Feeling Is the Hardest Part: Why Emotions Are Key To Eating Disorder Recovery
Eating disorders are not about vanity— they’re strategies to deal with overwhelming emotions. When you can allow all of your emotions, the eating disorder loses it’s function and fades away. Sustainable recovery is about developing the capacity to feel, not just eat.
Martha Stewart & the Art of Resilience
If I could pass one skill along to all of my clients, it would be resilience. Resilience is the most important trait a human being can have to sustain good mental health and successfully face life. One way to further promote your own resilience is to identify your values and commit to taking actions based on the things that matter to you, a key principle in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I also like to have an actual person to emulate when I’m trying to develop a new skill, so today I propose Martha Stewart as our resilience role model.
5 Best Practice Tips for Treating Clients with Eating Disorders
I recently led a training for therapists who don’t specialize in eating disorders about how to work with clients struggling with eating disorders and body image issues. I wanted to share my list of things to do to build and rapport and trust when helping someone recover. This is also helpful to read if you are a parent or loved one of someone with an eating disorder and you want to learn more about how to be helpful. So much of this advice is not intuitive for supporters, but can make all the difference in connecting with the person struggling.
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” Is A Terrible Plan
Spoiler alert: this is a terrible plan. But it’s a common refrain you hear on college campuses, in tech start ups with 80 hour work weeks, among new parents, etc. It’s said half in jest, but with an element of- eh, rest isn’t that important. People have so many other demands, this can feel like the easiest one to let up on. The problem is that lack of (or irregular/fragmented) sleep is one of the single best predictors for developing a mental health disorder. You are way more vulnerable to conditions like depression, anxiety and chronic burnout when you’re sleep deprived. Every organ in your body operates on a circadian rhythm, every hormone is regulated by our sleep/wake cycles. So while we think we can push through the lack of sleep, the price we pay is often steeper than people realize.
Orville Peck, Mental Health & Me
If we in the mental health field know how to help people feel their feelings in a healthy way, i.e. a way that helps prevent the development of mental illness, why do the cultural norms around feeling emotions require the exact opposite? For example, have you ever felt ashamed for crying when you were sad? Embarrassed for being too excited or giddy? Foolish for earnestly trying something new and, like any beginner, sucking? Have you ever told someone you were doing really well, but in reality you felt terrible? Of course you have! Most of us have.
What Causes Eating Disorders?
While we think of eating disorders as a modern phenomena– and at the explosive rates we see them today they certainly are– they are also brain based diseases that existed long before anyone considered being thin aspirational. Remember, food scarcity was the problem for most of human existence, so a beautiful person was historically a visibly well fed person.