What?

The General Part

Eating Therapy works by mixing together various therapeutic techniques and skills.  It is therefore designed uniquely for you as an individual, because the whole process is adapted relevantly to help you understand why you are responding to your world in your own particular way. In order to tailor make your specific Eating Disorders therapy, there is an integral holistic overlapping and intertwining of different approaches:

• Cognitive Behavioural (CBT) – exploring your feelings and behaviours that are a result of the strong influence relating to what you believe, how you think and your expectations.
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) – releasing the inner tensions and emotional blockages held in your body by creating a direct link to your identified problems through a process of tapping on meridian pressure points.
• Gestalt – becoming more self-aware of the whole balance between your mind, your body and your soul in your present day life, by allowing the expression of your repressed feelings.
• Jungian – opening up what you don’t know (the unconscious) with what you do know (the conscious) about yourself, including the interpretation of your dreams, to bring more life balance through relieving problems and revealing new meanings.
• Mindfulness – learning to give your full attention to what is happening to you, and for you, in the present, so that there is more clarity and appreciation of the quality of your life now, not being hindered by the past and the future.
• Person-centred – allowing you to gain an appropriate and compassionate understanding of your own view of the world through an empathic therapeutic relationship, so that you can discover your own inner self-worth and  learn to recognise how to grow towards what you know is best for you.
• Psychodynamic – looking at unconscious inner conflicts you are experiencing, revealed also in the therapeutic relationship, that may be contributing to your present day struggle, but that may be connected to your past.
• Sandplay – making physical pictures of both the conscious and the unconscious internal and external realities of your family and situational relationships in order to resolve tensions.
• Transactional Analysis (TA) – examining your inner parent, child and adult voices and how these interact in the roles you play, and the responses you have, within your relationships with other people.

The Individual Part:

Underpinning every element of my therapeutic practice is the essence of Person-Centred therapy.  This means, above all, that I believe you know best about how you feel and what you experience, that you deserve to be listened to with understanding and honesty in a non-judgemental way, and that you decide what you want to do during our sessions together, rather than having your therapist control the process.  A Person-Centred approach involves believing that you, as my client, have the inner strength and resources inside of you to make yourself feel differently, and that hopefully, if you are given the right supportive, confidential and safe space, time and relationship, then you will be able to find your own ways to take responsibility and make decisions for your own deeper and richer potential to emerge and grow.  By being allowed to accept and respect yourself, because your therapist accepts and respects you, you will move on, at your own pace, to take positive control and discover that you have a real voice and no longer need to bury who you truly are within the too often debilitating world of Eating Disorders problems.

 The Eating Part:

Fundamentally, this is not about food, even though you may think or feel it is.  Eating Disorders problems, whatever size and shape they are for you in your own world, are not really about what you do or do not eat, or about how much you do or do not weigh, but are rather an understandable way for you to be able to express more profound issues that you continue to face on a day-to-day basis.  At the moment, if you are battling with an eating disorder, your sense of self and self-worth is being misplaced by the powerful control that your eating patterns are dominating.  Every waking minute of your day may be spent obsessing with thoughts about food.  By gently exploring and examining your thinking, feeling and behaving in relation to your eating, you will come to learn and appreciate that being stuck where you are now is no longer working for you, but is actually preventing you from doing the things that are important to you, and from leading the kind of life that you genuinely want and crave for.  Somehow along your life journey, the connection between your body and your mind has become unconsciously and temporarily stuck in order to cope with whatever you have had to deal with, however inconsequential the relevant circumstances might seem.  Each one of us has our own unique mix of psychological, cognitive, physiological, emotional and spiritual needs, and consequently we will focus on your own personalised therapeutic path, because what works for you may not work for someone else.   By opening up to where you have been and where you are, within a nurturing environment, you will be able to see where you want to go.  At the moment, it is your body that is being used to ask you for help – hopefully it is now time for you yourself to want to ask for help.