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Los Angeles As Eating Disorder Co-Therapist

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Category: Healing Resources

Los Angeles as a recovery support

Los Angeles can be lonely and just too big when you are anxious, and your eating disorder isn't leveling you out. This city has many riches to offer you in terms of fun, education, relaxation, culture, sports and opportunities to meet like minded people. But imagination shuts down when you are frightened.
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Fear and Trust in Recovery Work

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Category: Healing Resources

That Feeling of Terror

With or without recovery work, a person with an eating disorder periodically experiences a terror beyond imagining.  She feels she’s falling endlessly down a black abyss. Often she makes her first call for psychotherapy when she is in the midst of these terrors.
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Within her recovery process these experiences diminish in frequency and length—but not necessarily in intensity.  In an unguarded moment her defense system fails to block what triggers her fear.  Her psyche cannot cope. She needs her therapist and relies on the trustworthiness of the relationship to see her through her crisis.

Separations can trigger a terror episode,  So can memories and dreams. If she doesn’t have supportive resources to rely on in such an intense time, she will act out in any way she can in an attempt to save herself. She is at her most vulnerable. She is also at her most sensitive point of healing if she is in treatment with a trustworthy mental health professional.

I see it this way in my private practice.

Trust is Key to Recovery Work

Trust in recovery work is many layered.  First, she needs to feel or sense that I, as her therapist, am a survivor and can tolerate her experience.  She neds to know I can tolerate her terror.  She needs to know I can appreciate her terror and the circumstances, real or imagined, that bring her to this emotional anguish.  Part of my job is to see that her belief is based on fact.  Through my own recovery work and life work I need to develop enought health, experience and emotional sturdiness to deserveher trust.

She doesn't have to make her experience "nice" for me.  She doesn't have to withhold any of it.  She doesn't have to minimize the circumstances or attempt to hide her self-perceived flaws or weaknesses. 

As I remain present for her she learns that together we can face whatever her torments may be. Nothing has to be censored or denied.

In fact, the more she can clearly share her fears the more opportunity she has to develop strength and awareness to cope with her experience. As she learns this, our meetings and our relationship deepens and her treatment brings her more solid healing. 

I listen with caring without being caught in her fears. As she learns to rely on my stability she develops more of her own.  Then we can explore the range and depth of her emotional experiences that are normal and part of the human condition.

This includes all that she feels or felt when confronted by her own great terror.  It gives her an opportunity to know that such a state is knowable, understandable and survivable.

Her vulnerability to a terror state is one of the key reasons for the existence of her eating disorder. As she develops more awareness and a sturdy spirit based on her practice in therapy she can bear her terrors and dissolve them.  This is fundamental to her eating disorder recovery.

What part of this discussion is relates to you?
How has the issue of trust affected your willingness to seek treatment?
How has the issue of trust affected your ability to remain in treatment?

*  Painting by Luiz Carlos Cappellano

What do you see in this painting? Can you see why I may have chosen it for article about fear and trust?

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Eating Disorder Recovery: Follow Your Practice Gently

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Category: Healing Resources

Be soft in your practice.

Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall.

Follow the stream, have faith in its course.

It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there.

It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices.

Just follow it.

Never let it out of your sight.

It will take you.

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Binge Eat or Starve: Importance of an Eating Schedule

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Category: Healing Resources

Binge Eating or Starving: Why an eating schedule helps

An eating schedule, a regular and reliable timing for providing yourself with life sustaining nourishment is essential for all living beings.  For eating disorder recovery to begin and last, the first challenge is to accept yourself as a human being. That may sound obvious and absurd to even mention. But, if you binge eat you must eat. If you starve you must eat. If you purge you must eat. If you want recovery you have to eat.