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Thanksgiving Day: A Recovery Tool

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Category: Holidays and Special Occasions

Thanksgiving: Give instead of Binge

You can help yourself by helping others this Thanksgiving. Use the meaning of Thanksgiving as a recovery tool and discover real benefits to you.
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Question 1: How can I get through Thanksgiving without bingeing or restricting?

Thousands of people with eating disorders are worried, anxious and downright frightened of Thanksgiving. If you are one of them you may be obsessing about food challenges. While you are genuinely concerned about how you will feel and act around food, the source of your fear is not food. The source of your fear is your certainty that you cannot take care of yourself well when pressure of family, friends, and life obligations descend. The source of your fear is around the expectations you feel around this holiday.  Even if you are alone you can experience loneliness, anger, shame and a powerful sense of not belonging anywhere or being rejected.  You feel as if this holiday, centered around family and friendship, proves that you are unworthy of love. A food binge, severe restriction or both can be dreaded ways to calm or remove your anxiety.

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Family Thanksgiving Dinner: Two Vital Coping Strategies

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Category: Holidays and Special Occasions

Thanksgiving holiday is closely associated with family and food. If you have an eating disorder, being with both family and food means experiencing stress and anxiety levels that can push you into binge or purge or starve or high drama mode. So many expectations surround the holiday that unless you and your family are mentally healthy and emotionally stable disappointments can flare into painful situations. This year the economic downturn has placed disappointment, shock and fear into many homes. Stress levels in general are particularly high for everyone. It’s a paradoxical time of worrying about resources while celebrating and being grateful for abundance. Your challenge: how to take care of yourself at the family gathering.
 
Plan ahead:  Phase One: Coping with the inevitable This week end before Thanksgiving Thursday, look into your mind and heart for answers to questions about your family. Be honest. Who are these people? You know them well. If you must have expectations, expect them to be who they are.

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Inspiring Student's Eating Disorder Treatment Questions

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Category: Healing Resources

Eating Disorder Questions

Students of psychology, from grade six through graduate school, write me asking for help with their research papers on eating disorders.

Most want fast help in getting through an assignment, but some genuinely want information to help them understand eating disorders and what it takes to recover.

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Gardens and Creating a Healing Environment for Eating Disorder Treatment

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Category: Healing Resources

Welcoming Garden

A psychology graduate student felt she could ask me questions about being an eating disorder psychotherapist and get some help in writing her case study because she read that my patients wait in a garden before their psychotherapy sessions. She said she felt welcome to write and ask because of my waiting garden.

Nature of Welcome

I lead with this because gardens do call us to enter. People put fences around gardens and install entry gates because a lovely, open garden invites us in. The boundaries creates safety. The open gate gives permission to enter. A garden can be soothing, quieting and can hold you regardless of what you feel or how you look or think you look.