I didn’t become an eating disorder therapist because recovery was easy—it was actually quite the opposite.
I've spent nearly two decades getting very familiar with the bullshit an eating disorder can come up with. Which has taught me two very important things:
1. Give ed a lemon and it will make lemonade – for itself.
Eating disorders are incredibly good at taking rules, reassurance, coping skills, treatment language, “healthy” behaviors, and even recovery itself and turning them into another way to stay relevant.
Give it enough time and ED will figure out how to work with it.
Which brings me to...
2. ED really isn't THAT ORIGINAL.
But ED would love for you to believe that your particular thought, rule, fear, or circumstance is the one exception that nobody else understands and therefore you definitely need to listen to it.
I don't mean that your experience isn't unique. It is!
Meet Your Eating Disorder Therapist & Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor
Hi, I’m Cilla — eating disorder therapist, body image educator, speaker, consultant, pop ‘soda’ enthusiast, covered-bridge fangirl, and someone who has spent a VERY long time getting to know eating disorders from both sides of the therapy room.
I know what it’s like to be the client who gets it. The client who can tell you why the eating disorder is harmful, understands the coping skills, knows what the therapist is probably going to say before they say it, and then go home and still feel completely stuck.
That experience has shaped pretty much everything about the way I work today.
I spent years thinking I was BAD at recovery because I was stuck right at the cusp of “full RECOVERY”
I struggled with eating disorders for years before becoming the person sitting in the therapist chair.
And I did A LOT of therapy.
Some of it changed my life, while some of it caused more harm.
There were times when I felt like I was doing everything I was supposed to do while still wondering why the hell I wasn't better yet.
Knowing something and actually being able to live it are two very different things.
For a long time, I thought that disconnect meant there was something wrong with me. WRONG!
Then my body changed (Shocker)
Somewhere along the way, I had picked up an expectation that recovery would eventually lead me to this magical place where I felt completely comfortable with my body. Maybe I'd even love it! I even believed that if I did recovery really well, I'd get to recover while still having the kind of body our culture rewards. LOL
I recovered into a bigger body
Which meant I had to grieve. I had to grieve the body I thought I was supposed to have, the version of recovery I thought I was working towards, my clothes that I am way too sentimental about, taking candid pictures, my identity, the safety I thought being smaller would give me.
And I had to face one really uncomfortable question: Could I actually choose recovery if recovery didn't give me the body I wanted?
I wish I could tell you I reached some magical point where I looked in the mirror and suddenly loved everything I saw.
What happened was much less Instagrammable, sexy even. I just simply started living.
I wore things I once thought I needed a different body to wear and let pictures exist. I took a two piece bikini on tour all summer long. Purchased the bike because moving felt good instead of trying to make my body smaller. I wore the fitted wedding dress of my dreams without asking my body to change for the occasion.
I had shitty body image days and eventually realized they didn't have to become shitty life days. Little by little, my body stopped being the most interesting thing about me.
There were glimmers & tiny moments where I caught myself enjoying my life without checking how my body looked while I was doing it.
Eventually there were more of those moments than there were moments spent grieving the body I thought I needed.
My life became so much greater than what my body looked like while living.
You deserve this body liberation too!
Then I Became the therapist i once needed.
I didn't want to sit across from someone who already understood their eating disorder and spend an hour explaining their eating disorder back to them.
I didn't want every complicated experience reduced to: ”what coping skill could you use?”
I didn’t want to be that therapist asking you “how can you thank your body today”?
And I REALLY didn't want to treat body image by spending session after session trying to convince someone that they're beautiful.
I wanted to get curious about why this particular thought has so much power? Why is ED still useful here? What is happening right before the behavior? What does the person believe will happen if they don't listen? Where is treatment accidentally giving ED more lemons?
That's the stuff I wanted to understand, and it's still the stuff that gets me excited about this work today.
Because ED will make Lemonade out of damn near anything.
This has become one of the BIGGEST ideas behind the way I work, because eating disorders do—and will adapt.
Sometimes the thing keeping ED alive is obvious. Other times, ED has been through enough therapy that it has learned some new vocabulary.
- Restriction is "health."
- Body checking is "just making sure."
- Reassurance is "processing."
- Avoidance is "protecting my peace."
- And a recovery guideline has quietly turned into another rigid rule.
What's keeping it important?
THESE DAYS, THE WORK IS GETTING BIGGER THAN MY THERAPY ROOM
For years, most of this work happened one person at a time. And don’t get me wrong, I still LOVE therapy. But eventually I kept running into the same thought:
Why does someone have to become my client to have access to this conversation?
They shouldn't. And therapists shouldn't have to feel completely alone when they hit the complicated parts of this work, either.
So Cilla Hope Wellness has started growing up a little.
What began primarily as my therapy practice is becoming a bigger home for the work I care about:
- Eating disorder recovery
- Body image
- Body grief
- ARFID
- Diet culture
- Clinical education
- Writing a whole ass book
Conversations about what happens when the textbook answer meets an actual complicated human.
And Because I Know You Wanna Know About The Official Stuff, Too!
I heard through the grapevine that "professional diet-culture disruptor" is not a credentialing body. Rude!
Anyways, I’m a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) who is licensed in Indiana and Illinois and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor with clinical experience specializing in eating disorders, body image, ARFID, anxiety, ADHD, high functioning ASD (Level 1 Autism), OCD, perfectionism, and the complicated overlap between all of the above.
My work is relational, weight-inclusive, anti-diet, eating-disorder informed, anti-carceral and grounded in evidence-based approaches while still leaving plenty of room for one very important variable: the actual human sitting in front of me.
