Groups on Eating and
Body Image Problems
GROUPS FOR EATING AND BODY IMAGE PROBLEMS
In a therapist-led supportive environment, participants are introduced to the process of relating more comfortably to food and one's body. We believe that the diet culture has caused most women to become disconnected from their innate ability to feed themselves in accordance with their bodily appetites and in a way that is physiologically and emotionally nourishing, organizing, and sustainable. Our six-week groups help women to rediscover this lost relationship with their own bodies and needs. The groups themselves combine psychoeducational and psychodynamic elements to give women the insights and tools they will need to begin to understand, heal, and transform their relationship with food and their bodies. In group processing and exploration, visualization and fantasy exercises and homework assignments are utilized.
First, six-week group members are introduced to a "self-attuned" eating model that is anti-diet and mindfulness based. Over the six-weeks, women are helped to use the self-attuned eating model to eat with their hunger and to stop at satiety, while examining the reasons why they might feel compelled to eat at times when they are not physically hungry, and/or to restrict their eating during times when they are. This model represents a departure from the punitive and restrictive methods women often employ and introduces curiosity and compassion as alternatives to the often self-attacking response that constitutes the foreshortened internal world of the individual with an eating problem.
Next, there is an emphasis on legitimizing all foods and eliminating dichotomous thinking about food (i.e., good and bad, permitted and forbidden, healthy and unhealthy food groups).
Finally, group members work on body image, including the meaning of fat and thin and how ideas about one’s body function psychologically, interpersonally, and culturally.
All of this work is informed by a psychodynamic perspective and by the conscious and explicitly articulated awareness that we live in a culture that encourages women to live in disharmony with their bodies and that, for most, to live in an embodied way in this culture requires an active choice to resist cultural norms.
6 WEEK GROUPS
FOR THE PUBLIC
Educational groups focusing on eating/body image problems Fee: $200
2010/2011 Calendar
Two 6-week groups for the public announced:
Starts Monday, September 20, 2010
8:30pm - 10:00pm
Location: Chelsea
Lisa Thaler LCSW
Starts Monday, September 20, 2010
6:30pm - 8:00pm
Location: Brooklyn
Cheryl Perlman, LCSW
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT 212-721-7005
