Are you working through a difficult relationship with your body? How do you start to change the way you see yourself? Is there a way to find sisterhood and rid yourself of shame that is not for you to carry?

In this podcast episode, Dr. Cristina Castagnini speaks about body love with Brenda Fredericks.

MEET BRENDA FREDERICKS

Brenda Fredericks is a mother and middle school teacher turned Transformational Coach. She guides people on their journey to be authentic and live vibrant, meaningful lives. She believes that people with exquisite self-care practices have better relationships with everyone in their lives.

She is a published writer, a lifelong learner, and the founder of Body Love, a program designed to show women how to create a new healthy relationship with their bodies so they can experience more joy, ease, and sexiness in their lives.

Learn more about Brenda here.

IN THIS PODCAST

  • Tapping into your intuition
  • Self-Care
  • Talk about it
  • Body Love course

Tapping into your intuition

A lot of the women that come to me in Body Love, they hate their bodies. They constantly judge their bodies and they don’t trust their bodies. So when they don’t trust their bodies, they don’t listen to their bodies they get stuck in their head and I found on this journey – and this is what I teach – I teach women to tap into their own deep wisdom and their intuition.

Inside your intuition reside the questions to your answers, but women have been taught to seek wisdom externally from others and neglect their own deep knowledge. Body Love works to reeducate women on how to learn that they have wisdom within and they can access it via their intuition.

It is a practice to connect and hear your intuition, especially after having shut it out for such a long time. It is a daily practice. Knowing you have it is one thing, and trusting it is the next. Being willing to take action based on your intuition can be terrifying, this is why so many people block it out.

Women are also conditioned and almost encouraged, to fit the image, to put themselves last. By working with your intuition, you place yourself back on the to-do list.

Self-care

Saying ‘no’ when you don’t want to do something is excellent self-care because many women will do things they don’t wanna do … and they end up hating the people around them but really they just didn’t follow that voice inside of them that wanted something different.

Self-care can be anything and starts small, such as buying yourself flowers and getting a manicure, to doing deep emotional work and setting boundaries around yourself, and practicing saying ‘no’.

Talk about it

Shame is eradicated by talking about it. There are so many women throughout the world that have stories that many other women also share, but they withhold the shame because they think they are alone in this. By talking about it, you reclaim power back from the shame and you can release it.

By talking about your shame, you will without a doubt connect tenfold to other women who likely share the same or a similar story and they also struggled with shame.

Through sisterhood and being brave enough to start the conversation, it will keep on rolling because it will resonate with so many other women around you. By talking about shame and releasing it, more likely than not, joy will come into its place from connecting with other women around you.

Body Love Course

It is coming home to yourself.

This 6-week course focuses on aspects like desire, embodiment, communication, feeling deep emotions – both dark and light – and through the combination of all these, building confidence.

It is a virtual program available to anyone in the world and meetings take place over Zoom. Brenda mostly works with women 35 and older because of the particular space they enter after that stage when their body begins to change, and they want to foster a healthy relationship with their new bodies.

USEFUL LINKS

MEET DR. CRISTINA CASTAGNINI

I am a licensed Psychologist and Certified Eating Disorder Specialist.

While I may have over 20 years of clinical experience, what I also have is the experience of having been a patient who had an eating disorder as well.

One thing that I never had during all of my treatment was someone who could look me in the eye and honestly say to me "hey, I've been there. I understand".

Going through treatment for an eating disorder is one of the hardest and scariest things to do. I remember being asked to do things that scared me. Things I now know ultimately helped me to get better. But, at the time, I had serious doubts and fears about it.

If even one of my providers had been able to tell me "I know it's scary, but I had to go through that part too. Here's what will probably happen...." then perhaps I would not have gone in and out of treatment so many times.

My own experience ultimately led me to specialize in treating eating disorders. I wanted to be the therapist I never had; the one who "got it".

I will be giving you my perspective and information as an expert and clinician who has been treating patients for over 2 decades.

But don't just take my word for it...keep listening to hear the truly informative insights and knowledge guest experts have to share.

I am so happy you are here!

THANKS FOR LISTENING

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