Therapy for Women with Eating and Body Image Problems

        When you come in for your first appointment, you may have a lot to say, or you may be so nervous that you don't know what say. Trust is a key issue, and you may feel afraid to trust or you may want to dive right in. Either way, we will both come to understand that trust is not a static thing - it comes and it goes, and generally has to be earned to be meaningful. While we are exploring these complexities, it's often a relief to start talking.

        We begin by helping you explore your personal experiences of food, feeding, fat, and body size, and why these issues are so painful. You may have been put on diets or diet pills, forced to eat when you weren't hungry, weighed and lectured by well meaning (or not so well meaning?) doctors or relatives, or felt otherwise disrespected and intruded upon. I will not be weighing you or telling you what or what not to eat. This may feel like a relief, or you may not like that. Some people become dependent on others to tell them what to eat. I will simply be encouraging you to sense your hunger and satiation points, and to notice when you can follow them as guides, and when it seems too difficult.

 

Also link to:  Techniques for Treating Eating Problems

 

---

Techniques for Working on Eating Problems

        We may choose to include journal, art, or movement work, and guided fantasies to help you express what the eating problem has been trying to say. Ultimately, you will learn to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. But in the meantime, when you cannot always do this, we will use the symptoms to point us to the triggers and issues in your life that you have been using bingeing, starving, and/or purging to solve. We work these through one by one, until you feel stronger to face these difficulties without depriving or punishing yourself with food.

Also link to:   Compulsive Overeating,  The Diet/Binge/Purge Cycles,  Helping a Loved one With an Eatiing Disorder

 

---

Body Image: A Feminist Understanding

        Eating and body image problems can express some of our deepest experiences as women and men. Issues such as staying true to our hunger/s; defining ourselves within and outside of relationships to others; and taking up space and being visible in a sometimes dangerous world, may show up in our relationships to food and body.

        Gender roles, the victimization of "fat", and cultural stereotypes all play a role in the development of eating and body image problems. These influences interact with our genetic endowments, family upbringing, and experiences with peers in a multitude of ways. All of this must be brought into our explorations of how your particular problem with food developed the way it did.

        Throughout we will be working toward increased self esteem and body size acceptance. Acceptance does not mean the same as approval. Like trust, it comes and goes, and has to be earned to be meaningful. But this acceptance can be earned as you struggle to attune yourself to your body's internal signals, work through exercise resistance or compulsion, and prove to yourself that you can become a reliable self-feeder.

Also link to:  Improving Body Image,  Fat, Thin and Power  

---

Group Therapy (Eating,* Body Image,* and/or Assertiveness Issues)

   If you are currently in a group in the Auckland area that would like to hire me as a consultant or group therapist/leader,  you may contact me by e-mail or telephone with questions and /or to set something up. My fee for group is $125 per hour, divided among the members of the group. If you have a site where you would like to hold your meetings, I may be able to travel to that site if time permits. I charge $60 per hour for travelling time if the group is more than a 15 minute drive from West Auckland.  I have 22 years of experience leading groups and consulting for self help groups in the areas of eating problems, body image  and working with adult survivors of abuse. I have also worked extensively with general women's groups and with  assertiveness training and empowerment groups.  You may contact me by e-mail or by leaving a telephone message. Please let me know what type of group you have and whether you would like a response by e-mail or telephone.

 

 

JLightstone@gmail.com

(0)27
657 2106

Link to: Experience leading Women's Groups

 

*Based on the book Fat is a Feminist Issue, by Susie Orbach. To buy the book: First bookmark this page. Then click on the title link-- Fat Is a Feminist Issue : A Self Help Guide for Compulsive Eaters   When you are finished with the purchase, simply click your "Back" button to return to this site or click your bookmark for Women Food and Beauty.

Recommended Books and Online Bookstore
 

by Susie Orbach. Value Priced at: $8.99  Hardcover - 304 pages (March 1997). Includes both Book I and Book II

This is the newest edition of the two most famous books from the Women's Therapy Centre, the one that got us all started back in the early 80's. At that time, this kind of thinking was revolutionary. The book inspired such well known authors as Geneen Roth, Mary Pipher, Jane Hirschmann and many others. The very notion that dieting doesn't work and that society's expectations of women's bodies was what needed to be challenged was first introduced here. Susie gets right to the heart of eating problems with techniques to tune into physical hunger rather than dieting and trying to ignore it.  It is as  timely now as it ever was, after 20 years of being put to the test by women and therapists all over the world.  To Purchase click: Fat Is a Feminist Issue : A Self Help Guide for Compulsive Eaters

 Highly recommended:
The Obsession : Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness by Kim Chernin (1984)
You could just read this for its inspiration and poetry if it weren't also so wise and true.

Feast or Famine: A New Zealand Guide to Understanding Eating Disorders. Karen McMillan. Random House (2006)

Other Recommended Books