Mollie Birney: “I Survived An Eating Disorder And So Can You”

…set boundaries. This may sound a callous, but I’m speaking as a clinician who often coaches parents through the process of guiding an unwilling person into treatment. Be honest with yourself about where your own limits are, and establish them clearly. They may be financial, emotional, or behavioral. Fair warning though: boundaries are set to protect ourselves, not to manipulate other people’s behavior.

As a part of my interview series with public figures who struggled with and coped with an eating disorder, I had the pleasure to interview Mollie Birney.

Mollie Birney is a Clinical Coach in private practice in Los Angeles providing life coaching with an eye towards mental health to high functioning professionals. She has a wide array of clinical experience as a Therapist in inpatient, residential and outpatient treatment programs, as a Consultant and Interventionist for families in crisis, and as a Private Coach for high-performing individuals seeking efficient, authentic transitions and behavioral change. She holds a masters in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University with a specialization in Addiction Studies, and based on her own recovery has a personal soft spot for working with disordered eating, chronic dieting and other self-destructive patterns around food.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and what you do professionally?

I’m a Clinical Life Coach. My background is as a therapist with years of experience working in eating disorder and addiction treatment, but I love coaching because it’s playful, directive, irreverent, and in some ways more collaborative. I work with my clients to transform their relationship to the noise in their heads so they can have more freedom to operate from authenticity and creativity, rather than fear, trauma and cognitive distortions. Coaching allows me to draw from a body of academic knowledge as well as my own lived experience, and that makes for a really unique dynamic where my clients get to know as much about me as I know about them.

Thank you for your bravery and strength in being so open with us. I personally understand how hard this is. Are you able to tell our readers the story of how you struggled with an eating disorder?

I battled a case of ass-kicking bulimia from when I was 16 til I about 22; it absolutely brought me to my knees. No one thing causes an eating disorder, it really is a perfect storm of events that brew into self-destruction. Between growing up in the culture of Hollywood, having a misogynistic, volatile father, a passion for food, and a pre-existing emotional template of loneliness and neuroticism, I just happened to have all the ingredients.

I’d always loved food, I’ve had a particularly intense romance with cereal, ice cream, pudding, anything you can eat with a spoon apparently! (Hah, I suspect Freud would think there’s something regressive about that!) But my love of food totally threatened the very thing that I believed secured my value — my body. The disorder started initially with purging when I thought I’d eaten too much, which oddly enough was at my dad’s recommendation, (he had plenty of opinions about what made a woman’s body acceptable), but I eventually found myself eating too much simply because I knew I could purge, and then I was off to the races. The brain chemistry of bingeing and purging is fascinating, and actually looks an awful lot like the cycle of any substance abuse disorder, so intervening on that without professional support is a goddamn Herculean feat.

I hid the pattern as best I could for years. Bulimia itself was never actually an effective weight loss strategy for me, in fact quite the opposite, but I picked up a compulsive exercise habit along the way which lessened the impact of my bingeing while adding to the insanity of the noise in my head, and the further deterioration of my body. It was an absolutely endless cycle that I couldn’t stop returning to as a solution to my loneliness. But somehow it only served to perpetuate the loneliness.

You don’t need the details of the saga of suffering, but for me, the rock bottom of it looked as gruesome and hopeless as that of any other addiction. I couldn’t get up off the bathroom floor, hadn’t showered in a week, and my clothes were disgusting. I had bruises from passing out from electrolyte imbalance, a broken blood vessel in my eye from the pressure of purging, and heart palpitations. My mouth tasted like blood and bile because my esophagus is eroding from all the acid. My body was an absolute war zone.

What was the final straw that made you decide that you were going to do all you can to get better?

Well that moment on the bathroom floor seemed like a pretty good time to surrender. I called my mom and she arranged for me to go to inpatient treatment as soon as possible. Like most people though, my first round of treatment wasn’t the final straw, I struggled with relapse for a solid year afterwards (which is really common — ED is rarely healed with a one-time stint in treatment).

The final straw though was one day when I was about to binge, and this voice in my head asked “what if you don’t?” It wasn’t a hypothetical, it was a genuine question, I didn’t know what I was avoiding. So I had ask myself, what was I telling myself would happen if I didn’t binge? It was the moment that I realized that part of my disease was about believing everything I thought, rather than having some critical thinking, and some healthy skepticism. And then of course I had to test it out. I had to see what was on the other side of that craving, and what I found (through a ton of dogged self-examination, contrary action, and sometimes just plain will) was freedom.

And how are things going for you today?

To be frank, today things are pretty damn beautiful! But I want to be clear that the freedom I have today doesn’t mean I don’t have noise about my body image, or noise about my food, or that the ghost of my eating disorder doesn’t at times come up with really clever suggestions like “hey we should try that new cleanse!” Or “going to the gym plus an intense yoga class isn’t compulsive, it’s self-care, right?” And that’s where I need to be in relationship with those thoughts so I can catch them, identify them as disordered, and meet them with a sense of humor and compassion. I haven’t purged since 2007, but in terms of my relationship to the “noise” the way I like to think of it is that I have an eating disorder, it doesn’t have me.

Many of my clients who wrestle with disordered eating or chronic dieting have the misconception that once you’re in recovery you have zero noise (or are supposed to have zero noise). I think that’s such a dangerous set-up. If I thought I had to have no ED-related thoughts in order to be in recovery I’d have given up by now, because they pop up all the time!

Part of my mission as a clinician in recovery is to represent what real recovery looks like, and I’m hear to tell you that real recovery sometimes looks like mindlessly housing a bag of kettle corn, over-scrutinizing my body in the Lululemon dressing room (I take personal offense at how their lighting choices), or going to the gym on what should be a rest day. This is progress not perfection. My definition of recovery is no purging, but the strength of my recovery is in direct proportion to how honest and compassionate I can be with myself.

Based on your own experience are you able to share 5 things with our readers about how to support a loved one who is struggling with an eating disorder? If you can, can you share an example from your own experience?

First, no body comments. Not about your own body, not about their body, not about J Lo’s body. Zero body comments. A person with an eating disorder has a cacophony of noise about their own bodies, and hearing others discuss their own weight, their own body image, or even saying something that they might think is entirely harmless can further trigger the ED tailspin. Yes, that also means no compliments.

Secondly, don’t share your opinion on what they should eat, just model what a peaceful relationship with food looks like. This means eating your own regular meals and snacks at regular times, choosing a wide variety of food, not just unhealthy food to prove it isn’t dangerous, or just what you think is healthful food. Don’t recommend particular foods, diets, or quick fixes. There are many landmines, so leave the nutritional counseling to the dietitians who are specifically trained to work with eating disorders.

Third, don’t take their behavior personally. People with eating disorders are working with so much shame, so much secrecy, and so much self-judgment. This means there are going to be times when they lie to you about their food, about what they have/haven’t eaten, about whether they’ve purged, and about how they’re actually feeling. This is not because they don’t love you, think they’re smarter than you or are being malicious, it’s because in their mind it’s a matter of survival. That’s what it means to be completely shrouded in shame. So don’t waste your time trying and catch them in the act of purging, proving to them you know they did or didn’t eat, or arguing about the facts. Their shame is stronger than your logic, and you can’t allow your feelings to be hurt by someone who is playing by those rules. Disengage, call your own therapist.

Fourth, yes you should have your own therapist, coach, counselor, guide, someone who is supporting YOU through this. I happen to think everyone on the planet should have some kind of mental health support, but especially those who have loved ones with eating disorders, addictions, or any kind of self-destructive pattern. The best thing you can do to help them is for you to be doing your own emotional work.

Fifth, set boundaries. This may sound a callous, but I’m speaking as a clinician who often coaches parents through the process of guiding an unwilling person into treatment. Be honest with yourself about where your own limits are, and establish them clearly. They may be financial, emotional, or behavioral. Fair warning though: boundaries are set to protect ourselves, not to manipulate other people’s behavior.

Is there a message you would like to tell someone who may be reading this, who is currently struggling with an eating disorder?

This is cliche, but I’m saying it for a reason: recovery is absolutely possible. That’s what I needed to hear when I was in the hopeless depths of the noise and the madness. It takes a ton of work and support, but you can absolutely get freedom around this.

According to this study cited by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, at least 30 million people in the U.S. of all ages and genders suffer from an eating disorder. Can you suggest 3–5 reasons why this has become such a critical issue recently?

I usually look for any excuse to blame social media for things, but I happen to think blaming social media is especially fitting here for a couple of reasons. First of all social media allows us to literally filter out our humanity, allowing people to promote the carefully-curated versions of themselves they want to go public with. It perpetuates totally unrealistic expectations of body image, beauty standards, lifestyle standards, happiness standards, the list goes on. But to someone particularly insecure and impressionable, like, I don’t know, ANY 13 year old, that can be incredibly dangerous. Hell, it’s dangerous to the adults I work with too, and it’s the primary reason I avoided social media until I finally had to get on board with it for work. Secondly, despite having the illusion of connecting people, social media has the tendency to create a greater sense of disconnection and loneliness among users. Those are two major factors that contribute to disordered eating.

Finally, skyrocketing anxiety rates are another huge reason for the rising rates of eating disorders. Anxiety is all about attempting to gain control where there is fundamentally no control, so regardless of the source of someone’s anxiety, restricting calories, micro-managing our bodies and binge eating are common “solutions” to anxiety, as they allow us the illusion of control.

Based on your insight, what can concrete steps can a) individuals, b) corporations, c) communities and d) leaders do to address the core issues that are leading to this problem?

When I think of the core issues of eating disorders I think perfectionism, self-criticism, shame and loneliness (just to name a few). Whether it’s individuals, corporations, communities or leaders I think the answer across the board is to lead with your humanity. That means acknowledging out loud the struggle that the human condition requires. Folks with eating disorders, hell, folks with any mental health issues end up thinking they’re the only ones who are suffering from their unrealistic standards of themselves, from their own abusive self-talk and from the loneliness of not allowing themselves to be seen because there is too much shame. So my answer to how to address that problem is for us to begin to be public about the areas in which we struggle. All of us.

We can do that as individuals and as communities, and we can build it into the corporate culture, but it starts with individuals being willing to be seen, warts and all, so we can begin normalize this very human experience we’re all in. That can be as simple as responding “actually I had a really hard weekend” when asked how we are, instead of the standard “good!” Or as bold as “I’m sorry can you repeat what you said, I’m struggling with anxiety these days and sometimes my brain is loud.” This kind of cultural shift takes awhile, but it’s this kind of honest vulnerability that generates real connection and real intimacy, both of which are extremely healing.

As you know, one of the challenges of an eating disorder is the harmful,and dismissive sentiment of “why can’t you just control yourself”. What do you think needs to be done to make it apparent that an eating disorder is an illness just like heart disease or schizophrenia?

If folks understood the brain chemistry of eating disorders they’d likely have more compassion for those suffering. It’s a little reductive to say ED is just like addiction, but the pattern is very similar. There’s an element to starvation that actually feels like a high because the brain gets flooded with neurotransmitters and feel-good chemicals, so it can be extremely compelling for anorexics to stay there. For bulimics, the a combination of neurotransmitters and hunger hormones perpetuate the binge/purge cycle so it’s fiercely difficult to interrupt. Bingeing activates the opiate receptors in the brain, just like heroin does, and the psycho-emotional and behavioral pattern of a binge eater or a bulimic mimics the cycle that any drug addict experiences — emotional trigger causes craving, craving causes relapse, relapse causes guilt, guilt is an emotional trigger, rinse, repeat.These cycles are extremely challenging to interrupt without professional intervention, little self control just ain’t gonna cut it.

What are your favorite books, podcasts, or resources that have helped you with your struggle? Can you explain why you like them?

I’m a little shy admitting this, but Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray Love was my bible in the years of my early recovery. Reading about her struggles with anxiety and depression and hearing her articulate what self-compassion sounds like helped me cultivate my own compassionate voice. I still have the copy I carried with me everywhere, it’s dog-eared and faded, heavily tear-stained and annotated. It was gold to me.

The book Intuitive Eating by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole was also extremely helpful. Following treatment I was a part of Overeaters Anonymous for many years — it can be a great program, and an incredible free resource. I used Intuitive Eating as my meal plan and OA’s 12 step model for the emotional recovery.

Podcasts weren’t big when I was recovering but these days there are so many great ones that are ED-focused. I highly recommend Dietitians Unplugged by my colleagues Aaron Flores and Glenys Oyston!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I’m never sure if it’s a quote or just an old adage, but what has always resonated with me was “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I was really offended the first time I heard it, I remember thinking “surely you know my suffering is real??” It made me realize that I needed to be curious about what variable I’m adding to pain that transforms it into suffering.

Turns out, it’s all about what narrative I’m attached to. The drama of suffering can be incredibly compelling, intense, and even addictive because it convinces me that the experience is somehow more meaningful. Pain isn’t nearly as sexy, so to speak, but because it lacks drama it’s far less sticky to move through. So my work is to detach from the narrative, work with pain, and be vigilant and honest with myself when I’m getting seduced by the drama of my own story.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Well I’m currently 33 weeks pregnant so that’s the biggest new project I’ve been tackling lately. Other than that, between seeing clients I’ve been doing a ton of writing — mostly personal narrative articles on anxiety, recovery, pregnancy, pregnancy IN recovery etc. I’m flirting with the idea of a book, we’ll see about that…

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the largest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’d like to introduce No-Makeup March: a whole month where women set aside that traditional expression of vanity and go out into the world without war paint. The common fear is that if we’re less beautiful we’re less valuable, but we don’t WANT that to be true, do we? Well, here’s whole month dedicated toward challenging that superstition. No-Makeup March is a chance to resist the rules that beauty culture has dictated as law, which we’ve obediently compliant with. Without makeup we’d get to see how the world engages with us differently, we’d get to re-establish a realistic standard of beauty for one another, and we’d get to explore other methods of affirming our worth. Maybe that’s easy for me to say as someone who’s makeup regimen consists of mascara and Dr. Pepper chapstick, but I’m going with it anyway!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can follow me on Instagram @mbclinicalcoaching.com, I sporadically post articles to Medium, and my website is www.molliebirney.com

Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!