Today we’d like to introduce you to Madeline Mattina.
Madeline, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
As a woman raised in a thin-obsessed culture, I became very aware of my own body and how it measured up to social standards beginning at a very young age. Each and every message I received about food, weight, diet, and body image I internalized and condensed into one toxic belief system: I am not enough because there is too much of me. This belief system snaked its way into all parts of my young adult life.
I developed multiple eating disorders and was in and out of therapists offices and treatment centers for several years. A part of me hated it and hated me for struggling with it, but it provided a relief and numbness that nothing else could. It also gave me a sense of control over my life, which made it all the more addictive. I wanted to want to get better. But in my nutrient-starved mind, the benefits far outweighed the cost.
That is until I started to see the effects of my illness. I was chronically cold, couldn’t sleep, could barely function due to extreme lethargy, and lost my cycle, just to name a few. My whole world seemed colorless. I lost interest in all of the things I used to love. Everything was empty, but none more so than me.
I began to reach a point where the cost was greater than I was willing to pay, I matured out of the reckless invincibility of my youth and started to look at the long term vision for my life and my relationships. I’ll never forget the day I decided that I was done once and for all. I was in my car staring at the bill I had just paid for a visit with a Naturopathic Doctor. Of course, insurance didn’t cover a dime, so it was quite a chunk of money. At that moment, I had a thought that changed everything. I said to myself, “Maddie, you literally can’t afford to be sick anymore.”
Not only was there a physical cost to my eating disorders, but there was a very real financial burden as well. If I didn’t start getting serious about recovery, I might end up broke beyond repair (again both physically and financially.) Immediately I drove home and fixed myself some breakfast, That one meal kicked off a painful yet healing journey of self-discovery and coming to terms with the truth. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of what that truth was. But I was about to find out the hard way.
About a month after that fateful day, I woke up with excruciating neck pain. Part of my eating disorder included rigorous exercise and I had felt some compression building up for some time, though I always pushed past it. This morning it was so bad that I couldn’t turn my head. I ended up being forced to quit my job and go on disability for the next six months. During that time, I was lost and confused. The doctors kept telling me that nothing was wrong, I just had stiff muscles. But the pain would not let up. I was angry with my body. I felt like it was giving me the middle finger after I had made a decision to be on her team.
Pain of all kinds can be very isolating and I began withdrawing from all social contact. I spent most days lying on my couch, soaked in tears and buried in ice packs. Then a dear friend of mine reached out to me. She has struggled with chronic pain and illness for many years and she knew what it was like to be alone and frustrated. She encouraged me to come over to her house just to get out and break free of the depressing monotony. As much as I felt resistant to this, I decided to accept her invitation. And I’m so thankful I did…
As we sat in her beautiful garden watching the birds flit around from bloom to bloom and listening to the fountain gurgle and splash, she shared something with me that I had never heard about before. It was a burgeoning industry called “life coaching.” She herself had been on a journey of self-discovery and in her searches, she had stumbled across a woman by the name of Kara Loewentheil, who proclaimed herself as such.
My friend began sharing with me some of the concepts that she was learning from this woman and it was as if I was hearing a truth that I had long since known existed but could never quite put into words. She told me that our experience of our lives is filtered through our minds and our thoughts and we always have the power to choose what to believe. In order to shift our experience, we don’t need to change the world (often an impossible endeavor), we only need to change how we think about it. Specifically, for me, this meant that I didn’t need to change my past, my body, or other people in order to feel better. I only needed to change the lens I was looking through when viewing these things. When we shift what we believe, our emotions, actions, and results follow.
For too long, I had been trying to change the world in order to feel better. It never worked. Therapy taught me to set boundaries with people who “triggered” me to avoid exposure to anything “inflammatory.” to blame my eating disorder and my upbringing (often personified as ED) for how I behaved. At the time, it felt validating. It wasn’t me, it was everyone else and they all needed to change so that I could feel safe. But I was validated as a victim because I had no control over what other people chose to believe or say. I couldn’t storm into Victoria’s Secret and demand they take down their blown-up pictures of air-brushed bodies. I couldn’t tell the person standing behind me in line at the grocery store to get off her phone and stop talking about the new diet she’s on. I couldn’t tell the blonde beauty jogging on the street to put a shirt on, so I didn’t have to look at her flawless tummy. Being validated as a victim of reality is still being a victim. And it sucks to have so little power.
What I realized that day in the garden, is that no one needed to change but me and that was the best news ever. I finally understood that it was way more powerful for me to practice believing in my own worthiness and beauty than it was to try to go around telling everyone what they could and couldn’t say or do in my presence. It wasn’t ED. It was always me. It was always a choice I was making even when it felt like I wasn’t the one making it. My freedom to believe that I was enough didn’t go anywhere. I just wasn’t taking advantage of it.
I also understood why it wasn’t working just to change my actions. Eating more food and becoming weight restored only repaired the physical damage, but it did nothing for the constant war in my mind. As long as I was living in the belief that I was disgusting and unworthy, I was still disordered. The only difference is that no one could tell.
It dawned on me that this message was exactly what was missing in therapy. All those years of rehashing the past and blaming my parents, society and ED left me exhausted and without a clue of what to do about it. Hundreds of thousands of women of all ages were suffering with disorders and they desperately needed someone to tell them how powerful they truly are.
Not long after that conversation in the garden I made a decision to get certified as a life coach with The Life Coach School (Owned and run by Brooke Castillo. This is also the school that Kara Loewentheil attended) It was the biggest investment I had ever made in my life and it was worth every second and every penny. It was a year-long program that challenged me beyond what I ever could have imagined I was capable of.
Now almost nine months after graduating, I am coaching men and women day in and day out and loving it more and more as I watch so many beautiful people come to their own awareness. It’s the best job on the planet and I look forward to the opportunities that this path will afford me. One of my very favorite questions to ask myself is, “What else is possible?”
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has most certainly not been a smooth road. But then again, isn’t that how it always goes? My teacher calls it the 50/50 of life. Half of our life is easy, happy, and lovely, and the other half is hard, painful, and ugly. We know this to be true simply by looking at our own lives and the lives of everyone around us. No one has had it all one way.
It is the belief that we ought to be happy all of the time and that everything ought to work in our favor that causes us to suffer. This is not how the world works. Sometimes we don’t feel positive or optimistic and things don’t go according to plan. And since fighting reality only adds insult to injury, we come to the reasonable conclusion that the alternative is to accept it. Perhaps sometimes we OUGHT to feel badly and things OUGHT to fail. When we release our perfectionistic desire to achieve perpetual bliss and embrace this truth, we ironically find freedom and peace because we understand that bumps along the way are just part of it. We understand that nothing has gone wrong. We are just human beings living a human experience.
I have had my fair share of bumps along the way. Some I have handled more gracefully than others, but always I have grown because of them. As I began to gain the much-needed weight back, I heard my brain criticize my blossoming form. I mourned the loss of specific scale markers that I had quite literally worked myself to the bone to achieve. I had to say goodbye to those numbers that represented so much more to me than thinness.
As my body returned to a healthier outer state, the concerned comments from others began to subside. I had placed so much weight on these, even equated them to love. So the lack of questions felt like abandonment. There was many a time that I caught myself reverting back to old patterns. I would be halfway through very specifically measuring out a portion of nuts or some other food, and then it was as if I was jolted out of a dream. I knew the rules had to go, but that if left unattended, my well-programmed mind would return to a more familiar state.
It was often painful, physically as well as mentally and emotionally. But the struggle to achieve holistic wellness only served as a beautiful contrast to the freedom and pride that I felt in overcoming it. The difficulty was directly correlated to the depth of gratitude I felt and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.
I would be lying if I said that I never have critical body thoughts anymore or that I am never tempted to cut a little here and reduce a little there in order to get that false sense of control again. In fact, I am not sure that these thoughts will ever completely go away. The difference now is that I recognize that they ARE just thoughts and therefore, they are optional and not inherently true. A teacher of mine once expressed this so profoundly. She said: ” I will let old, unintentional thoughts come in until the day I die as long as I show up as the new me.” This is the work of my life and the lives of all my clients. We are committed to showing up every day as our new, empowered selves.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
Through my extensive training at The Life Coach School, I have developed skills that enable me to coach anyone on anything. The beauty of this work is that all of my client’s problems stem from their mindset, so I don’t have to know what they are going to bring to a session in order to know that I can help them.
That being said, my specialty and true passion is coaching on body image and post eating disorder recovery since this was my personal “curriculum,” so to speak. As one who has suffered greatly from self-destructive beliefs that I didn’t realize I had the option of discarding, my heart lies with those who feel trapped not only in their skin but in their minds. I have tools to help them, and it is my honor and privilege to do so every day.
I am most proud of the fact that I have showed up and continue to show up even when I harbor doubts and fears of inadequacy. On the days when I look in the mirror and cringe, what often hurts worse than the body shame is the “coach shame” that often follows. I hear my brain tell me that I have no right to share what I have learned when I still have so much growth left ahead of me. But I must remind myself regularly that perfection is not the goal, nor is it attainable. The goal is to live my human life well, which, to me, means embracing the pain and failure along with the joy and success. Perfect isn’t relatable. Humanness is. And I am certainly not perfect, but I don’t need to be in order to help people.
This is exactly what sets me apart from any other therapist or coach. I’m willing to be vulnerable. I’m willing, to be honest about where I’m at. I won’t pretend that I am fully enlightened or above anyone else. Yes, I am a leader. But I am first and foremost a student of myself and of others. My clients don’t need me to tell them that I have it all figured out. They need me to tell them that it’s possible for them to make lasting changes. And that I can promise with full confidence no matter how much growing and learning I have left.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
It’s difficult to pick one very favorite. But just the other day, I was feeling a little nostalgic as I reminisced about adventures with my cousins. While my sister and I grew up in town, they lived on a ranch about 30 minutes away from us. It’s incredible what a little open space can do for young, imaginative minds. I remember one day we went down to a small pond on their property and played in the mud on the banks. We dug tunnels and built houses and made waterways. In a few hour’s time, we had a whole city built, and our fingernails bespoke our accomplishments for days to come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.myuncovery.com/
- Email: madelinemattina@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Kiah Twissleman
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