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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Fit Bottomed Zone Podcast. I’m Katie from fitbottomedzone.com, and I really enjoyed recording this episode with Jessica Brown all about how self-compassion and something called re-parenting are amazing tools for transformation and healing. Including in our physical health and related to things like emotional eating and so much more.
She really does a great job explaining this concept, gives applicable examples of how it works for her, and how it’s worked for people she’s worked with. And I find this concept might be a really important piece for a lot of people who are struggling with health issues and the stories around that.
She talks about learning to reparent, find safety and source that from within, and remember our own goodness as she calls it. She’s a Stanford certified compassion teacher, clinical nutritionist, and author with over 25 years of experience. Including 10 years of clinical practice, directly related to self-compassion based reparenting parts work and inner child healing directly tied to the root causes of an individual’s relationship with food or disordered eating. And in those 25 years, she’s helped thousands of people heal physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. And this inspired something she calls The Loving Diet, which is one of the first mind body books supporting those with autoimmune disease.
I learned a lot from her in this episode. I think this work is vitally important and I’ve done it some myself, and will continue to do it more in the future. Let’s join and learn from Jessica Brown.
Katie: Welcome and thank you so much for being here.
Jessica: Hi.
Katie: I’m so excited for these topics and we’re going to, especially this is very near and dear to my heart, the topic of self compassion and reparenting and how these are massively transformation tools, even for our physical health, but of course, beyond and into so much more as well.
Before we learn from you on that topic, though, however, I, from researching your bio, found out that you are a surprise identical twin, which is like so rare to begin with. But there was a mention that you and your twin had your own language as babies and essentially are like communicating telepathically.
And I always wished I had a twin. So I would love to hear what is life like and what is that like now?
Jessica: Well, my grandparents told me that they would come in when my sister and I were supposed to be taking a nap in our cribs and we’d be standing up looking at each other in each of our cribs, laughing uncontrollably, having a complete conversation that they called gibberish, but I feel like it set the path for us… you know before she’s going to call, that happens constantly. And you know, whenever we talk, we just usually finish each other’s sentences and it’s just been… I only have a twin, no other siblings, so it’s just been a lifelong high intuitive connection between the two of us. It’s fun being a twin.
Katie: That’s so cool. And so fascinating to hear. I’ve heard of stories like that, but to get to actually hear from someone who has experienced it, that’s so fascinating. And I would guess also that you are probably a deeply intuitive person based on the work that you do. And I feel like this topic is so important.
And I really feel like often this one piece we’re going to really talk about today might be the missing link for a lot of other pieces when it comes to physical health, especially. And it was for me in like reintegrating parts from trauma and actually relearning how to associate with my body. And I know this is a pretty deep and intense topic.
So I’d love for you to kind of broadly walk us into the idea and the understanding of self compassion and reparenting. Which might be something some people listening are not fully familiar with, but how these even relate to our physical health and how then we’ll build from there into how we can actually build this into our lives and do that inner work.
Jessica: So the idea of reparenting is that we have the ability to give ourselves what we might not have gotten. And this is sort of a revelation to a lot of people when they come out of highly traumatized childhoods and they didn’t get what they need to consider that even though they didn’t get what they need, they actually have the ability to to give it back to themselves. The reason why this is important, if we went back to the ACE scores, the adverse childhood experience scores, we know that highly traumatized people suffer from chronic diseases at a much higher rate. And so the idea of reparenting is you have all the things that you need to give yourself what you didn’t get.
It’s just a matter of learning the skills and taking the leap of faith that you can do it. And then the bonus to that is, is that then we lower the odds that we are going to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic illness. I always consider to be reparenting is the ultimate inner toolkit that we all have that we’re walking around with, but that most people are unaware of. It’s like a secret stash of healing that we have built inside of us that does not go away no matter how much we are traumatized. It is simply just remembering that it’s there and then learning how to dive into learning the skills.
Katie: I think that’s a such an important point that it doesn’t go away. So even if we have trauma, it’s still there and that capacity is still there. I know it probably can feel like it did for me, like that wasn’t when I first started doing that work and it was definitely a beautiful but intense process. But I love that you also even tied in autoimmunity because I find it fascinating that autoimmunity affects women in a much larger percentage than men and it seems like there might be some reasons for that that you might be able to explain better than I could. But I wonder if it’s emotional component and the way we hold that in our bodies is actually a big piece of that.
Jessica: Yes, hormones are a big driver of autoimmunity. And some people have really speculated that that’s why women suffer at a much higher rate than men. But if we were to say, well, what if there’s something that’s not physiological, and we looked at the different ways that men and women respond to traumatic events. This whole idea of, well, first, women have been misrepresented in science and studies for a really long time. And what we know now is, is that women don’t respond with fight or flight, that men respond to trauma with fight or flight. And that’s really important because when we look at how do women respond to trauma, they tend to respond by what’s called tend and befriend. Women tend to go into their little communities and make sure everyone is okay. And they often do that at the expense of taking care of themselves.
And I feel like that, when we look at both the physiological pieces of women, have a different set of hormones that might set them at a higher statistic rate to getting autoimmunity. But when we look at how women actually respond to trauma, they respond to it in much more of a way of going out into the community and taking care of their people, their family, others in the community. And that is a different response than men. And I always feel like there’s a correlation there.
Katie: I’d never heard it called tend and befriend. That’s really helpful. And I felt so true when you said that I was like, Oh gosh, that was my pattern for a very long time.
Jessica: Yes, and so this idea of reparenting is tending and befriending the parts inside of us that we feel like might be a liability. Or we’re afraid of getting hurt again. Or have already been hurt so badly that we don’t trust that that won’t happen again.
Katie: That makes total sense and I would love if you could give us like a kind of detailed description of reparenting. I feel like this has been a really valuable tool for me, but it can seem a little obscure. Like when I first learned about it, it took me a while to understand exactly what the term meant and then beyond that to learn how to actually integrate that and to do that work too.
Jessica: So reparenting is simply stepping into being the safety and security that we are all looking for that we might not have gotten when we were growing up. So it is the actual providing that sense, felt sense of safety and security. The emotional security, the psychological security, also maybe the physical security. And so one of the ways that I tell my clients is, is that there’s the theory of what self parenting is, which is you can parent yourself and you can depend on you to do it, but I always tell people it’s a feeling. It’s the feeling that you get when your best friend in the whole world hugs you and tells you it’s going to be okay. It’s the feeling that we get when all of our needs are met.
And so reparenting is often a leap of faith in a way, because it does take vulnerability to trust that you can actually do it for yourself. But it is first the feeling and then it’s the practical piece, which is remembering to give yourself that feeling of safety and security in life, even if it feels like it’s not safe and not secure.
Katie: Yeah, that was so paradigm shifting for me to learn the idea and then the practice of how we can actually source, like, intersource those things versus outsource. And as I learned about it, it made sense to me that we kind of are in a pattern of outsourcing it. In that while we’re growing up, I’ve read, for instance, that when we’re under age seven, our nervous systems are kind of like entrained to our mother’s especially nervous system.
And we are sort of like outsourcing the learning of that to our caregivers, which is a beautiful and important part of growing up. And that like it makes sense that kind of some sticky parts could remain there or if needs weren’t met and then there was trauma, you mentioned the ACE scores and I found that interesting when I learned about those of like, those aren’t just big T traumas.
Those aren’t just direct abuse. Those aren’t just like a violent thing that happened. Those can also be interactions or needs not being met when you were a certain age that weren’t like someone might not call it big T trauma or overtly traumatic, but your nervous system still interpreted them as a need not being met.
And so it makes sense to me that like we would have that pattern of kind of outsourcing those needs and be in that experience, but it’s really interesting to me this concept of learning to source that from within us instead of looking outside. And it feels like there’s a lot more peace when we can learn how to do that as well.
Jessica: Yeah, I’ll give you an example, because I tell my clients this, it’s just sort of easy to see it conceptually when it’s not you and you’re not diving into your own stuff. So I was born two months premature. My twin sister and I were two months premature. My mom did not know she was having twins. And so the first things that happened were, number one, we were born early, so it was before ultrasounds. So the doctors weren’t aware that we were, they just thought they got the date wrong, the conception date wrong. So we were born two months premature and we were immediately separated into different incubators.
And my mom was in her early 20s, and she was an hour away from the hospital. I wasn’t breastfed, I wasn’t held much, I was immediately taken away, separated from my twin. And they, of course, were doing the best that they can, but that created attachment issues, lifelong attachment issues for me. And my first, not one of my first, but one of my biggest reparenting moments was when I went in and I imagined what it would be like to have given myself as a two month, early born child all the things that I didn’t get. And that was really, really helpful. So what do we do when we give ourself the things that we didn’t get? Well, I held, I imagined holding myself. I imagined feeding myself, you know, giving myself a bottle. I sang to myself. I read stories to myself. So reparenting is pretty much the simple form of connection that we can give to ourselves, the part of us that thinks we are alone. That thinks we have done something wrong to cause our aloneness, and we essentially turn away from ourself. We turn away from our own deep loving and our own deep care as a viable resource. And then we spend a lot of our life looking for that outside of ourself.
So I would say reparenting is not only the most effective way of reconnecting safety on the inside of ourself, but it’s also, for a lot of us, the scariest thing. It’s hostile territory when we look at our traumatized lives. And so it helps to just take time, work up to the big things that we want to reparent inside of ourself.
Katie: And it sounds like you do this work often with your clients as well. And I can imagine they must probably feel like huge transformations when they are able to go deep and do that work. Can you give some other examples to just kind of help people understand an application like from the small things from childhood that might be things that show up in reparenting and adulthood?
Cause I feel like this could probably hit such a wide range of things from childhood in different ages, different phases related to, I want to in a minute talk about emotional eating and food, and I would guess it shows up there, but can you give us some practical examples to help people kind of like resonate and understand how it might apply to them?
Jessica: Well, anytime that they feel like they have been heartbroken. Anytime they feel like they have been alone or they are afraid. Those are the moments that we tend to try to fix, search outside of ourself for the resolution. You know, oh, my parents weren’t there for me when I was growing up, so I’m going to look for a partner who is there for me. That would be sort of like a typical way that we try to resolve these things. Oh, my parent growing up was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold down a job, I’m going to make sure that I always hold down a job.
And so oftentimes we do the opposite of what we grew up with in order to resolve that lack because we’re afraid of that same thing happening to us. I love reparenting because you’re not held to any standard except for how deeply can I care for myself. And when we deeply care for ourself, then it resolves misunderstandings and beliefs that we have built as the framework of our life that are often set up on very big misconceptions about our innate value and goodness. And I see that connected to eating, emotional eating, eating disorders more than anything else.
Katie: That’s so, yeah, such a deep concept and so beautiful. And you mentioned like we look for partners in that specific way, and I’ve heard it said that we like look for that outsourcing in a romantic relationship especially. And that the feeling of comfort and safety when we get comfortable in a romantic relationship is often when some of those things can begin to surface because like you said, we might search for someone who fills the void that we didn’t have in childhood.
And I’ve also heard sometimes people will subconsciously seek out someone who matches some of the patterns of a caregiver to sort of like reinforce those things. Even if they were like dysfunctional that feel safe because they were used to that pattern in childhood. So it seems like doing this work could drastically affect relationships.
Certainly, I’m sure it affects the way we parent as well. And like you just explained our relationship with food, which seems like that ties in also with feelings of safety and comfort since food has that also purpose in our life. I’d love for you to explain more on the emotional eating side, especially.
I know that for me, that was an issue and I know many people who have had that experience as well. And it seems like this is maybe a paradigm a lot of people have not considered in addressing the emotional eating.
Jessica: Well, I want to say one thing too. I loved how you use that word reinforce. That we’ve searched for partners that sort of reinforce our traumatized caregivers, which of course comes out through our relationship with food. But with the form of reparenting that I follow and I was taught that has self compassion as the element is that we often feel like life is really against us.
And so then we’ll look for ways, relationships, or jobs that reinforce our wrongness or our trauma. But when we look at it from this, what the conversation you and I are having, it’s about resolving. So we’ll keep attracting partners to us that seem like they have that same patterning, not to reinforce our trauma, but to actually give us an opportunity to resolve that. And that’s a huge turn that I tell all my clients who have emotional eating issues where I say, you know, emotional eating isn’t going to give up on you until you resolve the idea of the belief that you have about your own goodness. You know, we have big beliefs: we’re broken, we don’t deserve things, we are not lovable.
And these things seem like we have to overcome them, search for the solution and fix them. But reparenting is really about remembering. So we resolve through remembering, through reparenting, and self compassion, versus reinforcing and fixing. And that is the biggest piece that I hope people get from this conversation, which is why it’s so important to remember, even if you don’t believe it, there’s a toolkit inside of you that’s ready to go to help you to do it.
Katie: I love that. And the idea of remembering our own goodness. And I would love to dive now into like kind of the practical skills. You mentioned this is like learning the actual skills to do this. This is not just some ambiguous process out in the ether, but there are actual ways to walk through this and to do this work.
So I would love for you to teach us some of those skills. I know it’s a much deeper work and of course we’ll link to where people can find more work that you’ve done and more resources. But what are some of those basic skills? Like how does someone begin this process and even begin to learn to source these things from inside and to remember their own goodness?
Jessica: One thing to do is to write your story out, which is, you know, when we start writing our story, then we have beliefs that come out. So one is to just take the time to understand what it is that you believe. And oftentimes when we look at it with a self compassionate eye, versus a critical eye, then we can see, oh yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me. So that’s one thing is one: what’s our story, writing it out, looking at it from a self compassion eye versus a critical eye.
The other thing is asking ourselves what’s the relationship that we have? So I would say too, if we’re talking about eating, what’s the relationship that you have to the part of you that emotionally eats? Do you see it as a liability? Do you see the part of you that emotionally eats as the enemy? Do you see the part of you that emotionally eats is something you need to fix and again, you know overcome? Because oftentimes these parts of us have something really valuable. It wants to teach us mostly that connection. It wants loving connection.
Katie: And also being a mom with kids ranging from 9 to 18 right now, I also, as you were saying that, was thinking, of course, none of us will ever be the perfect parent. Even though I feel like all of us try to do our best, but recognizing that so many of these things come from even early childhood.
Are there any things we can do as parents? I’m sure doing this work ourselves is maybe the biggest and most massive one. But are there any ways in our parenting and in the way we relate to our kids that we can help them avoid kind of forgetting their own goodness or avoid building that pattern of outsourcing and looking for that outside and help reinforce that, this thing that we now get to learn as adults?
Jessica: Well, judging is the pastime of America. And so looking at how you judge yourself is one of the best ways to prevent you from passing on the skills of our kids learning to judge themselves. And so I always tell my clients if we were to just take a step away from the idea that we need to be a good parent and we’re actually just trying to be loving parents, the most loving thing that we can do is look at all the places inside of ourselves as parents that we’re judging ourselves first. And stop worrying as much about parenting, “right”.
Because again, it’s about where are the places inside of myself that I’m not loving myself. And why are we not loving ourself? Because we’re holding misconceptions about our innate goodness. What happens when we hold conceptions about our innate goodness? We decide that we did something wrong, that life is against us, that we’re not lovable. And when we hold those things true, then kids pick up on that unconsciously. So us doing our own inner work, I believe that kids sense that when we feel safe in our own bodies as mothers, they feel safer in their bodies.
Katie: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And I’ve often thought of like, even just that concept you just talked about in doing the work on ourselves, which we can often feel resistance around thinking it’s selfish. And I realized this is such a selfless thing, because even if we don’t even speak about it, by doing this work ourselves or by doing any of that work ourselves by exercising, by eating healthy, we actually are both modeling it and giving them permission to do that as well by being an example. Or I think of that in the moments where I’m certainly not a perfect parent and I have to apologize to one of my kids or get to apologize for something and how that can actually build more strength and trust and I feel like it helps give them permission to not feel like they have to be perfect either.
And so I love that you like don’t focus on being a good parent, just focus on being a loving parent. I think that’s so beautiful and I read somewhere, I wish I remembered the source, but kind of, we can often emerge in adulthood with these core sort of questions, or core beliefs, and the questions are usually like, am I lovable?
Am I worthy? And that sounds like a child question, like a very young question. And we can internalize that belief of like, I’m not good enough or I’m not lovable or I’m bad. Or if people really knew me, they would never love me or things like that. And it sounds like this work really gets to go to the heart of that and to help people, like you say, reparent that and to find and remember their own goodness, which I think is just so beautiful, and it’s something I hope many people listening will consider going on the journey of. I’ve gotten to do some of that, and I’m still very much on that journey, and it’s been so beautiful and so fruitful. And if someone is hearing what you’re saying and resonating and wanting to do that work, and maybe recognizing where this is showing up in their lives, where would be some good resources?
Where can I point them to keep learning from you and to begin that journey?
Jessica: My website is probably the best place to get in touch with me. thelovingdiet.com. I’m also on Instagram. But there’s a lot of people that are internal family systems. Dick Schwartz who runs internal family systems. I do not practice internal family systems, but internal family systems is a form of reparenting. I just learned through my own teacher over the last 20 years to do this work. So there’s lots of therapists that do internal family systems or what we call parts work. But if someone wants to work with me specifically for emotional eating, disordered eating, orthorexia, trying to come off of restricted diets.
We have these parts inside of us that think that restricted diets is the best way to keep safe from a really scary diagnosis. And so I tend to work a lot with chronic health issues and eating disorders and doing this parts work. So I’m happy to work with somebody on that if they go to my website.
Katie: Well, I love that name, the loving diet, and I will absolutely link to that and everything you mentioned in the show notes at fitbottomedzone.com. So if you guys are listening on the go, hopefully walking outside in the sunshine, those links are all at fitbottomedzone.com so that you can find Jessica and learn from her.
But Jessica, I love this topic. I love the work you’re doing. I’ve seen in my own life, the benefits of doing this work, and I love that you’re helping so many people on that path. Thank you so much for your time today and for all that you’ve shared.
Jessica: Thanks for having me, Katie.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Fit Bottomed Zone podcast.
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