Eating Disorder Resistance and Recovery

Course Description

Eating disorders make promises — self-worth, protection, belonging — and people stay loyal to them for good reason. Traditional treatment answers with control, often trading compliance with the eating disorder for compliance with recovery. This narrative therapy workshop takes another route: externalizing the eating disorder's voice, mapping its tactics and requirements, and making visible the client's own values and acts of resistance. It examines scaffolding clients through the liminal space that opens when the eating disorder loses ground, the diet-culture discourse feeding it, and the anti-eating-disorder community that helps discredit it.

Instructor Information

Educational Goals

1. Develop practical ways of working alongside clients in eating disorder recovery that separate the person from the eating disorder rather than seeking compliance with expert directives.
2. Develop the capacity to make a client's own values, preferred intentions and acts of resistance visible, as a source of strength in the face of the eating disorder's requirements.
3. Develop a critical awareness of the diet, clean-eating and wellness discourse that sustains eating disorders, and of the anti-eating-disorder community and local knowledge that discredit it.

Measurable Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to describe three promises an eating disorder makes to a client — self-worth, success/admiration and belonging — that sustain a client's loyalty to it.
2. Participants will be able to distinguish a control-based treatment response to an eating disorder from a narrative response that externalizes it.
3. Participants will be able to identify four aspects of the eating disorder — its effects, tactics, control and requirements — that can be mapped in an externalizing conversation.
4. Participants will be able to list three scaffolding practices that support a client through the liminal space opening as the eating disorder loses ground.
5. Participants will be able to identify two practices — naming diet, clean-eating and wellness discourse, and connecting the client to anti-eating-disorder community — that discredit the eating disorder's voice.

Outline with Main Points for Each Topic (including times)

1. 9:45–10:05 AM · Understanding Eating Disorders — Obj 1, 2 — 20 minutes

   • An insider's view of eating disorders and their early promises
   • Control-based treatment compared with narrative aims: separation, agency, values and food freedom

2. 10:05–10:30 AM · Externalization and the Therapist's Stance — Obj 2, 3 — 25 minutes

   • Mapping the eating disorder's effects, tactics, control and requirements
   • A non-neutral, validating stance; ambivalence and the pace of recovery

3. 10:30–11:00 AM · Liminal Space, Resistance and Values — Obj 4 — 30 minutes

   • Scaffolding through fear and loss
   • Double listening for resistance and unique outcomes
   • The client's own values as an alternative to the eating disorder's

4. 11:00–11:15 AM · Discourse and Community — Obj 5 — 15 minutes

   • Making diet, clean-eating and wellness discourses visible
   • Anti-eating-disorder community, shared recovery stories and resources

Total instructional time: 20 + 25 + 30 + 15 = 90 minutes / 60 = 1.5 CE hours

Signing in and out

• Sign in at the door between 9:30 AM and 9:45 AM.
• Sign out and complete this session’s evaluation at the door when it ends at 11:15 AM.
• Sign-in, sign-out and the evaluation are not part of the 1.5 CE hours.

References

• Chimpén-López, C., & Arriazu Muñoz, R. (2021). Narrative therapy for anorexia nervosa: Using documents of resistance. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 42(3), 276–291. https://doi.org/10.1002/anzf.1459
• Costin, C., & Grabb, G. S. (2012). 8 keys to recovery from an eating disorder: Effective strategies from therapeutic practice and personal experience. W. W. Norton.
• Lock, A., Epston, D., Maisel, R., & de Faria, N. (2005). Resisting anorexia/bulimia: Foucauldian perspectives in narrative therapy. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 33(3), 315–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069880500179459
• Maisel, R., Epston, D., & Borden, A. (2004). Biting the hand that starves you: Inspiring resistance to anorexia/bulimia. W. W. Norton.
• Pereira Santos, P. J., Soares, L., & Faria, A. L. (2023). Narrative therapy as an innovative approach to anorexia nervosa treatment: A literature review. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 36(4), 310–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2023.2189532
• Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive eating: A revolutionary anti-diet approach (4th ed.). St. Martin's Essentials.