Developing Resilience In Recovery

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Intro: Free live training starting this week

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Dates + times

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First training content

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Second training content

00:09:17

Third training content

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Closing thoughts

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Intro: Free live training starting this week

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 282 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/282.

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 I help clients to fully recover.

Today on the show, it is a short episode. The reason for doing this episode is I want to let you know about something that I’m doing that starts this week.

I’m doing a three-part live virtual training series, and it starts this Thursday, Thursday the 21st. It’s going to be looking at resilience and why developing resilience is so important for recovery. I even say why it’s the only way to reach full recovery.

This is going to be content that is applicable wherever you are in terms of your recovery, whether it’s recovery from an eating disorder or whether it’s recovery from disordered eating. So whether you’re right at the beginning stages or you’ve been trying to recover for a really long time and you just don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere with it.

I want to just run through briefly what I’m going to be covering as part of the 3 days as part of this training, and I’ll go through the times and the dates of when it’s going to be on and then where you can register for the training as well.

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Dates + times

The training is happening on Thursday the 21st, then Tuesday the 26th, and then Thursday the 28th. So it’s this coming Thursday, then next Tuesday, and then the Thursday. If you’re in the UK, it’s between 6:00 and 7:30 p.m. If you’re in Europe, it’s 7:00 till 8:30 p.m. If you’re in the U.S., Eastern is 1 p.m. till 2:30 p.m., and Pacific Time is 10 a.m. till 11:30 a.m.

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First training content

As I said, there’s three parts to this training. The first is called ‘Why Developing Resilience Is the Only Way to Reach Full Recovery’. As part of this training, I’m going to be talking about the connection between eating disorders and anxiety and really understanding why it’s so important to think about eating disorders as anxiety disorders and really seeing it through this lens.

I’m then going to talk about resilience and the different ways that we can understand resilience and different factors that are important in terms of building and contributing to resilience.

I’m going to talk about a lot of the statistics and the research around resilience and looking at this in the general population, but really more importantly looking at it in terms of recovery. One of the studies I’m going to go through includes a really great framework and stages of resilience and resilient development in recovery. This was based on qualitative research that was done with adults recovering from eating disorders.

The real thing with this and why I think it’s so important is that, one, resilience is what eating disorder recovery is all about. You have to do things that are truly scary again and again. It’s not that you do them once; you have to do them repeatedly so that you get to a point that your nervous system now isn’t scared of doing this thing, and you re-learn how to do these things.

The other part is that resilience is a learned skill. It is not something that you either have or you don’t have. It’s something that you learn, and recovery really is the way that you will learn this. By going through recovery, it develops resilience, and if we can see recovery as this thing of developing resilience, it really does help because recovery can be this thing that then allows you to develop resilience that you use for the rest of your life. It’s not something that you learn in recovery to get through recovery and then you just stop doing it later on. It’s something that you will then use for the rest of your life.

As part of this, I then share my framework for developing resilience in recovery. This isn’t just about how to develop resilience in a general way, but what is actually appropriate and is needed for recovery from an eating disorder or from disordered eating.

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Second training content

In the second training, I’m going to be looking at 5 mistakes that most people make in eating disorder recovery and how to avoid them. I’ve been working with eating disorders for many years now. I’ve been working with clients for 15 years now. So there’s lots of things that I’ve seen that happen with people who are in recovery and have been in recovery for a long time, and a lot of the mistakes that have been made. These are mistakes that individuals are making in their own recovery if they’re trying to recover on their own; it can be mistakes that I’m seeing happening in inpatient facilities; and it can be mistakes that I see happening with other dietitians or coaches or therapists or other people working within the eating disorder space.

I’m going to go through what these mistakes are and what you can be doing instead. If I’m thinking about these 5 different mistakes, the first one is one of the biggest issues that I see in recovery, and it’s something that is perpetuated in nearly all inpatient facilities and is something that really needs to change. Unfortunately, this is something that a lot of people internalise and take with them, even when they get out of the inpatient facility.

The second mistake is one of the things I see people making that unfortunately leads to the belief of “I’m not going to be able to recover. I’m trying all of these different things, I’m putting in a ton of effort, and I’m just not getting anywhere.” It’s something that I see again and again, and when we start to look into what people have been doing or what people have been trying, we see that this mistake is occurring.

The third mistake is actually the most common mistake that I see people making who are trying to recover on their own. I’m really of the belief now that people should not be doing recovery on their own. It’s a really difficult thing to do. I also understand that it’s very challenging to find someone who knows how to assist you in recovery properly. The amount of clients that I’ve seen who’ve seen multiple people and have been given not-great advice, not-great support – so I really get why people want to do recovery on their own, because a lot of the time they feel like they’re burnt out with working with other people or they can figure this thing out on their own because there’s so much content, there are so many podcasts, there are so many YouTube channels, that kind of thing. So I understand why there can be that pull, and I think it leads to one of the mistakes, and a really big mistake that I’m going to go through.

The next one is then something that I don’t see talked about very often. I think this is actually a mistake that is connected to a lot of the biases that can come up in recovery. This can be biases of coaches or dietitians or therapists, and this can mean that recovery is only dealt with in a very narrow band. There’s many aspects that then get missed.

And then the final mistake that I’m going to talk about is something that is definitely occurring in recovery but is actually something that most, or I’d say even all of us humans do. It’s then becoming aware that we are doing this thing so that we can do something different. But because of how recovery is and the kinds of thoughts that it leads to occurring, the kinds of feelings and sensations that come up, this is something that is really important to become aware of in recovery so that you can do something different.

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Third training content

And then the final training, Training 3, is looking at the 6 pillars of eating disorder recovery so that you can reach a place of full recovery. This is really looking at all of the areas that I work on with clients that I think are crucial as part of recovery and understanding how all of these things fit together.

What I see often happening is that people’s recoveries are focused around bit parts of this. It’s “If we just get you to go all-in and we really focus on the food side of things, that’s going to be what is going to give you recovery” or “We need to do a lot of this work around trauma and the trauma that happened to you; that’s what’s going to get you recovery.” Actually, full recovery is looking at many more areas than just that.

So this is looking at those different pillars and what is included in each of them, why I think they’re important, and also how you can then develop each of those pillars or what’s included and important as part of them.

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Closing thoughts

So that is what we’re going to be covering as part of the 3 days of the live virtual training. This is something that I’m super excited about. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now and putting together, and if you’re an avid listener of the podcast, if you have done the recent mini course that I’ve put out, there’s going to be some of the stuff that you’ve heard before, but a lot of it is going to be new content in here. So even if you’re a regular listener, there’s going to be new stuff that I’m going to be sharing as part of this. I definitely recommend checking it out.

The other thing as part of it is I would highly recommend showing up live. You’re going to get the most out of it by showing up live. I’m also going to be answering questions, so you can come prepared with questions that you want to know about disordered eating or eating disorders or recovery, and I will then be able to answer those questions for you.

The dates, again, are this Thursday, starting, the 21st. Then next week on Tuesday the 26th, and then Thursday the 28th. I will put a link to this in the show notes so that you can register. The link for the show notes, again, is www.seven-health.com/282. If you go there, you’ll be able to register for this free 3-part live training.

So that is it for this episode. I said it was going to be a short one, and I look forward to seeing you on the 21st.