Food for Thought: Eating Disorders and Trauma Survivors
Many clinicians treat eating-disordered clients with varying degrees of success. It is a difficult, persistent problem that is particularly challenging because of it chronicity and high relapse rate. In-patient settings barter discharge for “goal weight”, yet patients often return, with no greater insight into the behavior.
This workshop offers a paradigm shift, re-framing eating disorders as clients’ attempts to enact, re-story, and resolve traumatic experiences that they can’t verbally articulate. Using case studies, clients’ journal entries and artwork, we will process eating disorders within the context of “trauma re-enactment syndrome”. We will identify the specific ways in which anorexia, bulimia, and bingeing serve as a re-enactment and perpetuation of, and response to prior traumatization including physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect.
We will de-pathologize the behaviors and view them as metaphors. We will process common psychosocial triggers and cultural influences, as well as the diagnostic red flags and potential medical complications. We will explore specific treatment strategies designed to take the focus off of traditional interventions (dieting, calorie counting, food journals, weigh-ins) and focus, instead, on offering clients alternative, safe ways to articulate and re-story their trauma experiences. A variety of creative interventions will be offered, addressing both symptoms and long-term healing in an outpatient setting.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify at least five behavioral and psychosocial triggers that promote eating- disordered behaviors.
- Define and explain the clinical red flags that indicate anorexia, bulimia and binge eating behaviors.
- Describe the “meta-communication” of eating-disordered behavior and its relationship to the re-enactment and perpetuation of prior trauma.
- Identify at least four medical complications related to anorexia, binge eating and bulimia.
- Identify and describe at least five creative interventions designed to treat eating disordered-behaviors.
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