And I had never heard of Echidna, but this, this was my dream image.
And she takes this huge bite out of another snake. And it's like, Blood dripping. And it was like very visceral and intense. And I was like, huh, that was intense. And I just happened the next day. This is like evidence of synchronicity if there ever was one, I was studying Greek mythology for a class and I opened a book I had to read and it just opened to this image that was the same as my dream.
And it was this goddess Echidna. And the more I. learned about her or imagined into, who is this figure? I started to think of her as this really important ally in women's recovery from Dieting and body image problems, like just this cultural obsession with [00:35:00] control and rigidity that she's the opposite figure of that.
And for one of my, for when I was launching my book, I led a workshop based on, the book, but also this idea of true hunger.
And part of the workshop is people journey to meet Echidna and just to hear what this archetypal figure might have to say. And that what people have shared with me after is just so fascinating. There's often people often say, she ate me.
I went, I journeyed down to meet her and she ate me. Um, but people can actually do take that workshop for free on my website after if you're curious about it. But that's another way to imagine into these archetypes that are supportive. Imagine this figure that is like, I will eat you if you cross me, I have hunger that is ravenous.
I'm embodied in that, serpents are often that root chakra symbolically, it's connected to the earth, and I will do it. In a beautiful [00:36:00] way,
Speaker 2: I love that. It's, it's helping us make meaning out of things,
That's such a cool, whether it's dreams or archetypes or, or whatever, whatever it is that gives us a sense of meaning or bigger connection or understanding is so valuable.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: for the work that you do. This is, this is so amazing and has been such a good conversation. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: This was great. Yes. To dive into together.
Speaker 2: Towards the end, or at the end of these episodes, I always pull an Oracle card. So speaking of, of, uh, not necessarily archetypes specifically, but they offer a message, so I'd love your participation to help pull a card on behalf of the listeners. Great. So I'll just have you close your eyes for me and you and I are going to both just tune into the deck.
I'm starting to shuffle the deck. We're just going to ask the energies that be, what is the message that is intended for the listeners today? [00:37:00] And Kathryn, whenever you feel like the shuffle's complete, you tell me when to stop.
Speaker 4: Complete.
Speaker 2: A. We got soothe, which if you're not watching the video, it's a picture of a big hand and then like baby hands holding the, holding one of the fingers. So I'm going to find it in the book here and I'm going to read what the message is. Sooth brings a message of comfort. Allow the Divine Mother to hold you tightly and close to her bosom.
She sends a message of reassure, reassure, she sends a message of reassurance and unconditional love. You are okay. You are safe. You are loved. You may rest here assured that you are on the right path, deeply cared for, and held in love. If you are feeling that low level buzz of worry, or perhaps you are in a situation that is fully activating your internal alarm systems, know that Soothe comes with an important message [00:38:00] to take care of yourself.
To reconnect with your soul's purpose and release into the arms of the Divine Mother. Soothe your body with self massage. Soothe your worry by asking the Divine Mother for consolation. Love and care are needed now. Listen to the music you love. Eat a delicious, nourishing meal in noble silence. Wrap yourself in a blanket and give yourself a squeeze.
You are loved.
I love it. I mean, it talked about safety. It talked about the divine mother, right? The archetype. So perfect, perfect card for today.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Kathryn, where do you want to, where do you want to point people so that they can find your book and all your, your resources?
Speaker 3: My website is the best place to find me, and I send out a newsletter with writings about depth psychology, soul work, most weeks actually. So that's the best place is kathryncholt.
com. I have very limited social media use and I'm [00:39:00] constantly debating not being on it at all, but I'm still technically on it, and that's drkathryncholt. That's on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. And remind everyone the name of your book.
Speaker 3: I have two books. One is the Overcoming Body Hatred Workbook. It's focused on depth psychology and behavioral psychology and recovering from, yeah, body hatred, discontent with our bodies.
And then the other one is, was co authored several years ago, called Stronger Than BPD Journal, and it's about borderline personality disorder. And Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
Speaker 2: Amazing. Yeah. So good. We're going to link all the things in the show notes for anybody who wants to check Kathryn out further.
And thank you. Thank you for the work that you do in this world. , I know that these messages that we put into the podcast touch more people than we probably will ever, um, touch. know or realize. So thank you for being willing to share your wisdom with us today.
Speaker 4: [00:40:00] Thank you, Bre. I appreciate it.
As we conclude today's episode. Remember that you're not alone. If you are experiencing some of these feelings within your body, if you're experiencing that repressed, anger, and control and anxiety. No, that you're not alone. Healing is definitely possible. I have done it. I have seen it with my clients. You are not alone in that. To recap what we talked about today, we talked about why feeling fat is not a feeling. And how we get stuck in that description and how we can actually begin to reconnect the mind and body. Uh, to be able to access our real emotions and be able to articulate what we're actually feeling so that we can then tend to those emotions. You also learned that repressed, anger, and anxiety that you don't know how to be with, or even repressed anxiety. Contribute. To eating disorders and relationship challenges. And how important it is to be able to sit [00:41:00] with both of those emotions. And be able to express them healthfully.
And now, hopefully you also better understand the nervous system regulation connection. And how disordered eating, being underfed and being in toxic relationships, being in an unsafe environment mentally, emotionally, physically. Exacerbate our nervous system and really keep us in that sympathetic fight flight freeze or fawn mode and how we need to regulate the nervous system so that we can actually get unstuck from the cycles.
And if you enjoyed this episode, I want to point you to episode 40, it's called finding self love and trust in yourself so that you can heal heartbreak and increase your self esteem with EFT tapping. And that episode is going to walk you through how to use. A tool called EFT tapping. That is one of the number one nervous system regulation tools, super easy to learn, super accessible.
And one that I use on myself and with all of my clients.
So until next time, this podcast is for you and you [00:42:00] are not alone.