Episode 314: My guest this week on the show is Julia Trehane. Julia fully recovered after living with an eating disorder for 40+ years. We talk about Julia's difficult upbringing, the many phases of her eating disorder, what did and didn't help in her recovery and many of the things she now works on with clients as a recovery coach.
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Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcripts and the show notes and everything we talk about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/314.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover irrespective of how long the eating disorder has been going on.
Before we get started with today’s episode, I just want to announce that I’m currently taking on clients. If you are wanting to recover and you’re wanting the help and the assistance to make that a reality, I would love to be able to assist you with that. As I said at the top, it doesn’t matter how long the eating disorder has been going on, whether this is something that started a year ago or many decades ago. I’ve had clients who have recovered in their thirties and forties and fifties, even though this was something that started in their teen years or even younger. So if you are sick and tired of living with an eating disorder and want to fully recover, then please reach out. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put ‘Coaching’ in the subject line, and then I can get in contact with you.
On with today’s episode. Today’s episode is a guest interview, and my guest today is Julia Trehane. Julia is someone who lived with an eating disorder for over four decades and has now made a full recovery. She is now a recovery coach, and she is helping others to also make a full recovery.
I was put on to Julia through Victoria Kleinsman. Victoria was Julia’s coach and was the person who helped her to fully recover. They also do some podcast episodes together. I know she’s been on Victoria’s podcast a number of times. Victoria had reached out and said, “Hey, I think you should interview Julia; she’s got a fascinating story. She’s now helping other people.”
I really enjoyed doing this episode – and I enjoy doing episodes like this, where I’m able to share the stories of people who have lived with an eating disorder for such a long time and then been able to recover, because I just don’t think this message is getting out into the world in the way that it should. Eating disorders are often portrayed as this thing that you have when you’re a teenager or maybe in your early twenties and then you just grow out of it and that’s it, but the reality is, for most people, they’re not growing out of it, and it’s still going on in their thirties and forties and even their fifties. Because to actually recover requires that you do certain things to make that a reality.
So it’s really useful to be able to have these conversations, and there’s a lot as part of Julia’s story.
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I do want to say that there is a trigger warning with this one because there are many details as part of Julia’s story that are pretty heavy and difficult to listen to. She talks about a suicide attempt, she talks about trauma. So this is by no means a light episode.
I also want to add that I know for so many people with eating disorders, there is a lot of competition with it and a lot of comparison with other people, and this tendency to not feel ‘sick enough’ and for the eating disorder to convince you that “Maybe this isn’t really that much of an issue, it’s not really a thing; lots of people are careful about what they eat or lots of people are into exercise”, and will always come up with logic for why this isn’t such a concern.
What I want to say with Julia’s story, before her point of starting recovery, it does get into quite an extreme place. And I don’t want anyone to get to the place that Julia got to. So if your eating disorder is trying to convince you after listening to this that you don’t have a problem, you’re not sick enough – that is not the message to take from this. If you have anything with food or exercise that is negatively impacting your life, it doesn’t matter if it’s not to the extreme that it was for Julia. You deserve and need to get help.
So please, use this episode in the way that it is intended, which is to demonstrate that someone can have an eating disorder for a long amount of time and make a full recovery as opposed to having the eating disorder hijack some very valuable insights and information.
That is it with this intro. Let me get on with the show. Here is my interview with Julia Trehane.
Hey, Julia. Welcome to Real Health Radio. I’m very excited to chat with you today.
Julia Trehane: Hey, Chris. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been really looking forward to talking with you.
Chris Sandel: Nice. You are someone who has recovered from an eating disorder that went on for four decades, so I think a big part of what we’re going to chat about today is your recovery, or the eating disorder and the many facets and how that looked, and then your recovery journey. And you are now a recovery coach, so I want to talk about that and how you got into that and the work that you do with people. I know you have your own podcast, so I’ve gone through some of the topics that you’ve covered as part of that. So there’s a lot that we can cover today.
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But I guess just as a very starting place, can you give a little introduction on yourself – your name, who you are, what you do, any training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Julia Trehane: Sure, yes. My name’s Julia Trehane. I’m primarily an anorexia recovery coach, but really any form of restrictive eating disorder. I help people recover, and I’ve been trained as a transformational life coach, a spiritual life coach; I’ve trained in CBTE for eating disorders; I’m a former mental health nurse; and my own experience and recovery is pretty much what I use most of all. I’ve also done some training in things like EMDR and NLP and stuff like that.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I definitely want to come back to some of those things and get a little more information. But let’s start with your journey.
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If we go back to you as a young child, what was your relationship with food like? What was food like in your household?
Julia Trehane: I don’t remember particularly having any issues with my relationship with food when I was very little. My mum was constantly on a diet, constantly doing dodgy videos with legwarmers and leotards and things like that. [laughs] Which were around at the time. So she was very, very aware of diet culture. I guess I became quite aware of it through her, but I don’t remember ever feeling like it related to me particularly.
But I had a very critical father. I’m not blaming him at all; it was his own conditioning, his own childhood, and partly generational as well, the time he was brought up in. I think I was quite a sensitive child, and I struggled with the criticism. I always wanted to be good, I wanted to do the right thing, and I seemed to never be able to with him. I realised that I could be better if I wasn’t seen so much by him. I wouldn’t get in trouble or criticised if I wasn’t really seen. My child brain realised that not being seen meant being smaller, and that’s where everything started.
Chris Sandel: In terms of the criticism, was it directed about your body? Or it was just across the board, “You’re not doing well enough in school, you’re being too loud”, just everything?
Julia Trehane: Anything and everything. There was very little praise. It was more if I’d got 9 out of 10 in my spellings, it was like, “Why didn’t you learn that 10th one properly?” Anything, really, was criticised.
Chris Sandel: And was your mum then coming in and trying to save you from that kind of stuff? She was onboard with “this is the way that parenting is meant to be”? How was the relationship with your mum in regard to the criticism?
Julia Trehane: My dad was quite a dominating character, so my mum never really said anything against him. I don’t know whether it was ever said it was my job, but I always felt it was my job to look after my mum, to stop my mum being criticised by my dad, to make sure she was happy, to shower her with praise and love. She always used to tell me I was her little rock that got her through everything and that I was her best friend. So I always felt that it was my job to serve my mum.
Chris Sandel: And did you have other siblings?
Julia Trehane: Yes, I had an older brother who I don’t think I ever really got on with particularly well. He was very much like my dad.
Chris Sandel: I was just wondering if there was other siblings you could confide in or be able to talk about behind closed doors how annoying it is that Dad’s doing this thing, or you could use stronger words than just ‘annoying’.
Julia Trehane: No, not at all. My brother was just like my dad and joined in with criticisms and stuff.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned about your child brain coming up with the solution of “if I make myself smaller, I’ll be less visible to him and then receive less criticism.” When did that thought start? But when did the action of then taking on that thought begin?
Julia Trehane: Honestly, I think the thoughts probably started very young, about five or six years old. And then as I started to grow up a bit more, by the time I was like eight, I had started to restrict. I think I had then linked some body comments that Dad used to say and Mum used to say. I remember my trousers being too short. I had this absolutely awful pair of brown cords. When I look back and imagine them, they were dreadful. But I thought they were amazing at the time. And I remember them being too short, and I said to my mum, “My trousers are too short”, and she said, “No, your bum’s too big.” Instantly I was like, “Oh, okay, so it’s my fault. I need to be smaller.”
So yeah, I think at eight I started actively eating less. I suppose it was restricting. It wasn’t in my brain at the time. It had this like magical side effect to me, because one of the things that my dad was most unhappy about was emotion. If I cried, if I was angry, if I laughed too much – any form of emotion wasn’t permitted. And being sensitive. I used to cry quite a lot; little girl, I suppose – and I realised that restricting my food stoped me feeling, and then I didn’t show the emotions, so that was amazing to me then, because it meant that I was smaller, I didn’t get seen as much, and I didn’t feel as much, so I didn’t get into trouble either.
I guess that’s how it all started. I felt like I was finally doing something right.
Chris Sandel: With the restriction piece at that stage, in the early stages, was this something you were doing in secret? Or it was something that was very obvious to others? I know you mentioned about your mum being a dieter. So was it something you were doing with her?
Julia Trehane: In some ways, yes. I remember I used to love butter. I used to absolutely love bread and butter and stuff, and I remember not having the bread and starting to have Ryvitas, because she used to eat a Ryvita for lunch, and not having butter but having a scraping of salad cream because it was low calorie.
I did those sort of things with my mum, but then I started to hide food, as in take food off my plate and either let the dog have it or just put it in my pockets or in my lap and then go and hide it. And that was very much done in secret. I guess I knew in some way – I don’t know how I knew, but I knew in some way that they wouldn’t be happy with what I was doing.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned also about the emotions piece, that this was a way to dampen down the emotions and a way of regulating – although ‘regulating’ might not be the right word, but a way of basically turning off.
Julia Trehane: Yes.
Chris Sandel: How quickly did you notice that effect?
Julia Trehane: I stopped crying at eight years old, and I didn’t cry again until I was in recovery at forty-eight.
Chris Sandel: That’s a while.
Julia Trehane: Yeah. It felt like a superpower.
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Chris Sandel: With this commencing and you starting to do this and notice these changes, and you said the weight started to come down, at what point was there any alarm bells? Were there any people who were saying “I think there’s a problem here”? Or that wasn’t what occurred? I just want to know what happened next.
Julia Trehane: I think I kept it that I was eating enough to not ring massive alarm bells, and I also realised that I was getting colder and colder, so I started wearing more and more layers. Which made me look normal sized. I managed to keep going with that and keep it hidden until I was about 14, when at school we got a new PE teacher who would not let me get away with wearing my tracksuit in PE, and I had to put on the shorts and t-shirt. Actually, they were those awful PE knickers that people used to wear. The great big blue and gold striped, terrible things they were.
Because I’d always kept in the tracksuit with layers underneath, nobody knew what size I was, and I got basically caught out then because I was in the shorts and t-shirt and it was very obvious then that I was quite underweight. The school phoned my parents, and they were absolutely furious with me. I went to the doctor and I was told that I had to just start eating again.
My dad took it upon himself to make me start eating again, and I think I was more scared of my dad than the eating disorder. I knew I would get punished if I didn’t do as he said. He used to stand over me and I would eat. When he wasn’t there, I wouldn’t eat. But I did kind of weight restore.
But at the same time, my parents were going through a very messy divorce, and there was a recession, so they were still both living in the same house but in separate bedrooms, and saying “tell your dad this”, “tell your mum this.” They were really caught up in their own troubles, so I was still able to stay fairly under the radar.
I put on enough weight for them to not be stressing so much. I was still I guess underweight for me, and there was certainly no mental repair work done at all. There didn’t seem to be any help outside of that, or certainly none that I was aware of.
They finally split up; my mum moved abroad for a little while when I was 16, and the day she left, I came home and my bags had been packed and I was out of that house. My dad told me that I reminded him too much of my mum and he didn’t want to see me again. So I was out. I went and stayed in my friend’s caravan at the bottom of her garden for a little while. I already had a Saturday job at the local market, and I started working there on Sundays as well, and on Fridays before school, and I managed to earn enough to pay rent on a room in a little house.
Actually, things got a bit better then. I guess I didn’t feel under pressure to be hidden away. So yeah, I left home at 16.
Chris Sandel: That’s a lot to be dealing with as a 16-year-old, especially with the preceding years of all the criticism and then Mum and Dad going through this messy divorce while living under one roof. That’s a lot.
Julia Trehane: It was tough. It was a difficult time, yeah. When I look back to my younger self, I have so much love and compassion for her. But at the time, I guess it just was what it was.
Chris Sandel: You don’t have time to dwell. You’re like, “I need to be pragmatic about this. I don’t have somewhere to live.” It’s often not at that point that the tears come because you’re like, “Right, I need to figure this out.”
Julia Trehane: Yes. I guess I was pretty resourceful, really. I managed to do school and work and live for a couple of years.
Chris Sandel: Before you go further with this, I just want to go back a second. There’s something I was thinking of. When there was that point of the doctor telling you you needed to eat more and then your dad standing over you and you having to eat more, at that point for you, was there any alarm bells of recognising “Maybe this is a problem”? Or at that stage it was just your solution? And then how was it for you when you were having to eat more in those situations? Obviously it’s not nice with your dad being there, but in terms of the eating disorder fears, did you recognise them and did that seem like it made sense?
Julia Trehane: That’s a really good question. There was a lot of fear about eating, I knew that. I became quite an expert at lying and saying that I’d had food when I hadn’t had food, saying that I would have a bit more later. I manipulated the situation as much as I could to get by and to not gain any more than I was absolutely forced to. There was a lot of fear. But as I said, the fear of my dad was probably stronger. It was a confusing time.
It’s strange; a lot of my memories of the early part of it, because I was really quite underweight then, are quite sketchy. I think my brain switched off to most things. So it’s all a bit hazy.
Chris Sandel: For sure. One, we’re going back quite a number of years anyway, but two, there’s the eating disorder; three, there’s a lot of trauma going on, and I would imagine there’d probably be a lot of disassociating when there’s a house where there’s screaming going on or upset. It doesn’t sound like the environment that someone’s going to be really switched on in. There’s going to be a lot of “What are the ways I can escape from this?”, whether that is physically escaping or just doing things cognitively where I’m going to a different place.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, I do remember spending a lot of time hiding in my wardrobe. It was quite a big wardrobe, by the way. It wasn’t a really tiny one. It was like a ‘Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe’ wardrobe, and I had all sorts of things in there and a little lamp in there, and I used to hide in there and read my books. That felt safe in there.
Chris Sandel: As big as your wardrobe may have been, that’s no place for a kid to be spending their time because they feel they have to, because it’s the only place that feels safe. It’s one thing to be in a house where it’s loving and kind and then you have this really lovely place in your wardrobe because it’s your fun place versus what you’re describing.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, it wasn’t really a fun place. It was a safe place.
Chris Sandel: So catch us up, then. What happened from there in terms of you started this job, you found a place to stay, and then what happened from there?
Julia Trehane: Things were quite stable, I guess because I wasn’t with my parents anymore. I managed to eat enough to get by. It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to stop continuously losing and to function. And then when I was 18, I met a boy and I moved in with him pretty quick, actually. We went back to the living in a caravan. We lived in a little caravan, and I basically fell in love. I’m still in love with him; he’s my husband now.
Things were really not too bad. That was probably the most stable period in my life. I was doing okay, I was functioning, I felt quite safe, and everything felt quite okay. I’d managed to regain my period. We got married when I was 21 – which, when I look back, I’m like, wow, that was so young. And shortly after that I fell pregnant. I was nursing by this time, and unfortunately there was a situation with one of the psychiatric patients who was quite violent, and I lost the baby.
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And then I got pregnant again, and I had my first son. Then I had another child, and my first son had a reaction to egg. He had anaphylaxis to egg – which was in everything. There’s so much egg around. So I became really, really careful about what food we had in the house. I started to make everything from scratch, and I took it really quite obsessive. It went very, very far, and everything had to be clean, everything had to be organic. It was a very orthorexic way of eating. It was quite extreme, and I would then restrict so many different things, so many food groups – all sugars.
Chris Sandel: That was not just for him, that was for everyone in the family? Or just him and you?
Julia Trehane: I restricted everyone in the family, which isn’t my finest moment. But I thought I was doing the right thing. I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing at the time, and I did work really hard to make them nice things, like making cakes with dates and things like that. But then I wouldn’t eat any of that stuff. I wouldn’t eat anything with any form of sugars, even if they were natural sugars.
Then I started to get a lot of body image thoughts, and I decided to go into a ‘weigh in and work out’ class after I had my second son. I saw the scales go down each time I went in and the exercise felt great, so I then stopped doing it once a week to once a day to several times a day until I was exercising for about eight hours a day.
Then I learnt about intermittent fasting, so I introduced that, and then I learnt all these things that say “If you fast for longer, it does all these benefits to the body”, so I started doing longer fasts, and then there was all this thing about not eating carbohydrates, so I stopped eating carbohydrates. I was just restricting the times I ate, restricting entire food groups, and it just got to this weird ‘Groundhog Day’ existence where what I was eating was getting smaller and smaller.
I started lying a lot again about what I was having and when I’d eaten and why I wasn’t eating with the family and stuff like that.
Chris Sandel: Because your husband was then getting concerned and there was red flags?
Julia Trehane: No, because I didn’t want him to get concerned.
Chris Sandel: Getting out in front of it.
Julia Trehane: Yeah. What I thought was luckily for me at the time was that he was quite a workaholic and was wanting to provide for his family, so he was constantly involved in work. So he didn’t notice me that much, and with children as well, I was busy with the children, he was busy with work. So, as many couples do, we kind of led slightly separate lives for a long time. So he didn’t really know – because he’d never known me without an eating disorder, and he’d never known that I’d had an eating disorder. He just thought I was a bit weird and obsessive about food and that I was very obsessed with exercise. But a lot of that I did in secret as well. And this carried on for years. It was just like ‘Groundhog Day’, over and over and over again.
Chris Sandel: But at that point would you have said “I have an eating disorder”? I don’t know if that label was given to you when you were the teenager with the doctor, or how did you think about it?
Julia Trehane: I knew that there was an issue. I knew that I couldn’t eat normally. I’d become so adept at lying to say I was doing things for my health and all this sort of thing that I was believing my own lies. Does that make sense?
Chris Sandel: It does. I think it makes sense for many people because that’s what happens. There’s this very stereotypical view of what it means to have an eating disorder, and people just don’t see themselves as being that person. “That’s not what I’m doing. Yeah, I’ve got some stuff around food or I’ve got some stuff around my exercise, but it’s not an eating disorder.”
Julia Trehane: Yeah. In my mind, I didn’t look like a skeleton, and therefore I was fine. I was very into CrossFit, and a lot of people in that community are very obsessive about what they eat. Clean eating was a real thing then. Also, working out a lot was celebrated. So I got a lot of validation for what I did, which made me feel it was a good thing to do. I got a lot of validation for being thin and muscular. And that made me feel good because I’d never validated myself.
There was also a strange, but good, feeling of superiority. It doesn’t feel good to say, when people were saying, “I wish I could eat like you” and “I wish I could say no to crisps and cake and stuff” – it felt like I was a bit superior, and it felt good to be the one that could say no, the one that had all that willpower.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting because I’ve heard this – it’s not that this is just you that has this feeling; there’s many people where this is the case. The thing that often happens is there’s that superiority piece until it doesn’t really feel like superiority. The point at which you recognise “I’m not in control, I’m being controlled; I’m not really the one that has the willpower.” The willpower would be “Let’s take off exercise today, or let’s eat that piece of cake today”, and when you recognise “I don’t have the capacity to be able to do this; this has got nothing to do with willpower”, I think that’s where it switches.
I’ve had many clients have this situation where they’ve been offered that as a bit of praise, and it makes their blood boil because there’s this feeling of “You don’t know half of what is going on here. You wouldn’t want to trade this for a day” – and yet this person is trying to be complimentary about “Wow, it’s so dedicated of you to always go out for a run no matter what the weather is. That’s such willpower.” The reality is, that’s not willpower. It’s the fact that someone is compulsively doing that and just can’t do anything else.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely. It was very definitely in control of me. I knew in the way that if we went on a family holiday, the flight times and stuff had to be around the times I could go to the gym. I wouldn’t agree on a hotel unless it was all-inclusive, because then they had a buffet restaurant, so I could put salad on my plate and choose safe foods. The thought of having to go to a restaurant and choose foods off a menu was terrifying to me. The hotel had to have a gym, and I would have to take my running stuff and my gym stuff. And then in the all-inclusive hotels, a lot of them have fitness classes, so I would do all those as well.
There was so much that I had to do that my life revolved around making sure I did this, making sure I did the exercise, making sure I had access to the only types of food I would allow myself to eat. And if there wasn’t access, then I would say “I’m on a long fast” so that I could get away with not eating.
Unfortunately, people were like “Oh, that’s amazing. I wish I could fast like that. I wish I could do that.” As you said, I used to think, “You don’t. I’m exhausted. I just want to rest, and I can’t. I want to just let go, and I can’t.” So yeah, it’s really hard when people validate disordered behaviours.
Chris Sandel: For sure, and I think unfortunately we live in a society that validates disordered behaviours a lot, and in lots of different ways.
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When did it either all come to a head or when did you make the realisation of “I cannot do this anymore and I need to do something different”?
Julia Trehane: When Covid hit, it was really tough when the gyms closed. I really struggled and went out cycling for miles and miles and running and walking and doing home exercise and stuff, and it was consuming me. It was really much harder to hide behaviours then because I wasn’t able to be away from home without people knowing where I was and stuff.
And then a few months into Covid, my dad died, and all these emotions started coming up. I didn’t know how to process emotions; I’d not done it since I was a tiny child. So I restricted to not have them because I didn’t know how to feel them, and they felt really scary. And it didn’t work. So I restricted more, and it didn’t work. I kept on increasing the restriction, increasing the exercise. At this point I did start to resemble that skeleton.
I think the gyms had reopened by this point, and I’d gone back and I kept passing out in the gym. My gym coach said to me, “You’re not allowed to come anymore. You’re not safe to be in here.” And that was like my world had ended. That was the only thing I felt kept me sane at the time. I was just in an absolute whirlwind of all these emotions that were coming up, and I was trying to restrict them and they wouldn’t stop coming up, and there was all these thoughts and feelings about my dad and things from my childhood coming up.
And then I lost the gym, and I was so scared of being committed to a psychiatric hospital, because I thought I was going mad. I really thought I was completely losing my mind, and I had no idea what to do. I was restricting more and more and more. I was even passing out on dog walks. I was making my poor dogs walk for hours every day. I had these numbers in my head of steps I had to achieve, which took about six or seven hours of continuous walking to achieve them. My poor dogs were exhausted.
I’d got to the point where I had completely stopped eating for a very long time. Far longer than – when I look back, I think, how did I actually survive that? I have no idea. I got to the point where I thought I was thinking clearly. When I look back, I absolutely wasn’t. My brain was so low on energy I couldn’t think clearly at all. But I decided that I couldn’t cope with living anymore and that everybody would be better off without me, my kids would be better off without me, that I was of no value whatsoever. I’d always thought I was of no value anyway. I always thought I was a rubbish person. I had such a strong inner critic.
So I planned to take my life. I have anaphylaxis to gin, which is a very random thing to have anaphylaxis to. So I bought a bottle of gin; I wrote notes to my kids and to my husband. For some reason I went to the woods to drink this gin. I don’t know why I went to the woods. I took the lid off the gin, because I knew that literally within a couple of mouthfuls I’d go into anaphylactic shock. I guess I didn’t want anyone to find me quickly. I think that’s why I went to the woods.
I put the bottle up to my mouth, and I heard in my head my children’s voices. The weirdest thing was, they were furious. It was like, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? How fucking dare you do this to us? You are so selfish! Can you believe what legacy you’re going to leave us? This is the most selfish, unkind thing you’ve ever done to us!” They were so angry.
I stopped because I was like, “Wow.” It really felt like they were there, like they were screaming at me, and that I was going to damage them by doing what I was planning on doing. I went home. My husband’s a blueberry farmer, and it was blueberry season, and he came home quite late because it was the middle of harvest season, and I said to him – he remembers the words really clearly – “I need to tell you something, you’ve got to listen, and you’re not allowed to try and fix me.” [laughs]
I just broke down, and I cried for the first time in 40 years. That’s when I decided that I couldn’t carry on. What I thought I was in control of was totally in control of me. I knew that I couldn’t get out of it on my own.
Chris Sandel: Gosh, that’s so heartbreaking to hear about you getting to that place. The sad thing is, when you look at the statistics around eating disorders, where they talk about it being the worst mental health disorder because of death, it is suicide that is the big thing that is pushing up those numbers. It’s people getting to a state like you did, where it feels like “This is my only way out, I’m worthless, no-one’s going to miss me, I’m doing a favour for everyone else.” That’s the way that it typically goes.
And yes, there are lots of people who sadly pass away because of organs shutting down or the body not being able to continue on, but so many people, it’s suicide. And it’s suicide purely because of the state that they’re in. And I’m not saying that you didn’t have a very difficult childhood and that there couldn’t have been things done differently in terms of the way your dad was and your mum was and all of those things. But the thing that was really pushing you to that place was the malnourished state you were in and how that affected your brain and your cognition and your mind and how you were able to see you and the world and all of those things.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, it absolutely was. I had no idea at the time that my brain was simply unable to function, and I was just in that ‘fight or flight’ response continuously. It was all down to malnourishment, really, that actual crisis.
00:39:53
Chris Sandel: So what happened from there? What did your recovery look like? I know it’s not then going to be this lovely linear, ‘everything improves in a day’ type thing, but what happened?
Julia Trehane: Oh, the sun came out, the roses grew, and everything was okay. [laughs] No, I went to the GP; she referred me to eating disorder services, but the waiting list at that point in this area – because it’s different in every area in the UK – was two and a half years. So I wasn’t going to be seen anytime soon, and I wasn’t ‘sick enough’ to be admitted straight away. Apparently trying to take your life isn’t sick enough. I think my organs might have begged to differ.
Chris Sandel: That just boggles the mind.
Julia Trehane: I know. So the GP wanted me to go back each week, and she was very caring and very lovely, but very limited in her knowledge on eating disorders. Her hands were tied with what she could do, really. I was referred to the community mental health team, who phoned me each day to ask me if I was going to commit suicide that day, and when I said no, they’d say “Cool, we’ll speak to you tomorrow.” It was literally as blasé as that. It was shocking, actually, when I think back.
A couple of my friends found me a therapist. I went to see the therapist. My friends were amazing; they took me, they waited outside, they picked me up. The first therapist I saw really didn’t have a clue about eating disorders whatsoever. I was just in such a state. I just sat there in silence, just trying to hide in the corner of the room. And I was still getting thinner and thinner and getting worse and worse. So he said, “Look, I can’t help you. I recommend this woman.”
I went to see her, and she did help me to start literally just having bites of food a few times a day. But then she started to say to me, “Now, we have to go really slowly because otherwise you’re going to end up with going the other way and get a binge eating disorder or something.” Which absolutely terrified me and is just so very wrong. So wrong. So I saw her for a few months.
In the meantime, my husband, who I said wasn’t allowed to fix me, decided that a holiday would probably fix me. So he booked a holiday – which, in his defence, it didn’t fix me at all, but it did take me away from the reality of home for a while, which was quite good. On that holiday, I’d ordered a load of books on eating disorders and I spent the entire time researching, listening to podcasts, reading books. I reached out to an author of one of the books who was a recovery coach, and I signed on with her for a couple of months of recovery coaching – which was great, but it was very, very food focused. She really helped me to start eating again, but there was nothing on the mindset. There was nothing on any of the reasons why or how I spoke to myself or getting past the fear thoughts and all that sort of thing.
Now, I’m quite an A-type personality and I’m very all-in to anything I do, and I research everything, so I was continuing to do loads of research to find out as much as I could everything I could find out. I decided that I was going to gain weight and that I would worry about that later because I knew I couldn’t carry on how I was. I knew I wouldn’t survive if I carried on how I was. I would either take my life or die from some form of malnourishment.
00:44:29
One of the podcasts I was listening to was the lovely Victoria Kleinsman, and she was actually being interviewed on somebody else’s podcast and she said one comment about her relationship with her mum, and I was like, “Wow, I need to talk to her.”
So I went onto her website and I found out more about her, and I had a call with her, and I signed on with her and I learnt about self-compassion, and I learnt about self-love, and I learnt about just being kind to yourself, and that you have to face the fear. I mean, I tried. I tried every single route around facing the fear, as I think just about everyone does in recovery. I tried doing the acupuncture; I tried meditations. Honestly, I tried everything apart from facing fear, because who wants to face fear and who wants to feel feelings when you haven’t done it for so long?
So I finally realised with Victoria’s help that it was actually really courageous to face your fear, and that actually, nothing bad happened when you faced it. So I started to do all the inner work. I started to do a lot of inner child work. I started to speak to myself like I’d speak to somebody else rather than like I was a really awful piece of poo that you’d trodden in. To begin with, it felt like I was lying to myself. It felt horrible. It felt so unnatural. I’d never been kind to myself. I didn’t think anyone was. I didn’t think that was a thing.
I thought self-love was arrogance, which was what I was brought up to think. Like my dad would say, “Yeah, he loves himself, doesn’t he?” in a really negative way. I started to learn that self-love wasn’t arrogance, and even though it felt so horrible, every time I spoke to myself critically, I started to say, “No, hang on. I’m not going to do that anymore. How would I talk to someone else? Right, it’s fine. You don’t need to be so mean to yourself.”
Things like if I dropped something, before, I would be like, “You stupid idiot. You are so useless. You can’t even hold that.” If I fell over, it’d be “You deserve to be hurt” and all that sort of thing. I started to say, “No, stop. Everybody drops things. It was an accident. Everybody has accidents sometimes. It’s okay.”
This was one of the biggest changes. In changing the way I spoke to myself by doing those actions, then I started to change my feelings. I started to not feel so useless, not feel so rubbish, not feel so fundamentally broken and rotten inside. And when those feelings started to change, when I started to be kinder to myself, everything started to change. Obviously, with renourishment as well, which is essential but it’s not the focus, everything started to get so much better.
I started to smile. I started to laugh. And I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried, and that felt amazing, and awful all at the same time. But I allowed myself to feel, and the world didn’t end. My head didn’t blow up. Nothing bad happened. And nobody rejected me. I couldn’t believe how much the eating disorder affected every single aspect of my life. It’s like a virus that infects everything.
So yes, I gained weight. Of course I gained weight. But I gained a life. I gained friendships. I mean, I had friends before, but I used to tell myself, “Oh, they’re just being polite. They don’t really want to spend time with me.” And I didn’t use to talk because I didn’t think anyone would want to listen to anything I had to say. So I started to be able to be me and to trust me and to talk, and people would listen. I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore. I felt like I belonged. Honestly, it was like living in black and white to living in full colour with glittery sparkles and everything. [laughs]
And then I was like, “I’ve got to share this with people. I’ve got to share the message that that existence isn’t forever, and that I thought it was everything, that I’d been there so long that there was no changing it and that was just how my life was and I was too old and I wasn’t a teenager, and early intervention is best and all the things that you hear. And none of it is true. I was 48 years old. I’d lived in some form of restrictive eating disorder for 40 years, and then I found freedom and self-love and self-compassion. My relationships with everybody changed. My relationship with my husband changed. All for the better. And my whole life – it was like I’d turned the lights on.
Chris Sandel: That’s so lovely to hear. There are a couple of things that came up when I was hearing you go through that.
00:51:15
One, you had an experience as part of recovery which is what I want everyone to get, which is it was well-rounded. I think so often, when talking about recovery, we can get very narrow and “It’s all biological. You just need to eat the food and once you eat the food everything’s going to be fine.”
For a very small fraction of the population, that is true, where prior to the eating disorder, there was never any dieting, there was never any body image issues, there was none of that stuff going on, and it really was they’d got into a situation where they unintentionally underate or they intentionally underate but didn’t really understand what was going to happen and then they find themselves in an eating disorder. For that person, yes, it can be we just need to work on getting in more energy. I think even with that person, there’s more to it than just that, but at least there are times where it feels like it’s a little more of a cleaner case of that.
But for the vast majority of people, that’s just not the case. Or, like you were talking about when you first went to the therapist – I’m not against therapy at all, and I think it can be a really useful part of recovery, but if someone’s not actually making changes and not taking care of bringing in more food or reducing or stopping the exercise and doing things that fundamentally change your foundation, then it doesn’t work.
So really understanding that there are all these different areas that matter. Because even you talking about, “I just started to be kinder to myself” – I can guarantee you, if you tried to do that without changing any of the food stuff, it just doesn’t work. You’re in a state that doesn’t allow that to take hold.
So one, I’m so glad that you found someone who was able to provide this approach and you were able to do all the reading and the research and take action on this to look at all the ways that the eating disorder has got its tentacles into all of the aspects of your life.
00:53:20
But the second piece I want to say is you said “No-one rejected me”, which is fantastic, and I’m glad you had that experience. And I would say for some people, there are relationships that don’t last the eating disorder. There are things that come up. What I want to say is that when that happens, the thing that the eating disorder recovery gives you is the capacity to be able to deal with that.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t be upset; it won’t mean that there won’t be tears; it won’t mean that there won’t be some difficulty with that. But you have the capacity to be able to get through that and recognise, “Actually, this is worth it. I want to have the life that I’m getting now and have the quality of relationships and the capacity to do these things, to go on a holiday and not have to check all the boxes”, in the way that you described you being able to do, “and that’s worth having relationships that used to be there no longer being there.”
I do think sometimes there can be this fantasy of “No-one will ever say anything, no-one will put their foot in their mouth, no-one will make a comment.”
Julia Trehane: Oh, no, that’s not true.
Chris Sandel: It’s like, no, people will.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely they will.
Chris Sandel: People will make comments. You will just be able to cope in a way that your eating disorder isn’t allowing you to know that you can cope.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, and there were some times in recovery – when I got extreme hunger, I was waking up in the night to eat a lot. I don’t like sleeping with crumbs in the bed, but I also don’t like getting up and going downstairs and getting food in the middle of the night. So through a bit of trial and error, I found out that Belvita breakfast biscuits were the least crumbly out of all biscuits and didn’t need to be refrigerated, and I kept boxes of them by my bed.
One time I ate a packet of them in the night and I was still hungry, and I opened another packet and my husband said to me, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” And that was such a triggering comment to me, and that was it. I stopped eating again. I was like, “Right, I can’t do this. You’re saying I’m fat. You’re saying I’m eating too much. You’re saying I’m greedy. You’re saying I’m not acceptable.”
I completely freaked out for a couple of days before I calmed down and, with the help of my coach, started eating again, started to realise that he didn’t mean all the things that I thought he’d meant; they were stories that I’d made up in my head because I was scared.
There was another instance with a friend who – she didn’t reject me because I’d gained weight, but I thought she was a good friend, and she actually was somebody that I people-pleased continuously. I was there for her, doing all the things for her, and when I was really sick, I couldn’t. I had no capacity. I was not able to do anything for anyone, let alone properly people-please. And she didn’t want to know me because I wasn’t doing the things she wanted me to do.
And yes, that hurt, and I had to work through that. I had to realise that actually, that wasn’t a friendship, with me just doing stuff to serve her and then her not wanting to know when I wasn’t able to do it anymore. That wasn’t a friendship at all. And actually, that’s not the kind of person I want in my life. She’s not my people.
So you change. You change a lot when you recover because you actually become who you are rather than who you think other people think you should be. Friendships and relationships do change, and you have to realise that the people who are drifting out of your life aren’t actually your people, and that when you are your authentic self, the people that like you for you are there for you. That is a learning curve, and there is a lot of heartbreak associated with that.
And yeah, people say stupid things. I remember one of my friends actually said something – what was it? She said that “So-and-so had done really well because they’d lost loads of weight, and she was looking so much better now.” Another friend said, “How did she do that?” She said, “She didn’t diet. It was after her son died.” And I went mental. I went absolutely ballistic. I was so, so angry that she was validating weight loss through grief.
People say stupid things because they’re so conditioned to diet culture. Now, she didn’t mean to be insensitive; she was just conditioned to this whole narrative that losing weight is a great thing, when in actual fact, there could be so many reasons behind it. The same for gaining weight. There can be so many reasons behind it. Gaining weight is seen as a negative. For me, it saved my life.
So yeah, people say stupid things. People act in ways that you don’t expect, and you have to not let it mean anything about you.
Chris Sandel: I think that is the skill, being able to recognise “This is not about me, this is about them” and recognising “Hey, my mind is generating these thoughts, these stories, these beliefs, and I can recognise that that is just a thought and that just because I’ve had that thought, doesn’t mean that it’s true.”
Going back to your husband making that comment, I know I’m not my best self if I’ve been woken up at three in the morning. [laughs] So maybe that was part of it. And he went back to sleep and probably didn’t even think about it, and then, I don’t know, the next day or a couple days later, he’s like, “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the greatest thing to say. I by no means meant what you think I meant.”
And this is true for all of us. There are thing is remember in my life that are pivotal moments where someone said something or someone did something, and if I went to that person now, they would have no recollection that that thing even happened.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely. I used to think that my thoughts were true, and now I have the capacity – even coming on this podcast, your amazing podcast today, when you first invited me to be a guest and I booked in, I had a bit of imposter syndrome going on. I listened to an episode – I can’t remember who it was with, but they used loads of really big and complicated words, and I was just like, “Oh no, I’m not clever enough to go on that podcast. Everyone’s going to think I’m stupid.”
Then I thought, “Oh wow, isn’t that cute? There’s that little part of me making up a story, telling me that in some way I’m not good enough, and that’s part of my past self. I’m just going to reassure my past self, my inner child, that it doesn’t matter. If I say something silly on the podcast, I’m human and I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s what happens when we’re humans, and it’s okay.”
Our brains make up so many stories all the time, and it’s when you start to recognise that anything we’re thinking about in the future is a story that we’re making up because we can’t know what the future holds – when you realise that you’re making up a story, you realise that you can make up another story that feels a bit better.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. When I hear that story about the thoughts that came up about coming on this podcast, that’s your brain trying to keep you safe. It’s trying to protect you. It’s doing this out of the goodness of its heart. It’s not wanting to make you feel terrible for the sake of feeling terrible; it’s “There’s this thing that could happen and we could get embarrassed or we could have shame after it or we could say the wrong thing, and that could be really bad.” In its essence, it’s like the three-year-old or four-year-old version of you, where it’s just a really scary thing, and the way that I deal with these really scary things is I want to avoid them and I don’t want to deal with them.
I think you can say, “Brain, thank you. I understand you’re trying to keep me safe. I understand you’re trying to help me in this way. And there are other ways we can deal with this.” Coming back to the self-compassion piece, this is a big part of self-compassion: recognising that these are the kinds of thoughts that we all have. It might not be about a podcast. For someone else, it might be about something else. But we all have these insecurities, we all have these areas where this triggers an unhelpful thought in us, or a thought that is trying to keep us safe by helping us move away from doing something that could be potentially dangerous.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, it’s just part of being human.
01:03:07
Chris Sandel: How did this then transition into the recovery coaching piece? When did you start doing that?
Julia Trehane: I started coaching a couple of years ago. Really, straight after I recovered, because I just wanted to help other people feel how I felt. I just was so – it blew my mind how different I felt. It’s so hard to actually put it into words, how different life is recovered to living in an eating disorder. It is night and day. I felt that I had to. I felt it was like my purpose to try and help other people do that.
So yeah, I started coaching, I started a podcast – which scared me so bad. For somebody that didn’t talk because she hated her voice and didn’t think she had anything worth saying that people would want to listen to, starting a podcast scared the bejeezus out of me so bad. But I did it because I’d learnt to face fears by this point. I’d learnt that if you let fear hold you back, you live a tiny life and you don’t get to do things that light you up. Because there’s going to be fear in everything.
So I started the podcast. I started an Instagram account. I’d never gone out on social media before. That terrified me, too, because that was being visible, and my whole life I’d tried not to be seen. So that was super, super scary.
The more I did it, the slightly less scary it became, and Victoria helped me help some other people to recover who weren’t in a position to invest in coaching. So I started to get experience with that. I did my transformational life coaching qualification, spiritual life coaching qualification, and the CBTE for eating disorders, and then I started becoming interested in EMDR and NLP.
I love learning. I just absolutely love it. So I learnt more, I started to get paying clients, and then helping them and being on their journey of transformation literally is the most amazing feeling. Just seeing people I guess emerging from the cocoon, starting to live their life, starting to enjoy things, starting to feel good, starting to be kind to themselves – I realised that this is exactly what I want to do.
I was a sports massage therapist before I started coaching, and the coaching got busier and built up more, and I gave up the massage therapy, and now I coach full time. And it’s amazing. I just absolutely love doing it. It’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m glad that you’re doing this work. You obviously have a ton of lived experience around it, and you’re then getting other qualifications, putting in the work to understand how to help people. It’s great. You’ve only been doing this a short amount of time, and I know you have many years or decades ahead of you to keep doing it.
Julia Trehane: I hope so, yeah. It really is so fulfilling. I love it.
Chris Sandel: I haven’t had an eating disorder, but I still have the same feeling when I’m seeing someone get their life back. To be able to do both the big things and the mundane things, to be able to wake up and just have breakfast and it not be terrifying and it not be “Can I try and eke out the number of hours before I allow myself to have this?” – to just be able to wake up and do it. Or to be able to go to a wedding or to be able to go on holiday or to be able to do these things that used to be so filled with dread, and yet now they’re an enjoyable experience.
And it’s not that every aspect of them is enjoyable. An EasyJet flight is not that enjoyable. [laughs] But yeah, you’re just able to enjoy and appreciate and do all of the things that allow you to have an enjoyable life.
Julia Trehane: Yeah. We’ve just been away this last weekend, and a restaurant we were supposed to go to, there was a problem with. My husband and I were like, “Oh, where should we go?” He started to look a bit uncomfortable, and he said, “Well, there’s this place up the road, but I’m not sure what you’ll think of the menu.” I went, “Oh, it’ll be fine. I’ll find something.” He was like, “Oh, I was going back in time. I was thinking, oh my goodness, we need to check that there’s something on there you can eat and all this.” I was like, “No, it’s fine. It’s great.”
And to go for a walk and just be in nature and not have any step trackers or anything telling me how far I’ve gone or how far I need to go. It’s just freedom.
Chris Sandel: Nice. We’ve touched on a lot, but I want to go through some of the stuff that you work on with clients. As I said at the top, I went through your podcast, I looked at some of the topics you’ve covered as part of that.
01:09:11
I know we’ve touched a little on the mindfulness and self-compassion piece; what else would you want people to know in this area, or what are some of the things you do with clients in this area?
Julia Trehane: The mindfulness is actually really important because we tend to spend a lot of our time worrying about the past or the future. We can’t change what’s happened. We can’t change what’s been. Stressing about it and worrying about it is just like self-torture, because we can’t actually change what happened at all.
So just forgiving ourselves, whatever’s gone past, and being present rather than regretting the past or worrying about the future – because in the present, when you’re in this exact moment right now, everything’s okay. You can cope, because you are coping. That’s your evidence. You can because you are.
So if you just come back to the present moment – using your senses is brilliant for getting you back to the present moment. What textures can you touch? What can you hear? What can you see? What can you smell? When you’re using your senses, you’re being present. All the worries for the future or regrets for the past aren’t there when you are in the present moment. So that’s really, really important: to try and be as present as possible.
And self-compassion and self-love is everything because you have to spend the rest of your life with yourself. There’s no getting away. You’re literally going to be there forever with you. You can’t escape, can’t run away. Life is so much nicer when you’re kind to yourself. When you treat yourself with respect and kindness, when you take the actions, you start to feel like you do actually deserve them. And yes, it takes a while. It’s a practice; it’s not a one-and-done.
But it changes how you feel. I used to feel like I didn’t deserve kindness. I used to feel like I wasn’t good enough, I had no value. And by treating myself as a person who is good enough and as a person who does have value, my feelings changed. And I am good enough. I know I’m good enough, and I do have value, and I’m a great person, and I could never have said that before.
Most of us are really kind and compassionate to everybody around us, and yet we can be so mean to ourselves. If you imagined saying the mean stuff to somebody else that you say to yourself, you’d be horrified. If you think about how you treat yourself, if you treated a child or something that way, you’d probably be arrested. It would be abuse. There’s no rule that says we have to be mean. Life is so much better when we’re kind to ourselves.
I used to think, “I don’t know how to be kind to myself”, but that wasn’t true, because I knew how to be kind to other people. I knew how to do it; I just wasn’t used to applying it to myself.
Working on applying it to yourself even though it feels wrong and it feels like you’re lying and it feels like you don’t deserve it and it feels unnatural – if you keep going and keep doing it, the feelings change, and you start to notice that actually, when you tell yourself “Not to worry, you didn’t mean to drop it”, it feels a whole lot nicer than “You stupid, useless idiot. You can’t be trusted to carry anything.” It feels so much better, and you start to appreciate yourself more.
Chris Sandel: For sure. Two things that came up for me when I heard you talk about that. One, in terms of the mindfulness piece and getting stuck in the past or getting stuck in the future, is that when you’re living in an eating disorder – especially when you’re in recovery – your mind connected to the future comes up with all these ‘what if’ scenarios, these horror situations of all the things that could possibly go wrong.
The thing that I regularly say to clients is that I don’t know how this is going to go. You have your theories, I have my theories, and we’re not going to argue our way to anywhere. We need to run the experiment. You need to do the thing, and then we can have a conversation about what actually happened. It’s not that everything’s going to be sunshine and rainbows. There could be something that was difficult as part of doing that. But we can have a conversation about what actually happened, how you were able to cope with that, what you did, and do that in a way that is truly meaningful versus nothing changing and we’re having conversations about all the potentials that could happen. There’s no way I’m ever going to win that argument with you because I can’t provide proof that is going to be meaningful to you. There will always be some other reason. So the only real way to deal with that is by running the experiment and seeing what happens.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, and reflecting on the evidence that you’ve got. Like you know that living in the eating disorder is hell. You have evidence of that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, we’ve run this experiment for 40 years.
Julia Trehane: Yeah. You know that restricting takes you back there, and you know that it’s awful, and you know that you hate it. You have all the evidence of that. So have the food today, and let’s check in at the end of the day. What happened?
01:15:34
Chris Sandel: The second piece I was going to mention was connected to the self-love. I think often, people can think of this like your dad did, as this being self-indulgent and all of that. I think the same gets talked about connected to self-compassion. There becomes this caricature of it, that you only think about yourself, you lack all self-awareness, you’re just a bumbling bull in a china shop narcissist who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves and that’s what self-compassion is.
That is not what self-compassion is. You talked about so much of how to treat yourself kindly, but you are also being able to be aware of “You know what? I really messed up in that conversation. That didn’t go well, and I’m going to do something to fix it.” It’s, how can I be aware and hold myself to a certain standard and hold myself accountable, but do so in a loving and kind way? I can notice I made a mistake; I don’t need to then tell myself I’m the worst person in the world and use all these expletives about myself. I can recognise, “Yeah, I did not handle that well. I need to go and apologise. I need to go and make things right.”
You can do that in a loving and kind way by recognising that everyone has moments like this, and everyone has things where they mess up and they have the opportunity to make it better. I’m just pointing that out because I think sometimes there can be this very one-dimensional view of what self-compassion is, and it does feel very self-indulgent to people. They do think that you just lack all accountability as opposed to, no, you can be highly, highly accountable; you can have very fierce boundaries about what is and what isn’t appropriate. All of these things come under the bracket of self-compassion.
Julia Trehane: Yeah. I often tell my clients that they need to give themselves a loving kick up the ass because it’s not just giving yourself free rein to have no accountability at all. It’s helping you become the best version of you. It’s not an excuse to just behave badly or anything like that. It’s accepting that part of being human is making mistakes and not beating yourself up over that. It doesn’t mean that you can go and make mistakes and not accept any responsibility for them at all.
Chris Sandel: Even with recovery, I think sometimes there can be this feeling of “It was going to be so hard for me to go to that event, so I didn’t go” or “It was going to be so hard for me to have that snack that I said I wasn’t going to have, so I didn’t have the snack. That’s me being self-compassionate.”
I would argue that’s actually not you being self-compassion; that’s you practising avoidance. The self-compassionate thing to do would be speaking kindly to yourself, “Hey, I know this is really hard. This sucks. I wish I wasn’t feeling this way. And I agreed that I was going to do this thing, and I know that this is going to be better for my long-term health, for the experience that I have, and I’m going to do it. It’s hard, and we’re going to do this action.” That is the self-compassionate way of being, not the avoidance.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely, yes. It is great to have high standards, but maybe lower expectations. It’s not criticising yourself and not doing enough, but it’s saying, “I will do this.” It’s not saying “I’ll try”, because you’re giving yourself an out. It’s saying, “I will. It’s hard. I feel uncomfortable. I feel scared.” But still doing it, and then celebrating yourself for doing that, because that’s a really important part of it – saying, “It was tough and you still did it, and that was brave. And I’m proud.”
Chris Sandel: It’s that thing of there’s a part of me that wants to be able to remove all of that from someone’s recovery journey, and there’s also a part of me that wants to remove none of that from someone’s recovery journey, for the fact that I think you are now a better coach because you’ve gone through that. We are better people for going through struggles and being able to overcome them, because that’s the skill. You then learn “I can have this thing that was really hard come up and I can still cope. I can reach out to a friend. I can find ways to support my nervous system without using the eating disorder.” It is really through that recovery process.
I think so often there’s this feeling of “I’m doing recovery and I’m going to learn all these things and do all these things that I’m then going to discard once I’ve recovered.” From my perspective, this is this training ground that you then use for the rest of your life.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely, yeah. I wouldn’t change anything about everything I’ve gone through because it’s made me who I am today, and all the struggles are there to grow from. They’re there to learn from. Any times that I was failing at anything, it’s not really a failure, is it? It’s an opportunity to learn and grow. We get to go from recovery to discovery, and we get to keep learning and keep growing. I’m learning and growing all the time. I’m not afraid of eating anymore, but I’m still learning all sorts of things about myself every day.
01:21:23
Chris Sandel: Another area that you work on with recovery and with clients is inner child work. This isn’t something that I really talk about very much; it’s not a big area for how I work with clients. I’m probably dealing with it, just in other ways and not using that as a label. But talk about how this is stuff that you work on – worked on for you or work on with clients, or how this comes up.
Julia Trehane: Inner child work is really important because we get parts of us stuck at different ages. We form most of our core beliefs in childhood, which is kind of tricky, because our analytical mind doesn’t really start forming until puberty. So we think with an emotional mind when we’re children.
It can be something like your parents praising you for doing really well. A child’s emotional mind can think, “Oh, I need to keep doing well all the time; otherwise I’m not good enough.” And that wasn’t the intention of the parents, but that’s the way the child’s emotional mind has taken it. And then that starts the “I’m not good enough” thoughts or the perfectionism thoughts. So it’s really helpful to go back to see where the needs weren’t met as a child and give our child self – because we’ve all got that child self in us – give that child self love and compassion.
When we’re scared about something, like when I said I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome coming on your podcast, I gave my child self that didn’t think she was good enough some love and compassion and validated those feelings. I said, “Of course you feel like this, because you never thought you were good enough. It’s okay to have these feelings, and you are good enough, and you can still go on and do this, and it’s going to be great.”
So it’s going back to those different parts of ourselves and reparenting them, and meeting the needs of the child then by our own adult selves rather than hoping that one day somebody’s going to come and save us. It’s essentially learning to meet your own needs right through your lifetime, and learning how to understand where those feelings have come from – the feelings of needing to people-please, the feelings of perfectionism, the feelings of OCD, the control feelings of needing to have everything right, and going back and giving love and compassion and understanding to that child version of you that created those feelings in the first place, and starting to heal from them.
Chris Sandel: For sure. I think no matter how wonderful your parents are, even if you have the most incredible, loving parents, they’re all going to have their deficiencies in certain areas because of just gaps in who they are and personality type that doesn’t necessarily match up with who you are as a child.
I think there can be this feeling of “If I’m doing this inner child work or I’m doing this reparenting, it means that I must’ve had these terrible parents”, and I think we live in a society where we’ve got two people who are trying to do everything for us, or might even have one person who’s trying to do everything for us, and it’s a tough ask. I take my parenting very, very seriously, and I know that there is stuff that I’m getting wrong. There are core beliefs that are there that I didn’t intend to put there, that have been there because of the way that I’ve parented or the life that we have and all of these things.
So I think one, recognising that this is something that we all have and that we’re all dealing with and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Julia Trehane: Yeah, I think most parents honestly are doing the best they can with the education, the knowledge, and the conditioning they have – and the messages society is giving them. Because we’re all fed messaging from society about what’s right, what’s wrong, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do. We’re just all trying to do the best that we can, and we’re not perfect. Nobody’s perfect, however much we try to be.
It’s forgiving ourselves for that, not playing the blame game with our parents. Yeah, there were a lot of things my dad did wrong. There were things my mum did wrong. There’s things I’ve done wrong as a parent. Deep down, they loved me in the best way they could with what they had available to them at the time. It didn’t necessarily meet my needs. And a child whose needs are not being met, as a survival mechanism, will make that problem their own responsibility rather than make the parents not fit for purpose. Because their survival is dependent on their parents meeting their needs. If they say, “Oh well, my parents can’t meet my needs”, that actually threatens their very survival.
So they will make it their fault, and when they make it their fault, they bring it into their control, and there’s hope that they can change it. Hence, then people start trying to people-please, start trying to do the perfectionism, start overachieving, because they’re trying to get their needs met without blaming their parents. And that’s where all the ‘not good enough’ stuff comes from.
Chris Sandel: You talked about this; the way your dad was, there wasn’t a recognition of “Hey, my dad really shouldn’t be talking to me like that. That’s not the way you speak to a kid.” It was, “How do I change me so that maybe he won’t speak to me in that way, which proves that I’m now doing the right thing?”
Julia Trehane: Yeah. It wasn’t “He’s not doing right”, it’s me. “I’m not doing right.” That’s how most children see things. I think it’s how all children see things, actually.
Chris Sandel: The other piece I would add – and this is from a conversation I had, I can’t remember how many years ago, on the podcast – when you’re thinking about where you were as a child, you always imagine yourself as being older. Maybe I shouldn’t use the word ‘always’, but you tend to imagine yourself as being older and feeling like “Yes, I was eight, but I was quite mature as an eight-year-old.” For many people, then seeing someone of that same age that they were when that thing happened can be something that really helps them to reflect on the fact that “Okay, that’s what an eight-year-old is really like, and this is what I was having to deal with at that point.” Or “I felt like I was really grown-up when I was 11, but if I now look at nieces and nephews and other kids who are 11, this is a real eye-opener about what kids are really like at 11 and what was then being asked of me.”
I think we have this tendency to, as you said, change things around to best insulate yourself from the harsh realities of what went on. So being able to find people of that age so that you can get in touch with the fact that “Oh wow, that was a lot to be asking of me at that point.”
Julia Trehane: Yeah. When you do see other children, it is like, “Wow.” I started restricting at like eight, and wow. It’s so young. It didn’t feel so young at the time, you’re absolutely right.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. As you’re talking about this, I’ve got a son who just turned seven, so the thought that he, in 11 months’ time, is going to start restricting and that is his journey – that feels mental. I don’t want anyone to start restricting, but it should not be happening at the age of eight. He’s a child.
Julia Trehane: Yes. But even down to – my youngest son is 22, and I was married at 21. [laughs] I’m like, wow, that’s just insane when I look back. I mean, he is a grown-up, but he’s not a grown-up, and I was 21. I wasn’t a grown-up. I was a child bride, virtually. When you look back and you do see other people that age, it does put it a lot more into perspective.
01:30:50
Chris Sandel: The other thing I wanted to ask – I know we’ve talked about a little bit in terms of the self-talk and being kinder to yourself, but I know you’ve done an episode talking about empowering language and positive self-talk. I just wanted to maybe add on to that conversation. What is empowering language? Can you give some examples of this that people could then be using, or clarify what that means?
Julia Trehane: Definitely. It’s really important, the language we use to ourselves. I think I mentioned earlier, if you say “Oh yes, I’ll try to have lunch today” – well, then you’re not setting a commitment. You’re not setting an intention. You’re actually giving yourself an out. It’s a bit of a half-assed sentence. Whereas if you say, “I will have lunch today”, you’re actually empowering yourself to do it. You’re setting an intention.
Lots of the way we speak to ourselves disempowers us. So it’s a case of being very, very careful with how you speak. Why has my mind gone blank for examples right now? [laughs] Words are spells, and they literally create how we feel. I have no examples in my head right now. It’s gone completely blank. Have you got any examples?
Chris Sandel: I think the one you just talked about in terms of – if ever I’m having a client say “I will try”, I’m immediately like “Can we remove the word ‘try’ from that sentence? Let’s think about this as being a non-negotiable of something that you will do.” And then taking that a step further and looking at, “Okay, this is a non-negotiable and has to happen; what are the things we can do to then allow that to be the case? Do we need to go to the shops today so that there’s things for tomorrow? Do we need to be preparing something in the evening time so that thing’s already ready first thing in the morning?”
I guess from my perspective, when I think about empowering language, there’s also the action-taking that is connected to that empowering language. It’s not a maybe; it’s “It will, and I’m going to look at all of the things that could then get in the way of this that prevent it from happening.” If this was something that was really important to you – and this happens with so many things in life. If you’re going to pick your kids up from school at 3:00 or whenever you pick the kids up from school, you don’t suddenly turn up at 4:30 and be like “Oh yeah, sorry.” There are certain things that you’re like, “I have to make that thing happen” and you figure out your life around that.
I think it can be the same thing with recovery. “I’m going to treat this thing in the same way as I would” – whatever you treat in a very high way. “I would never not turn up to this meeting that’s on my calendar, so I’m going to treat recovery in the same way” or “I would never not pick up my kids, so I’m going to treat it in the same way.”
Julia Trehane: Yeah. A word that people say a lot is “I can’t.” Well, why? Why can’t you? Has your mouth been wired shut? Are you hands tied behind your back? If you had to eat that donut or somebody very close to you would get hurt, would you eat it? The answer is yes. So you can. So what excuses are you making to stop yourself from doing this? And do you want to live in your excuses?
It is looking at your excuses. It’s looking at the things you’re telling ourself, and is that the person you want to be? Is it helpful? Is it taking you closer to where you want to be, or is it taking you further away?
Chris Sandel: For me, I would even say not calling them someone’s excuses, and the reason I say that is if it’s just a thought – none of my thoughts are my thoughts. My thought comes up, it comes into my consciousness, and then I become aware of it. I can get attached to that thought and think “Oh, that’s a really smart thing to say or think”, or I can be thinking “Why am I thinking about that kid that I went to school with in grade 2? That’s an odd thought to have right now.”
But we have these thoughts that naturally occur. All of our thoughts are naturally occurring. So rather than, from my perspective, saying ‘your excuses’, it’s your brain is generating these thoughts. Your brain is generating this thought about the fact that it would be too difficult to have that snack. Okay, cool, the brain is generating that thought; it’s not because you believe it to be true, it’s not because it’s something that is a value of yours, it’s not something that’s really important. It’s just your brain has generated this thing.
So much trying to detach from this connection between “Because I’ve had a thought, it means that it’s true and it’s a value of mine and it’s important to me.” It’s just those are the kinds of thoughts that are going to come up when you’re thinking about recovery.
Julia Trehane: Absolutely. You are not your thoughts. You’re just the thinker of your thoughts, and you can stand back and observe them.
Chris Sandel: I wouldn’t say you’re even the thinker of your thoughts. Thoughts think themselves. You’re the observer of your thoughts. Thoughts enter into your consciousness and you become aware of them being there. And that’s true even when you’re trying to think of something. We often have that experience of “I’m trying to remember that person’s name and it’s just not coming”, and then it comes. I didn’t do anything; it just was there. So we’re recognising that that is the case with everything. We can do things that make it more likely certain thoughts are going to come to mind. We can do things that, when a certain thought comes to mind, it’s more likely that thing is going to stay for a much longer amount of time.
The reason I’m hammering this point home is because I think it’s really important to recognise how much we are constantly impacted upon by the state we’re in. We are always in a state, and we’re always being pushed around by the state that we’re in, for want of a better word. And sometimes we’re pushed in very good, meaningful directions, and other times we’re being shunted in less meaningful directions. Just being able to recognise that these things are naturally occurring in us and we get to decide how we react.
Julia Trehane: Definitely. We get to choose which thoughts we want to focus on, which ones we want to give our energy to.
Chris Sandel: Exactly. Is there anything else that we haven’t gone through that you want to mention? I know we’ve been chatting for quite a long time now and covered a lot, but are there any topics we haven’t hit that you want to make sure we do?
Julia Trehane: No, I don’t think so. I think we’ve talked a lot.
01:37:56
As I said before you hit record, it’s really the message that you are not too old and you haven’t been in the eating disorder too long that I want to get across. Full recovery is totally possible for anyone. It really is. I know there’s people that say full recovery is not possible. Well, my life tells a different story to that. It is possible.
Yeah, of course I get thoughts – like I said about coming on the podcast, I get thoughts that are negative. Of course I do. But then I can speak to those thoughts and reframe them and feel a lot better about things. I have no fear about food at all. I am at peace with my body. I don’t love everything about it, but I don’t need to. I’m so grateful for what my body does for me, and the fact that I actually get to live my life rather than just exist now.
So it’s never, ever too late. You can very definitely have a much better life than the one in the eating disorder. So please do reach out and seek help, because it’s possible.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m 100% on board with that message. I think there are so many people who are like you, and by ‘like you’, I mean have been dealing with an eating disorder for a really, really long time, and for a lot of that time, often it’s in that grey area where yeah, she’s got some stuff around food and stuff around exercise, but no-one’s got these red flags saying “We need to ship you off somewhere and we need to intervene.” And a lot of that is because of the culture we live in and what we prize and all the stuff we talk about with intermittent fasting or weight loss or exercise or whatever it may be.
But I think there are a lot of people who are living in their thirties, forties, fifties, who are dealing with an eating disorder that started back in their teenage years, or in your case even younger than that. I really want people to get the message that, one, you don’t just grow out of these things. I think there can be this story of you deal with it a little bit in your teenage years and then you just grow out of it, and that’s not true. But two, even if it has been going on for decades, like in your case, you can get to a place of full recovery. It’s not that you just have to get better at living with this version of life and you’re never going to escape and you’ve just got to get on with it.
You can truly recover, and you can fully recover, and you can get to this place where, from what I’ve heard from you today, you’re living a completely different life to what was going on beforehand.
Julia Trehane: Totally. Completely different. It’s free. Obviously it’s not perfect; it’s a human life. There’s ups and downs and things go well and some things don’t go well. But it’s not filled with anxiety and fear.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. I know that many people are really going to benefit from hearing this, they’re going to be inspired from hearing this. I think it’s great that you’re now doing the coaching and helping people with this. Where can people go if they want to find out more about you?
Julia Trehane: They can go to my podcast, which is Fly to Freedom. They can go to my website, which is juliatrehane.com. Instagram I’m quite active on, @juliatrehane. The website will take you to everything, though, so that’s probably the best bet.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I’ll put all those links in the show notes, and thanks again for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Julia Trehane: I did too. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great.
Chris Sandel: So that was my interview with Julia Trehane. I think she’s doing fantastic work in the recovery space, and I think she’s a shining example of what can happen when someone does fully commit to recovery and doing all of the different aspects of recovery – not just an eating component of recovery, but all the things that are crucial to making the recovery a full recovery and for this to be something that is ongoing.
As I mentioned at the top, if you are wanting help with recovery, I’m currently taking on new clients. You can reach out, info@seven-health.com, and put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and then I can send you the details of how we can work together, how we can have a discovery call to figure out if we’re a good fit, and I can explain how I work with clients. If you’re interested in getting help, then please send an email.
That is it for this week’s episode. I will catch you again with another episode next week. Until then, take care and I will see you soon!
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