Interview with Dr. Deah Schwartz, New
Voice in Fat Poets Speak 2: Living and Loving Fatly
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Dr. Deah Schwartz has more than 20 years experience using
therapeutic arts, music, drama and recreation activities in a variety of
clinical and educational settings with clients ranging in age from 5 to 80+.
She has a Doctorate in Education, a BA in Theater, an MS in Therapeutic Recreation,
and an MA in Creative Arts Education and is a Nationally Certified Recreation
Therapist.
And…she is also one of the New
Voices in the second volume of Fat Poets Speak: Living and Loving Fatly.
This is the first part of the
interview. The second will be published at a later date. Read and appreciate her as she talks to us
here.
1.
First of
all - at least to my mind- many of us are excited that you have just finished
your second book. Can you tell us a little of what it is about?
The
book’s title is: Dr. Deah’s
Calmanac: your interactive monthly
guide for cultivating a positive body image. It is loosely based on The Old
Farmer’s Almanac, which is a manual that provides information for growing and
harvesting hearty and plentiful crops and gardens. People struggling with
Eating Disorders and Body Dissatisfaction often feel trapped in cyclical
patterns with no way out. For example,
Every January offers another reminder that whatever resolution was made the
previous year has most likely failed and they are still struggling.
But I believe that our history is not fate—it is knowledge, and our
past does not dictate our present or future behaviors. We can learn from our
past, hold on to the positives, and choose to throw the negatives in the
mulch bin. In order to reap the benefits of the repetition or redundancy that
our calendar year presents, it is imperative that we take some time to
examine the months and seasons for their predictable ebbs and flows and plan
our garden of positive body image around the elements that are most certain
to occur. This proactive approach has
a calming effect in lieu of a self-critical outcome, hence the name, Dr.
Deah’s CALManac.
2.
What made you want to go into the field of eating disorders?
That is a difficult question to
answer concisely but I will give it a try!
My career path was heading in the direction of Expressive Arts Therapy
because of my interest in psychology and the expressive arts. Concurrently, I was trying to figure out a
way to resolve my own Eating Disorder by using psychodrama and drama
therapy. This resulted in co-authoring
a three woman play called, Leftovers, the Ups and Downs of a Compulsive
Eater. While performing the show on
Off-Broadway, New York, and up and down the west coast, I found that the
audience inherently experienced a therapeutic benefit from watching the
actors confront and ultimately step on the road to personal recovery. It reinforced my belief in the Expressive
Arts as a healing intervention for Eating Disorders. In the process I found that even though my
E.D. was improving, I was still grappling with my body hate, you see I was
not just obsessed with food; I was obsessed with the desire to be thin. I was also working in adolescent
psychiatric hospitals at the time, and noticed that the two areas were
intertwined. The teens hated their
bodies because they wanted to be thin, they developed disordered eating
patterns to become thin, found ways to address their eating behaviors but
still had to change their self-loathing to self-acceptance with or without a
change in body size from their E.D. recovery.
I also noticed that teens and
young adults resonate with expressive arts and are more easily engaged than
when only verbal psycho-therapy is used because there is an integration of
the mind AND the body in the process. (I
actually have a soundcloud recording Under the heading Expressive Arts
Therapies
https://soundcloud.com/tags/expressive%20arts%20therapy explaining this concept
if you want to hear a bit more information about that). So I suppose the answer is I gravitated to
the field of Eating Disorders because of my personal experience with my own
E.D. and in my professional life, seeing
the efficacy of the particular therapeutic work I was doing with this
population specifically.
3.
How would you say the shape of your life today differs from what you
thought it would be 20 or 25 years ago?
Life throws us interesting curveballs once
in a while. 20 years ago I was an adjunct
professor at San Francisco State University, working full time at a
psychiatric hospital, and a new mom working on my doctorate. I really loved the balance in my life. Then I had a severe back injury that
resulted in my having to leave my work and found myself at home as a full
time mom and very part time doctoral student.
The good news was how available I was for my son. Those were years I wouldn’t give up for
anything, despite the pain and grueling rehab I went through because of my
back, but unfortunately, it also catapulted me from my career path into the
unknown. I found that I needed to find
work that did not require driving long distances and a variety of other
physical limitations due to my newly acquired back disability. And so I began to do two things. The first was writing. I co-wrote a workbook/DVD version of
Leftovers that is a unique multi-media resource for Eating Disorders. I started blogging; writing articles, and
as previously mentioned, just finished my second book. The second was I started a private practice
in Oakland California called Dr. Deah’s Walkie Talkies. Part of the rehab for my back is to walk
every day. Because I am a certified
Recreation Therapist, I found that I could walk with clients who were
struggling with body image and disordered eating and were either intimated to
publically engage in physical activity for fear of being taunted, or they
didn’t have time to squeeze in pleasurable physical activity and a therapy
session during the week. In my ‘Walkie
Talkies” we do both things at once and I was helping my back in the
process! But despite the secondary
gain for my rehab, ultimately my goal is that my clients find places in
Oakland and other people where they can continue to explore trails and
opportunities for weight neutral physical movement.
5. How does your son feel about
what you do and how you identify yourself?
The timing
of this question is amazing because of a recent conversation I was having
with my son. Z (short for Zachary) was
home from college over the summer and he and I were talking about the concept
of people living up to their potential.
One of the benefits of having a 21 year old son, besides being able to
legally enjoy a beer together once in a while, is having more open and
disclosing conversations. I told him
that sometimes I questioned whether or not I was living up to my potential
because when I was a professor and a hospital clinician my income was
exponentially more than what I am earning in my post disability
“reincarnation”. He looked at me and
said, “But Mom, the work you are doing is all about helping other people make
their quality of life better and feel better about who they are. You help others live up to their
potential. That HAS to be the way you
are living up to your potential.”
Yes,
I was farklempt! It was clear that my
son not only really groks (understands) what it is that I am doing, but he is
proud and supportive.
7. What advice do you have for fat younger women who are worried
about "fitting in" with their peers, but don't want to diet or
starve themselves?
Well,
because I don’t believe in a one size fits all philosophy, I would need a bit
more information before giving what I feel would be a truly beneficial
response. Chronological age is
important, how long the person has been fat is a factor, the etiology of
their fat has some import when offering advice about interventions. But
assuming that all variables are equal, I would recommend the Dr. DEEEE’s 4
steps to increasing body-acceptance.
1.
EXPLORE: Find your support systems,
people and organizations, websites, therapists, family members (lol notice
how they are different from people) who feel the same way you do. You do not have to fight this level of
discrimination all alone.
2. EDUCATE:
Educate yourself with facts facts facts about the realities of weight
stigma, the relationship between fat and health, and the reasons behind size
discrimination in our culture.
3. EMPOWER:
Empower yourself with permission to love your body and EMBRACE the concept
of body diversity.
4. ENCOURAGE:
Encourage others to do the same, whether they are fat or not. Changing a societal norm HAS to include
the oppressed and allies of the oppressed.
If one group of people is discriminated against, all people are
subject to being discriminated against.
8. Tell us the addresses of your blogs so we can follow right along
with your essays.
Once
a month I write an original post for the Fierce Freethinking Fatties Website
at www.fiercefatties.com
I
also write about once a month for http://www.arttherapyblog.com where I post an
Expressive Arts Therapy Directive specifically created to explore issues
related to Eating Disorders and Body Image Issues.
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This is brilliant and utterly fascinating. Much love, Dr. Deah, and many blessings.
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