Eating Disorders: Navigating Recovery

Catherine and Francis are excited to welcome Deanna Linville, Ph.D, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the state of Oregon. She joins the podcast to talk about the importance and value of including support systems -- family, chosen family, friends, and caretakers -- in the treatment and recovery of eating disorders, noting that the family as a whole experiences the eating disorder, not only the individual. 

She brings two decades of experience providing direct mental health care, clinical supervision, and training as well as conducting clinical research to the podcast. Her professional experiences to date inspire and inform her clinical research and allow her to stay on the cutting edge of best practices for training mental health professionals to provide ethical and culturally responsive care.

Linville earned her MS and Ph.D. degrees at Virginia Tech in Marriage and Family Therapy as well as completed a 12-month doctoral fellowship at the Chicago Center for Family Health, where she gained specialized training and experience working in collaborative family healthcare settings. She has published over forty manuscripts as well as developed and tested numerous clinical interventions aimed to reduce health disparities, prevent eating disorders, and promote family wellness. 

Catherine and Francis are grateful for Deanna's time, and are excited to provide space for both her lived and professional experiences with eating disorders to be heard.

Catherine and Francis are excited to welcome Deanna Linville, Ph.D, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the state of Oregon. She joins the podcast to talk about the importance and value of including support systems -- including family, chosen family, friends, and caretakers -- in the treatment and recovery of eating disorders, noting that the family as a whole experiences the eating disorder, not only the individual.

She brings two decades of experience providing direct mental health care, clinical supervision, and training as well as conducting clinical research to the podcast. Her professional experiences to date inspire and inform her clinical research and allow her to stay on the cutting edge of best practices for training mental health professionals to provide ethical and culturally responsive care. Linville earned her MS and Ph.D. degrees at Virginia Tech in Marriage and Family Therapy as well as completed a 12-month doctoral fellowship at the Chicago Center for Family Health, where she gained specialized training and experience working in collaborative family healthcare settings. She has published over forty manuscripts as well as developed and tested numerous clinical interventions aimed to reduce health disparities, prevent eating disorders, and promote family wellness.

Catherine and Francis are grateful for Deanna's time, and are excited to provide space for both her lived and professional experiences with eating disorders to be heard.

In this week's digest, Catherine and Francis reflect on their conversation with Kristen Tully, MSW, who spoke about the intersection of grief and eating disorders. Francis talks about his passion for the topic, revealing the complexities of grief within his lived experience. Catherine comments on how support for grieving an eating disorder is received quite differently -- if at all -- than the support for the loss of a relationship or death of a family member or friend.

On this episode, Catherine and Francis are grateful and excited to welcome KristenTully, she/her, an advocate for Eating Disorder education, awareness, and recovery. Kristen received her Master of Social Work and Nonprofit Management Certificate from VCU in 2020. Today she discusses her experience with an eating disorder, including how a difficult conversation with her parents catalyzed her recovery. Kristen also outlines the stages of grief, and explores the intersection of grief work and eating disorder recovery. Finally, she shares her tips for self-care.

Kristen continues to use her voice of lived experience and education as an advocacy tool to help others who are struggling. She had the honor of organizing the Richmond NEDA Walk for four years and is currently an ANAD mentor. Kristen identifies as a person in recovery, a cat-lover, and a mental health advocate. In her free time she enjoys hiking, kayaking, crafting, and going to estate sales as forms of self care.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

NOTE: Despite our best editing efforts, there are some sound quality issues during the interview.

Catherine and Francis take a moment to reflect on how to approach the new year, and all the harmful language around body, food, and health often associated with it. It's been a challenging year for many, and whether you are a person who creates resolutions or intentions, as we turn the page on 2020, give yourself permission to create space to offer yourself self-compassion and self-care. Most importantly, be kind to yourself this year - you deserve it.

In this digest, Francis and Catherine reflect on their conversation with Misti Anderson, contributor to Catherine's book, Hope for Recovery: Stories of Healing from Eating Disorders. They discuss the intersection of eating disorders and addiction and how people in recovery from both addiction and eating disorders can support one another. Francis also reflects on how his eating disorder challenged him but has also brought good things into his life.

Welcome back! In Part Two of Catherine and Francis’s conversation with Misti Anderson – a contributor to Catherine’s book Hope for Recovery: Stories of Healing from Eating Disorders – Misti discusses how support in uncommon or unlikely places (in her case, a colleague with their own challenging experiences) can often help remain or get back on the road to recovery; talks about the intersection of eating disorders and alcohol and substance use disorders; and shares her thoughts on what folks seeking recovery should know about the journey ahead. Enjoy!

Welcome to Episode 45 of Eating Disorders, Navigating Recovery! As always, we’re grateful for your listenership and interest in this important topic. We’re thrilled to introduce Misti Anderson, who joins the program with a story of struggle, recovery, and hope. Misti is a former chemistry teacher and currently works in science ethics and policy. In her teens she struggled with bulimia and, while in college, she began her recovery. She found a reasonably healthy plateau that sustained her for a decade before meeting a friend who would change her recovery forever and help her continue her journey toward deeper understanding, forgiveness, and a much healthier self-awareness. She continues this work still.

In this first part of our conversation with Misti, she walks us through how her experience with an eating disorder began and what maintained her need to use maladaptive behaviors. She takes time to discuss how eating disorders – as a disease – are not about willpower and choice, but about creating more sustainable habits that will help build a foundation upon which to live a meaningful and joyful life. Enjoy!

In this week's digest, Catherine and Francis reflect on their conversation with Dr. Kim Daniels, a licensed clinical psychologist and online coach with practices in Hartford, Connecticut. The co-hosts explore further the differences between "overeating," emotional eating, and binge eating, and discuss how subjective binges differ from objective binges and ultimately how these experiences may impact the support received. Finally, in an effort to shift the typically negatively-oriented focus on emotional eating, Catherine and Francis share the joy they experience in emotional eating with family and friends -- an experience that is allowed to be enjoyed!

In Part 2, Kim talks about the morality of food (chocolate as sinful, lowfat versions as angelic) and our culture's celebration of restriction. She also discusses body image and the limits of the body positivity movement. The conversation concludes with thoughts about how people can identify and find treatment for binge eating.