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Codependency And Food, Weight, & Body Image with Cori Rosenthal
How does codependency relate to food, weight & body image?
How do codependents overeat, undereat, and everything in between to please others?
How can you stop using food to deal with your codependency?
Thanks for listening! Be sure to check out:
http://www.codependummy.com
@codependummy on IG
Sign up for my free course Codependummy 101 at http://www.codependummy.com
In this podcast episode, Marissa speaks with Cori Rosenthal, a Santa Monica-based psychotherapist, about codependency, codependency’s influence on weight, eating, and body image, and how Cori treats codependency with her clients. How does Cori define codependency? How did she cope with her own codependency? Marissa and Cori both open up about trying to undereat and please others then swinging to overeating to cope with all the stress throughout their 20s.
Meet Cori Rosenthal, LMFT, Santa Monica based marriage and family therapist (#98720) and mindfulness educator in private practice in Santa Monica. She incorporates mindfulness, compassion practices and Brainspotting in her work with adolescents and adults. She specializes in working with intimacy and codependency, eating disorders, disordered eating, trauma, anxiety and depression. Cori is trained in Pia Melody’s Post Induction Therapy for codependency, is certified in Brainspotting, and also is a Mindful Self-Compassion teacher.
Cori@corirosenthal.com
310-228-8081
In this podcast episode:
Cori discusses what she believes contributes to the development of codependency in young women: developmental trauma. What’s developmental trauma? Cori explains it all.
Cori talks about the connection between codependency and being “needless and wantless” when it comes to food, body size, and weight.
We discuss how you can stop coping with food and start being kinder to yourself, unfollow unhelpful social media accounts, and learn to say “no” so you don’t end up coping with food!
Cori discusses what drove her to work specifically with codependents and their issues with food, weight, and body size. She opens up about how she started as a life coach and transitioned to becoming a licensed therapist after she saw the same thing over and over again: “My clients were codependent.” Cori had her own fears about graduate school but overcame her fear when she saw the need to learn more to serve her clients better.
Cori discusses her difficulty in creating and making boundaries as a young woman. She shares about her dating messes and the “bad boys” she dated and was codependent with, including how he made decisions about what they did after school while she ignored her own plans. She let him run off with his plans while ignoring what she wanted and needed in the moment. Cori discusses how she was “easy going” and how “there’s nothing easy going about being easy going.”
Marissa asks Cori about what she believes is the cause of codependency. Cori describes Pia Melody’s teachings about how codependency is rooted in developmental trauma, meaning negative experiences you went through during your childhood and adolescence. It may be abuse, neglect, stress and how it’s “subtle.” Cori and Marissa discuss multiple ways that birth order, family issues, sibling’s issues, and parents level of presence can all be ways that contribute to abuse and neglect.
Cori talks about the connection between codependency and food. There are two ways she sees it: wanting to shrink yourself to be worthy versus coping with codependency by overeating, binging, and restriction. Cori discusses how food does offer “temporary relief from pain” and how that leads codependents to overeat to avoid the pain of the emptiness in their relationships.
Cori and Marissa discuss how comments about weight, whether positive or negative, are NOT HELPFUL, especially for codependents. If codependents are always seeking the attention, affection, and approval from others, then their weight loss or gain will be dependent on the feedback that they get from others and that can cause a lot of damage.
What about safety seeking through food? Cori discusses how we can be in control of our food to feel safe within ourselves. Marissa adds how this is not always conscious and how we may engage in overeating or restriction in an effort to feel like we are in control but unconsciously we want to feel safe.
Cori and Marissa talk about the influence of culture and how the media, television shows, movies, music, and etc. teach us to “equate who we are with our appearance.” Cori recalls a song she loved and how she would belt out “Invisible!” and how she worked to embody that. They reminisce about the songs they sang that reinforced them being small, wantless, needless, and codependent in their relationships.
Cori mentions mindfulness and how that can also help codependents “tolerate your own lived experience even when it’s challenging, scary, or difficult.” She encourages those who are codependent to trust that they have themselves and will be able to handle what comes. “I’ve got me and it’s okay.”
Cori suggests three ways to start developing a healthier relationship with food and yourself. First, start to develop a kinder inner dialogue. Second, stop following any social media accounts that make you feel poorly about yourself. And third, start to say “No” as a complete sentence. Marissa emphasizes how this is so needed to promote intergenerational healing. Cori adds how we can start to talk about our wants, needs, boundaries we are proud of instead of what food group we have eliminated.
Be sure to check out Cori’s meditation series that she mentions at the end. She has four meditations to help people create a healthier relationship with their bodies.
Helpful links:
The Center Does Not Hold
Pia Melody’s Book
Invisible song
Love the Way You Lie song
@body_redefined on IG
Want to work with me? Go to http://www.therapywithmarissa.com or visit @therapywithmarissa on IG and Tiktok
