← Breaking the Rules: A Clinician's Guide to Treating OCD
Breaking the Rules: A Clinician's Guide to Treating OCD
How “skinny-tok” is feeding eating disorder content to teenagers
00:35:38
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- [00:04]
A
This is Breaking the Rules, a show for mental health professionals designed to help you build confidence in treating obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm Dr. Celine Galgic and I'm a clinical psychologist who works extensively with OCD.
- [00:17]
B
And I'm Dr. Victoria Miller, but you can call me Tori. And I'm a clinical psychologist who works with young people, including those with ocd. Through our shared professional experience, we've found that effective treatment of OCD requires commitment, commitment, creativity and the recognition that things can sometimes get a little messy.
- [00:34]
A
They sure can. We want to empower clinicians to be able to work with their patients in new ways to treat OCD with confidence. Hello and welcome to today's episode where we introduce the complex interplay between Obsessive Compulsive disorder and eating disorders, two conditions that often overlap in ways that are subtle, powerful and frequently misunderstood. A staggering 11 to 41% of people with an eating disorder also meet criteria for OCD where 10 to 17% of people with OCD report lifetime or current symptoms of an eating disorder. Today we are joined by Felicity Phillips to help us begin to explore how control, fear and rituals can show up across both eating disorders and OCD and what that means for treatment and recovery. The lovely Felicity started out in professional ballet and developed an eating disorder in her pre professional studies. Whilst training full time following treatment with family based therapy and being admitted to an inpatient facility, she met her now husband and is now in her final year of her training as a doctor of medicine. Through treatment and recovery, Felicity realized a huge gap in support for people with eating disorders and their carers in recovery. That's where the concept Weight of the World was formed.
- [01:50]
B
In this episode you'll hear Felicity talk about her lived experience with an eating disorder and we explore the commonalities with ocd. Felicity also shares with us her frustration with social media, including the very worrying skinny tock trend, her fears for the younger generation and the intense painful parallel between eating disorders and addiction. Felicity is so keen for people to know that Messi is good. So let's get started.
- [02:21]
A
Hi everyone. Today we are joined by the wonderful Felicity Phillips from Weight of the World. Hi Felicity, welcome to the show.
- [02:29]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:31]
A
We are so excited to be chatting to you today because we have been wanting to head into this topic for.
- [02:38]
B
So long, ages and ages.
- [02:39]
A
Yes.
- [02:40]
B
Which is the topic of the intersection between eating disorders and ocd.
- [02:44]
A
We are excited. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
- [02:47]
C
Yes. Well, hello everyone, I'm Felicity. I'm currently in my final year studying medicine. But before I ventured into the medical world, I was a pre professional ballerina. Dedicated a lot of my life to becoming a dancer. Saw a lot of things, did a lot of things in that industry, and yeah, fell into an eating disorder, recovered. And then throughout my sort of medical career, the pressures of med school, I relapsed. But it was also just a really insightful sort of journey. Seeing both the clinical side of things as a doctor and also experiencing them personally really made me feel compelled to do something in this space. And it's funny, as soon as I sort of started, more and more has been happening with the rise of Ozempic and medicalization of weight loss and Skinny Tock taking a hold and misinformation being spread across Instagram as well. And so, yeah, I really felt compelled to put a different message out there and offer something else.
- [03:50]
A
Tell us about Skinny Talk.
- [03:52]
B
What is Skinny Talk?
- [03:52]
A
Oh, it's crazy.
- [03:54]
B
I mean, I think I can imagine.
- [03:56]
A
It'S crazy how it works.
- [03:57]
B
I'm hoping you'll tell me it's something different.
- [03:59]
C
So Skinny Talk is a trend on TikTok that promotes thinness, often in subtle or overt ways, and it glorifies unhealthy body ideals. So it typically includes before and after weight loss content, what I eat in a day, videos that showcase extremely low calorie diets, body checking videos, a lot of disordered content, often masters fitness or wellness experts. And it basically just reinforces unrealistic and narrow body standards to vulnerable users. It'll trigger disordered eating behaviors, and it also creates this really toxic comparison culture which our young viewers on these platforms are so vulnerable in experiencing.
- [04:38]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I remember you saying something like the algorithm.
- [04:42]
C
Yeah.
- [04:43]
A
Targets people like that too.
- [04:45]
C
Yeah.
- [04:45]
A
Which is really scary.
- [04:46]
C
It's so scary. I have to get a statistic up. I'll send it to you if I can. Basically, if you spent more than two seconds on a diet video, another diet video would come up.
- [04:57]
A
Two seconds. That's it?
- [04:58]
C
Yeah, two seconds. So it takes.
- [05:00]
A
That's literally just a glance.
- [05:02]
C
Yeah.
- [05:02]
A
Wow.
- [05:03]
C
You have to just pause for one moment. Wow. Continuous scroll. Or like pause a conversation and talk to someone and then continue scrub like you don't even have to be in pain. Yeah.
- [05:13]
A
Wow. Okay. That's really full on.
- [05:16]
C
It's really. And then the whole feed is like that. And so dangerous.
- [05:20]
A
Yeah. That's mind blowing.
- [05:22]
B
Yeah. It's something that I've been so interested in is the masquerading of a lot of disordered Eating behaviors and misinformation under the guise of wellness culture and sort of being purported as healthy living, body hacking, biohacking, whatever that is, you know, and it's so insidious the way that it creeps in and superficially it just looks like really helpful content that would be interesting to look at and interesting to take on board, but it's kind of nasty stuff underneath the surface.
- [05:53]
C
Absolutely. Like, buy this detox juice. But what are you detoxing? What is this detoxing that our livers can't. And our liver is doing a really great job of doing anyway. And why do we have to buy it and why are we giving you 10% of profit? It's just so convoluted.
- [06:08]
A
Yeah, there's always an agenda or a hidden agenda and a lot of those things.
- [06:12]
C
Things.
- [06:13]
A
So all of this led you to come up with a wonderful concept with Weight of the World. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [06:20]
C
Yeah, so I went through a relapse only a year ago, actually. And then during my recovery I found that really isolating. And I say isolating not that my friends weren't really supportive, not my family didn't want me to recover, but because it's so unique in society to stay healthy and to not subscribe to the next diet or not talk about weight loss in this way or it's just so. I think even now it's so there. Weight loss is just such a huge part of our culture, it's becoming so prominent. And I found that I was on this journey healing my relationship with food, but then I was getting told what was healthy and what was unhealthy and reinforcing other standards. So my idea was I was like, well, what did I need during recovery? And I needed other people on the same journey. I needed other people that understood I need other people that were also eating muffins and saying that that's healthy for me because that's what I need to do right now. And it was really hard to find and so I figured I'd create it.
- [07:25]
B
I can really relate to what you're saying there because I have through a lot of my life. Celine knows this, subscribed to diet culture and was put on a diet by my GP when I was 30, 13. And you know, my mum felt an enormous amount of pressure to help me with weight management. And even though I look back now and there was absolutely no reason for me to be being weight managed at all, but, you know, I've had to work extremely hard to push against that and My eating at times has been extremely disordered, and I thought that I was doing really well. And then I've. I've hit perimenopause and it has felt like without me changing a single thing about myself, my weight has changed rapidly and my body's a lot larger in a really new and different way. And I feel really lonely. I have this incredible GP and I have beautiful people around me. But you're right, it is. I'm searching for other people who will sit happily with me and just eat or just not talk about it. And it's really hard. And even I look to Instagram sometimes. I'm very particular. I curate my feed very carefully. But just when I think I've found someone who's like, it's normal to gain weight and everything, then along comes the. And so it's normal that you gain it and here's how you lose it. Like, accept the fact you've gained it now here's how you get rid of it.
- [08:54]
C
And it's like, what about this phase of my life? My body is going through all of these hormonal changes. Why just do that?
- [09:01]
B
And I'm grateful for my beautiful gp, who really is so amazing and so body neutral and just really all about health and stuff, but I can't see her every day. I can't, you know.
- [09:14]
C
Yeah. She doesn't hang out with me all the time.
- [09:19]
B
She can't walk life with me and remind you.
- [09:23]
A
That's right.
- [09:24]
C
And I just. I feel so aware of the next generation. I was reading up for Weight of the World, and I read that there's an epidemic of diet culture, the largest and the most widespread in the last two decades. So I think that's 20 years. Is that right? Yeah. And it makes me go, wow, like.
- [09:44]
B
Well, I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. Yeah, well, no, I'm surprised because we know that the 90s and the noughties were really bad, so I actually thought we'd turned a corner. Is the data not telling us that?
- [09:59]
C
The data is saying that we're going back. So when are the 90s? Yeah, probably around two decades ago. They're probably referring to that. That's when it was worse. And we're sort of trending back there. Isn't that awful? And then we've done this whole Ozempic trend, and we're seeing all these celebrities and all of these role models on sighting. They're all in much smaller bodies because they're all medicalizing their weight loss. And I just think about all these Teenagers who are going to have to go to extremes to hit this body shape that we're seeing everywhere.
- [10:32]
A
I remember growing up and looking to people with similar body shapes as me and feeling reassured and secure and okay and leaning towards more accepting of my body growing up. It really is. And so I think losing that is really sad because then it just becomes this uniform kind of. We all have to look this one way and that's it. That's horrible.
- [11:00]
C
It's really, really sad.
- [11:02]
A
So the idea of Weight of the World is to bring people going through similar sorts of things together. So it's like a peer support program type thing.
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, tell us all about it.
- [11:12]
C
So, yeah, it's supposed to be community driven. We're holding our first event in June which will be a high tea and we've got some guest speakers attending. So mental health nurses, GPs, people with shared lived experience and some dietitians. So that's psychologists. And the goal is to link people that are experiencing the same thing with other people to share their story, but also to. I hate using this word, but I'll use it anyway. As well as to educate community as well. Just on what support looks like for someone with an disorder, what we actually are experiencing, what eating disorder actually looks like. Because there's so much misinformation. So, yeah, that's the goal.
- [11:51]
A
I love that. We'll put that registration link in the show notes for anyone that's interested to attend. It will be amazing and it's very much needed. And that community education is so important because you're right, there's misinformation even among professionals. I'm not going to give the context, but I once heard a professional say to another colleague, just tell them that it's lettuce and it's mostly water and they won't put on weight. And I was like, A, why is that okay to even say something like that? And B, how is that appropriate? Like if you could all see Tori's face right now.
- [12:32]
C
I know, I'm speechless. The way that I'm not shocked though, like I've been back in those boardrooms, I've just consult an anorexic patient on the ward and conversations are hideous. Really?
- [12:44]
B
Yeah.
- [12:44]
C
The misinformation and the misunderstanding. I think what we miss is it's not actually about food or weight all the time. Like obviously society puts all this pressure on that so that's sort of how it's exhibited. That's the choice of self destruction in a way, but it's a coping mechanism. We Wouldn't do it for years on end. We wouldn't be able to sustain it without this vital coping mechanism. And I think that that is so misunderstood. When they get that people can empathize with that. We all have a crutch, we all use something. But I just don't think that there's that awareness of what's happening underneath what's happening in the mind. What are we thinking about, why are we doing this? And I think that probably links into potentially why there's so much OCD prevalence, shared disorders. I was speaking to my mum and mum said that I was actually worked up for OCD as a young child and I asked her why. I think you'll find this really interesting, but I used to eat my food in a certain amount of bites at dinner. I wasn't scared of the food, I was still eating the food. But if I ate the sandwich in eight bites, like that quarter of the sandwich in eight bites specifically, my world would stay really safe and calm and I would be okay. But if I stretched it out to nine or if I couldn't get it like I was living within these confines that I just made up in my head. But they brought me so much safety and up for it. And I think that that sort of rules around food started so young for me. But isn't it easy how quickly it can be translated into something that society values? Like I think genuinely society values a lot of weight and the self control and the praise we give to restriction.
- [14:21]
A
That is a wonderful example. And picturing yourself as like a young child, it just kind of brings so much compassion and empathy to that. But also it's like, like a really solid example as to how it can all spiral from there and how it can begin in terms of those obsessive rules around food and whatnot. And we often see that in our clinic in terms of clients who have co occurring OCD and eating disorder behavior or an eating disorder in the eating disorder is either there to kind of as a way that's followed on from what's starts off as OCD type behavior. But sometimes we also see OCD manifest to protect the eating disorder. We can see it the other way too. Do you notice that Tori? Sometimes?
- [15:06]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Then there's also the. Our clients who have ARFID where it's not actually to do with body image. It's an extension of contamination fears or perhaps neurodivergence and the clients end up with yeah, extremely disordered behaviors trying to manage other forms of anxiety.
- [15:27]
A
Yeah, we do.
- [15:28]
C
Yeah.
- [15:28]
B
Felicity what do you think about? Because I've always thought about it as there being a lot of similarities between OCD and eating disorders by virtue of the idea of it being a coping mechanism. Compulsive behaviors. Could you tell us a little bit more about the compulsive behaviors that the notion of an eating disorder being a coping strategy rather than just specifically a method of extreme weight loss.
- [15:55]
C
So my eating disorder stemmed from feeling unsafe around males. And my team proposed sort of three aspects of it. And one of that was trying to shrink back to a child body where I felt safe and where I was comfortable. The other one was this sort of like the biological thing that happens when you're starving is that you're chasing like you're thinking about food all the time, but you feel this sort of heart stopping high rush of adrenaline and power. And it made me feel so powerful and that's what I didn't feel in other areas. I also had a lot going on in my life and so it was a really great way to numb out emotions and sort of sit at a place where I could function. And then if we talk about sort of the more like compulsive side of it, it gave my life structure. It gave me something to think about other than sort of the other things that felt like too much to think about. If my whole mind is only consumed with what I'm going to eat today, how little I can get through when I'm going to exercise. And all I have to do is focus on that and the numbers on the scale going down and have all the other chaos of life that I can't cope with. And that gave me structure and that gave me this sense of I'm powerful, I've got it, I'm okay, I'm safe and I'm okay in the world. And it's very hard to give that up. And I'm still learning.
- [17:25]
A
Of course it would be a strong sense of safety and security in what you described as might feel otherwise chaotic.
- [17:33]
C
Yeah.
- [17:34]
A
Why would you want to let that go?
- [17:36]
C
No, you don't want to. And I think this is kind of moving into the recovery space a bit more. But I think that's one thing that I didn't see coming in my recovery is I was sick, but I was obsessing over food and I was like, I actually would love to eat again and not feel this food guilt and I'd love to go to my friend's dinner or their birthday dinner and participate and be normal. And I was really motivated to recover despite it being a coping mechanism. I wanted to eat my food. My body was screaming for food and I couldn't wait to eat. But you can be as motivated as you want and then you eat that first meal and your stomach has shrunk, so the food inside it stretches it, it's painful, you feel nauseous, you're physically unwell. The food wasn't that great, like as good as it seemed at the time. And you've only done one meal and then you've got all the food guilt to sit with afterwards. You feel unsafe, you feel physically unwell, your brain is going to wild and that's only one meal and you've probably got. I'm terrible with basic arithmetic, but a lot more to get through before you're recovered. And so I find you can be really motivated to recover. And then you have the one meal and then you just stop again and you restrict from the next because it feels so much more comfortable and you're back to the old ways. There was a point in my recovery, I was actually admitted and I got to week four and they said, okay, now you can feel like you're at this place now where your body can feel these emotions and we have to sit in it. And it flooded like finally sort of back. You're like glucose wise in your brain, you're back thinking and you feel a lot.
- [19:22]
A
So it's almost like you kind of come out of that starvation syndrome and into like thinking and feeling again and going online again, I guess is probably a way to think about it.
- [19:33]
B
Yeah, but then you're trying to resist the urge to use your old coping mechanisms. Mechanisms.
- [19:39]
C
That's a lot all at once.
- [19:42]
A
Hey, Tori.
- [19:43]
B
Hi, Celine.
- [19:45]
A
Did you know that we run our own courses here at Melbourne Wellbeing Group?
- [19:48]
B
I did know that. In fact, it's one of my favourite things we do here because it's a great way to help psychologists and other.
- [19:55]
C
Clinicians learn more about Oculus ocd, which.
- [19:58]
A
Means we get to help more people. So if you're a clinician who works in mental health and you're interested in learning from us, then get in touch.
- [20:06]
B
For more information, head to www.melbournewellbeinggroup.com and click on the webinars and books tab.
- [20:14]
A
Alrighty, back to the show.
- [20:19]
B
The story that you tell actually parallels a lot of what our clients with OCD talk about, which is that that notion of like, I want to be different, I don't want to be doing this. I want to be able to be normal, I want to be able to just go out for dinner and I want to be able to just be with my friends. But then I'm going to resist this time. I'm not going to engage in this behavior. I'm not going to whatever it happens to be. And then the emotions that come with that are so intense that people often feel like they to continue doing their ERP and urge surfing and visiting feeling so hard that the idea about it being ego dystonic, you're doing it despite not really wanting to.
- [21:00]
C
I find that buzzword urge surfing we got taught a lot about when I was admitted. And I think maybe what's not captured in that is how often you're urge surfing.
- [21:09]
A
Yes, all the time.
- [21:11]
C
Like 10 minutes and you're at the peak and you're like, okay, I've urge surfed. It's gone, it's gone, it's gone. 20 minutes later you're doing the same. It's constant. And that's like, maybe you'll get through eight urge serves. And on that eighth one you're like, nah, you know what? Stuff like, I can't again.
- [21:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [21:30]
C
Like, it sounds so nice. Like, let's go for surf in the morning. That's yeah. Beach bait. But it's. Oh, it's so much harder than that.
- [21:38]
A
It is, it wears you down. And that's the thing, like I have often said to my clients, and I think that's where self compassion can be really important, like to try and go easy on yourself. Because it's one of those things where I often say, like, there'll be moments where you're like, yeah, I've got this. Like, I'm just gonna, you know, go for it and I can do this. And then like you described, it's like again and again and again and again. And you're running out of steam and you're running, you're like, how much longer can I do this for? When is this gonna end? Or when is this gonna get easier? And then you're like, well, screw this. I know exactly what I'm doing and I'm gonna go back to these old ways of doing it. And sometimes I know it's easier said than done, but that's okay too.
- [22:19]
C
Sometimes I suppose it's about celebrating the first seven that you did urge.
- [22:23]
A
Exactly.
- [22:24]
B
I had a client just last night say to me that she'd done urge surfing for two hours. She had delayed her compulsion for two hours. And this is like a major one that she normally, you know, and she was like, yeah, but it gave in it's not good enough.
- [22:38]
A
It's like, you did it for two hours. Those little wins are so important to celebrate and we neglect to do that because perfectionism is such a huge part of OCD and eating disordered behavior as well. And we're just so critical towards ourselves in that moment. And we don't keep track of any of the good stuff that happens. The takeaway from that is celebrate the small winners. We need them to keep going because stay on.
- [23:06]
C
Yeah. I was like, hey, I'm going to recover. I'm doing this. And I just flipped this switch in my perfectionism went from I'm going to be really great anoretic to I'm going to be recovered and that's it. And I switched here and they were like, naflik, we need you to move through that middle zone. We need to do that work. You can't just.
- [23:25]
B
Yeah.
- [23:26]
C
And I'm sure I like, I don't know much about OCD recovery, but I'm sure it's the same thing. All the little things. Two to four hours or something. I don't know.
- [23:34]
A
It really is. There is a very huge similarity there. Like, you do have to move through the process. You can't just go there, even though, like, you know where you want to be and you can see it and you're like, I just want to get there already. But spoken like a true perfectionist. No one likes the learning process. You just want to do it already. The learning part is the painful part because we feel like we self criticize, we feel inadequate, we feel insecure, like all those awful things. But that's not forever either. But it can feel like it is forever in that moment.
- [24:04]
B
What are you hoping to achieve or influence are you hoping to have with Weight of the World?
- [24:11]
C
I'm hoping we can be something positive online. I think sometimes it's really easy to jump onto Instagram and then get stuck in that Skinny Talk or the what I eat in a day videos and start comparing yourself to these really beautiful, sometimes edited people online that you only get one version of their world. And I'm hoping that people can log on and if they're following me, that can help a different algorithm. But I can also say, hey, look, there's people out there that are bloated after eating a burrito right now. There's people out there that are not shaved. There's people and just offer something else and give people perspective. And I think everyone needs that. And I'm really feeling for that younger generation of teens who haven't had the years that we've had offline, we've been to spa and seen natural bodies, we've been able to see the real world. Whereas I think it's really easy to log online and only get one version of the world and get into that comparative mindset. Then we start getting the body dissatisfaction and the age of being able to self love and accept yourself and feel good in your skin, have confidence it's gone. And we don't see ourselves online in a good way, but see it there. So I'm hoping to offer that online for people that need it. Hoping to get together community and go through recovery together, inspire recovery, help recovery, promote recovery and be someone that I needed during my recovery journey. And also just education. Have the nutritionists, the dietitians, the psychologists, the GPs explain how the private health sector and the public health sector works and how metabolism works, how livers work and not juices.
- [26:00]
A
Yeah, oh, absolutely. I think it's just going to be amazing and so, so successful. Like, I think there's such a huge gap for it and kudos to you for putting it together. Keep doing what you're doing. It's just going to be so wonderful.
- [26:19]
B
Felicity, what do you think? I mean, you've talked a bit about misinformation and I'm still really curious about what you were saying before about the kinds of conversations that are happening behind the scenes with medical professionals. What do you want people to know? What do you think clinicians should know? What do you think medical professionals should know?
- [26:37]
C
People often dismiss eating disorders as manifestations of vanity or immaturity or being unwell, like madness. And in some ways it is kind of all of these things, but it's also an addiction. And it's a response, even though it's a rather twisted one, but it's a response to a culture, it's a response to a family, it's a response to ourselves. It's an attempt to find an identity. It ultimately strips you of any sense of power or any sense of identity other than the identity of being sick. But it's the thing that you believe is keeping you safe and alive and contained. And in the end it does the opposite. My eating disorder so radically distorted my sense of who I am and I've fought really hard to gain that back. But yeah, I think just coming back to eating disorders are addiction and they're a crutch. And yeah, I think that that's what I would like the broader community to understand is this addictive side of the eating disorder. I actually Wrote a little bit about how my eating disorder progressed into an addiction. So I said, you become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important, the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving, you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of frenetic, unstable energy. And the other is the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. So at first everything tastes and smells intense. Tactile experience is intense. Your own drive and your energy is so intense and so focused and your sense of power is very, very intense and you're not aware that you're actually becoming very quickly addicted.
- [28:25]
B
Effy, tell us about why you wrote that.
- [28:27]
C
I wrote it like I was literally saying, like last paragraph. I wrote it because people don't understand how addictive they are. The qualities of why we do this eating disorder, the coping mechanism, the power that. I don't think people understand what it's like to have an E disorder. I think people just think, oh, you're just starving or you're trying to lose weight, or you're vain, or it's a phase that all adolescents go through, or yeah, people just didn't understand for me, but I experienced it so viscerally and I found it really hard to let go of. And I wanted people to know it's a crutch. Like it's such an intense experience and it's so hard to let that go. I remember in recovery talking to my psychologist and I said, food just tastes so boring now because when you're not eating, your brain just thinks about food all the time. Whenever you are eating, it's giving off these huge dopamine fires to be like, do that more because we need more. So your experience is so heightened and food tastes amazing, better than it should. It's electric. And I remember saying to my psychologist during my recovery, this isn't fun. Like I'm not experiencing the world so blandly. And she said, I'll share it because it really helped me. She said, but isn't it amazing that you now have space in your brain to experience other things so heightened. Like your life shouldn't be about food or anything else. You should experience your emotions so heightened, which I had numbed completely out, experience love and fun and joy. So heightened. I loved that.
- [30:04]
B
That's a lovely, lovely reflection.
- [30:07]
A
It really is beautiful. Yeah. Because when you deny yourself wanting to feel all the emotions that feel really full on, like sadness, shame, guilt, etc, you also deny yourself feeling all the other emotions like what you described, joy, excitement, happiness and love and all of those things. And yet it's what she did there was shift your focus right from food to the rest of the world.
- [30:33]
C
And then I'm trying to help do that too because she focus to the rest of the world and then the rest of the world is trying to say but our focus should be about appearance and what we look like. That's the narrative that I'm really hoping way to the world can help change. And I hoping other people experiencing that and wanting to shift their mindset because it's toxic for them to be in that mindset as well can find a community that won't talk about it at dinner that understand the triggers. And if anyone from community would like to support they can learn what we need. They can have these conversations, they can understand more about eating disorders and why people have them and the pain that we experience as well and the complexities of it. It's not just vanity and it's not just a diet. And actually we love food.
- [31:20]
A
Oh, Felicity, thank you so much for being so open and vulnerable and honest and genuine in today's episode. It's just been amazing being able to start to shed light in this. It's by no means the last time we're going to talk about this. Tori and I have brainstormed a whole bunch of different people that we want to keep talking to as well in this space. We will put all the links in the show notes so that people can follow you and come to the event if they want to and all those wonderful things. So check out the show notes to be able to get access to that information. Before we wrap up, there is a couple of questions that we like to finish off with one of being we usually like to normalize intrusive thoughts that occur for people. So those unwanted pesky thoughts that just creep in and trigger us in certain ways. Do you feel comfortable sharing a couple of yours that might have popped in at some stage over the years?
- [32:24]
C
Yes. Yeah, I do. Most of mine are like body checking or things like that. Let me just think about it. Let me just think about pivot to a different one. Mine's locks.
- [32:35]
A
Oh, yes, locks.
- [32:37]
C
I check my locks about 10 times and I check the back lock and then I check the front lock and then I check the stove and make sure that's all off. And then I do it again and then I'll be lying in bed now I'll be like, okay, maybe just one more time. I need to make sure. We've just moved to a new house and I'm finding that extremely Intrusive. A bit of an older house and it's in a different neighborhood because we purchased it. And I'm checking the locks all the time.
- [33:05]
A
I think a lot of people can relate to that one, definitely.
- [33:08]
B
And the other question that we always ask is about whether there's something you know now that you wish you knew earlier.
- [33:16]
C
Oh, I want something good, because that's a good question. Pressure. Well, here's my perfectionism coming up. Why couldn't I prep these before? I think maybe just that we're all messy and messy is not a bad thing. That's been huge actually, for me, even just this year, because I am a bit of a perfectionist and I like my life just so. And I think that I like to be perceived as someone that's really conscientious and put together and organized and this, that and the other. And obviously you don't get that 100% of the time. And I think something I wish I knew is that actually it's really fine to be human. And even the most amazing mothers that we think are doing an incredible job and have handmade lunches, there's something going on in their life and we're all a little messy. And that's the beautiful part of being human. And we can celebrate it and embrace it.
- [34:09]
A
I love that. That is amazing.
- [34:11]
C
Couldn't agree more.
- [34:12]
A
We're all about mess. We're all about the mess and staying messy.
- [34:18]
C
Let's stay messy, guys.
- [34:21]
A
I love it.
- [34:22]
B
That's a great, great place to say goodbye, I reckon. Let's stay, Missy.
- [34:26]
A
Thank you so much for joining us.
- [34:27]
C
Felicity, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated this conversation and. And for creating a space where I could feel so open chatting about it.
- [34:39]
A
You've been listening to Breaking the Rules, a show for mental health professionals designed to help you build confidence in treating obsessive compulsive disorder.
- [34:47]
B
This. This podcast is brought to you by Melbourne Wellbeing Group, a psychology practice based in Melbourne with a special focus on treating OCD. To find out more, head to our website, melbournewellbeinggroup.com au all one word. That's melbournewellbeinggroup dot com this podcast was.
- [35:05]
A
Made with strategy and production support from Wavelength Creative to make sure you don't miss an episode of Breaking the Rules. Be sure to subscribe to to or follow the show in your podcast app. And while you're there, leave us a five star review. It really helps others find the show. I'm Celine Galget.
- [35:22]
B
And I'm Tori Miller.
- [35:24]
A
And we'll be back next episode with more reasons to convince you to get messy, have fun, and break the rules.