Eating Disorder Counselling

 

Whether you are suffering from Binge eating, Anorexia, Bulimia, Obesity or Yo Yo Dieting - Eating Disorder Counselling will address your problems, difficulties or dissatisfactions you may have about your shape, size and weight.

 

This kind of specialised counselling will aim to correct any harm done to your physical or psychological health and personal relationships, so that you may embrace your new life having fully recovered and feeling empowered.

 

What is Eating Disorder Counselling?

 

It is a highly specialised form of therapeutic intervention, where your Counsellor/ Therapist/Practitioner will help you explore and identify your own personal reasons for your behaviour around food, events, people and most importantly of all – how you treat yourself.

 

It will help you to feel in control of your life and provide you with simple tools and techniques for personal growth and self fulfilment as well as give you an insight in to how you can convey messages to others and communicate effectively to get what you want.

 

It successfully combines many approaches of well-established forms of Counselling (Behavioural, psychodynamic, humanistic and other new approaches such as NLP) in a holistic way to intervene with your body, mind and intelligence as well as your spirituality. 

 

Cognitive Behavioural Intervention is a widely used method for treating many forms of Eating Distress; and often focuses on unlearning unhelpful habits whilst acquiring new empowering behaviours.

 

Cognitive Behavioural Intervention is useful in dealing with unhelpful food scripts, flawed values, warped cultural values, negative view of yourself, perfectionist traits, faulty thinking styles, dieting syndrome, and misinformation – to name but a few.  

 

Although Cognitive Behavioural Counselling has a step-by-step approach, which includes positive thinking, planning, goal setting and is behaviourally driven - in dealing with Eating Disorders it is only part of the solution.

 

Psychotherapy in Eating Disorder counselling will use Coaching skills to help you look at your emotions and thinking styles and allow you to learn new ways of coping.

 

Your Counsellor will work with you to relieve or heal any disorder, and will double up as your Coach. Teaching you new skills to improve your effectiveness in dealing with stress, conflict resolution, problem solving, planning and self-motivation.  

 

 

What is covered in counselling?

 

Your Counsellor will often work on the following, to accelerate your recovery:

 

• Self monitoring to develop a deeper understanding of your behaviour
• Focus on “diet” free, regular healthy eating (nutritional intervention).
• Educate you on all aspects of your eating distress
• Stress management
• Stimulus /trigger control
• Identify bad habits and change them into empowering ones
• Cultivate a healthy lifestyle
• Convert faulty thinking into enlightened thinking
• Emotional management
• Boost self-esteem
• Work on non eating disorder issues
• Resolve any issues with current/past abuse
• Increase motivation
• Lapse prevention. …and much more

 

 

So what can you expect?

 

Following your Initial Consultation, you will be given a full assessment – in person or via a questionnaire to understand your medical condition, genetic background, and eating habits.

 

Your Counsellor will initially work towards stabilising your physiology before addressing emotional and other issues.

 

They may even work along side other therapist or specialists depending on your own individual circumstance (eg: Nutritionist/Dietician, Psychiatrist). Some will work with you even if you are on medication for depression, Bulimia or medical conditions etc.

 

You may be offered an opportunity to work in a small but closed weekly therapeutic group.

 

When treating young Eating Disorder sufferers – a skilful counsellor will always include the parents in the therapeutic process, to ensure it is successful in the long term.

 

Ultimately the successful intervention of a Counsellor will depend on how well s/he understands your core vulnerabilities around food, image, size/shape; as well as your own personal reasons for wanting full recovery.

 

Information supplied by:

Vathani Navasothy – Professional Eating Disorder Counsellor

Dip.Adv. Eating Disorder Practitioner, Trainer & Group Facilitator; BACP Accredited Counsellor; Dip.Sports psy; MSc; BSc. Reiki II

Tel: 0208 653 7177

E-mail: Info@awakeningdawn.com

www.awakeningdawn.com