Thinking – Michelle Sparkes

Understanding and experiencing the Love of the Father* has been one of the most profound and significant keys to helping me overcome the fear and striving at the heart of my anorexia. Sinking the roots of my being into this Love helps me manage all the ways anxiety continues to show up in my life […]

“Could it be that depression is not purely a physical sickness but a spiritual malaise?” asks Elizabeth Farrelly in her article, “Finding the black dog’s spiritual lead” (The Sydney Morning Herald, 26-27 August 2017 , p.30). “Perhaps we should see it less a personal issue than a societal indictment, less a treatable pathology than a […]

Gaining weight from a low weight may be possible in an outpatient setting if a person is not critically unwell. If a person can make progress with the support of a doctor, dietician and therapist in an outpatient setting, fantastic. If not it simply means more intensive support is required. (See previous podcast notes for […]

To recover from anorexia a person will need to confront their fear of food and eating; their fear of getting fat and losing control. It’s a huge challenge because the semi-starvation diet of an anorectic CREATES the food obsessions and inflexible, polarised thinking that make seeking recovery so difficult. Fear drives anorexia; and the anorectic […]

“Pornified messages are bombarding our young people and giving them distorted ideas about their bodies, about relationships, and about sexuality,” says Melinda Tankard Reist, in this podcast interview, “According to global research, (this is) making our kids very unwell.” We are seeing a rise in negative physical and mental health outcomes, eating disorders, anxiety and […]

When the ED voice (the bully in your head) is making it hard or impossible for you to take in the nurture you need to survive and thrive you need help.  You need other people to come alongside you and help you fight the lies and the fear that paralyses you SO THAT you can […]

My journey through anorexia, EDNOS and binge eating exposed the LIE that I needed to be perfect to be worthy and deserving of life. It may sound so obvious (we all know perfection is it is impossible right?), but as the lie grows it creates such a bind, it DISCONNECTS the heart and mind of […]

How do you re-establish your sense of worth and value when you don’t believe you deserve (or are entitled) to these things? The eating disorder lie that says you are not good enough/not worthy/don’t deserve to take up space, can shame, isolate, bind and blind a person to the point where it becomes very difficult […]

In the last few episodes I’ve been speaking about capturing and challenging unhelpful thinking. This is an important tool in getting free from disordered eating but it’s not the whole story. Our thoughts spring out of our deeply held beliefs and these beliefs are formed in the crucible of our self and life experience. To […]

Have you ever felt so awful about the way you look you’ve stayed at home rather than going out with friends only to end up feeling worse about yourSELF and comfort-eating? Let’s use the ABC to catch and challenge unhelpful thinking in this typical disordered eating scenario. I welcome your feedback and questions. michelle@michellesparkes.com @mp_sparkes […]

Have you ever found yourself reaching for food, comfort eating or bingeing like you’re on autopilot? Before you know it you’ve gone down a track you never intended and it’s not until you stop eating that the resultant anguish and emotional turmoil hits you, and if you don’t take hold of your thoughts right here, […]

Albert Ellis developed a simple ABC framework in the late 1950s to help us “think about our thinking” and to capture the unhelpful thoughts or statements we often say to ourselves with little awareness of the unintended consequences. In this podcast I provide a simple example of how this ABC framework can be used to […]

If you’ve ever walked in the bush you will have noticed that some tracks are easier to walk down than others because they are well-formed, usually the result of plenty of traffic or use. It’s the same with our thinking. If we want to think differently in order to have new, healthier or better life […]