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Eating Disorder Recovery: dealing with negative cultural messages

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Category: Culture and Media

Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult, arduous and requires commitment as well as time and resources.

Add to that the challenge of rising up from under the barrage of cultural forces that encourage eating disorder symptoms. Then you get a glimpse of the courage and stability required to make healthy choices regardless of cultural messages.

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Response to Cry for Help

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Category: Healing Resources

Today I received a long post from a woman caught in a desperate tangle of bingeing, starving, guilt, shame and anxiety. She is bewildered by her own experience and frantic to find relief without getting professiona*l help.

I believe she represents many women in a similar position of suffering.

If this is also you, this article may help you.

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Parental Acceptance of Eating Disorders

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Category: Friends and Family

One of the powerful and moving moments that occur in my work as a psychotherapist is when a woman, who never sought treatment for her own eating disorder, comes in for psychotherapy for the sake of her child. She couldn't rally her strength for her own well being. But when she is pregnant or has a young child she finds the courage and determination to do her own work in order to protect her child from developing an eating disorder. Often, a child has already begun to develop symptoms, but often too, not always, but often when the mother works on her own healing she is in a better position to support healing in her child. Love and courage bring the mother in. Love and courage create a powerful healing force.

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Parental Denial of Eating Disorders

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Category: Friends and Family

When adults are in denial about their own eating disorder, they can be in a position to deny the eating disorder symptoms in their child or children. Parents can even be angry and punishing to a child with an eating disorder because the child’s behavior threatens the adults. The child’s symptoms have the potential to force adults to look more closely at themselves. These parents, who believe themselves to be loving and caring people, defend their denial and defend their distorted view of themselves and their child.