Eating Disorders Therapy in Glendale, Arizona
Licensed Professional Counselor
Improve The Symptoms
Teach You The Ability To Deal With It
Restore The Self-Esteem
What Are Eating Disorders?
Eating Disorders are medically complex mental health struggles that are commonly associated with severe and relentless struggles in eating behaviors and distressing thoughts and emotions around food/eating. Most sub-categories of eating disorders are often associated with preoccupations with food, weight, or body shape, or with anxiety about eating or the consequences of eating certain foods which leads to the common misconception that eating disorders ARE ABOUT food, weight, and body shape. This, however, cannot be further from the truth.
What many clients learn through their recovery journey is that their eating disorder behaviors are often an indirect way of meeting unmet attachment needs, regulating their nervous systems or creating a system of self-soothing. Only once they became entrenched in these behaviors did then societal pressures of diet culture and fatphobia compound an already emotionally complex system of feeling ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ simultaneously.
Symptoms
- Unusual Behavior Around Food
- Strange Behavior Around Meal Times
- Being Obsessed With Getting It (food, calories, fat etc) Out
- It’s ( Food, dieting, calories, dieting etc) An Obsession
- Things (behaviors, thoughts, need to be in control) Are Out Of Control
- All Of The Above, Plus… Trauma, pre-existing mental health struggles and/or social and peer struggles
Types
- Anorexia Nervosa
- Bulimia Nervosa
- Binge Eating Disorder
- Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder
- Orthorexia Nervosa
Statistics
Treatment Approaches
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
The EMDR technique is used to help patients process traumatic events that have occurred in their lives, but also to overcome phobias or improve performance in certain aspects of their lives.
When experiencing a traumatic event or intense unpleasant situations, the processing of the trauma may not be done correctly and may become blocked. By not correctly storing the information of this event in the corresponding memory network, the information is fragmented in the nervous system in such a way that it can be automatically activated, conditioning the behavior and affecting the person’s life.
Somatic Based Therapy
Somatic Therapy is a specific type of trauma therapies that are based on the idea that trauma is stored in the body & Nervous system, thus healing trauma must also focus on the same place. Somatic therapy is considered a ‘bottom up” approach in that the therapeutic begins with body sensations and information acquired from the Limbic system (automatic responses) rather than beginning with the rational or cognitive processing techniques (Top-down therapies like CBT or other skills based or talk therapies). In Somatic Therapies, clients are taught to address their physical responses first through different techniques which helping them to learn to stay in the present moment and learn to create a sense of safety in their bodies, before moving into the Top-down processing therapies.
Examples of Somatic Therapies include Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Trauma Sensitive Yoga, Somatic Experiencing and experiential therapy.
Experiential therapy
This form of psychotherapy that uses nontraditional talk methods as a primary form of communication and therapeutic healing such as art, dance movement, trauma-informed psychodrama type therapy. Clients are guided by a professional in illustrating personal stories, thoughts, and/or feelings. Additionally, these types of modalities allow clients to get back into their bodies and out of their cognitive frameworks where they often feel most comfortable and disconnected from their emotions.
Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP)
Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP) is essential is helping individuals overcome fears and anxiety. This is accomplished by gradually exposing a man or woman to the feared object or circumstance with the goal desensitizing fears.
Additionally, ERP also focuses on assisting participants in resisting the use of compulsive behaviors that might typically be used to cope with feelings of fear or anxiety. The primary goal is for individuals to remain connected to the trigger without the use of their ritualistic behaviors.
ERP can be effective in the treatment of eating disorders as it helps participants overcome fears of forbidden foods and decrease urges to binge/purge.
