Hi Reader,

Natalia Aiza, LPC, is the founder of Kairos Wellness Collective in Boulder, Colorado. She is educated, well-informed, articulate, empathic, and aware. She's just the kind of person you'd think would be perfectly well-suited to quickly identify and address a mental health challenge in herself, right? Well, not so fast.

Natalia believes now that she was living with OCD since age seven, but she didn't recognize it for years; even while training and working as a therapist.
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Natalia describes her early experiences with motherhood, plagued by incessant, intrusive thoughts about harming her baby, but even though she managed to get through these thoughts, soon, another nagging obsession took that one's place: she needed to control everything about her child's (and later, her children's) eating.

For her, it was just a concerned mom being mindful about “healthy eating.” In reality, this was uncontrolled, untreated, and unidentified OCD running amok, resulting in food shopping trips taking multiple hours, methodically scanning labels on every possible food item, and placing unhealthy ideas about food into her children's minds.

Natalia openly describes the shame, guilt, grief, and other negative consequences of what she now calls orthorexia-by-proxy; a disordered obsession and compulsion with the healthy eating of others. A few years ago, she wrote a wonderful, open and honest essay about her particular form of OCD, and she reads it aloud here on the show.

Natalia, now successfully managing this mental health challenge (with grown children who are able to joke about it with her) discusses with us why reassurance-based talk therapy can unintentionally enable the OCD brain, and how exposure and response prevention (ERP) helps you stop responding to intrusive thoughts with rituals and safety behaviors. Natalia discusses SSRIs, what it means when OCD gets quieter instead of disappearing (it may very well never disappear, and Natalia still has her moments of struggle), and why access to proper OCD treatment is still a significant public health problem.
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It is so easy for OCD to get missed, even by a professional, and that's why our conversation with Natalia Aiza is so important; so many people out there are struggling with something they may not understand; a mental health challenge that presents itself under the guise of something "good" or "healthy", but one that actually has the potential to cause harm.

Subscribe for more Recovery Diaries in Depth, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review if you enjoyed our conversation with Natalia.

All my best,
Gabe Nathan