Restrictive eating or over-eating

Sometimes we might feel like what is best for us is monitoring our diet and eating habits. This can help us be the strongest and healthiest version of ourself. Other times limiting our food consumption or digestion can become a version of self-harm.
For example purging or avoiding eating can be diagnosed as Bulimia or Anorexia Nervosa, respectively. On the other side, sometimes we end up binge eating in an unhealthy way.  Emotion Focussed Therapy can help.

Unhealthy eating and EFT: How it works

According to Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) theory innate emotions are organized through interactions with our environment into meaning structures. When healthy, we are guided by and successfully interpret feeling and sensations. We struggle when stuck in various loops or patterns of emotionally relating which can cause distress. In EFT we work with these patterns by evoking them in the therapeutic space to shift emotions into permitting alignment with our goals, concerns or needs (like appropriate eating). This is called experiential processing. It is a restructuring of our emotional world which can make responding to our bodies hunger in a healthy way more possible.

Looking at painful feelings may feel trepidatious. We look at the distress so we can know it and increase our sense of control in it. EFT starts by increasing healthy self-soothing and coping mechanisms. We will also look at your safety together throughout our work and build support structures. Once you are set up for a safe therapeutic experience we will begin looking at your interpersonal and intrapersonal world together.

The effects of EFT on unhealthy eating patterns

Emotion Focused Therapy (or EFT) will help you with under or over affect regulation (the ability to modulate your emotion state in order to adaptively meet the demands of your environment), re-owning your expression of emotions, attend to any harsh internal voice and familiarize you with how distress is generated and maintained.

If you think this could be helpful for you, please contact us to book an initial consultation.

This article was written by Lauren Deimling Johns integrating articles published by Joanne Dolhanty, Ph.D. and Leslie S. Greenberg, Ph.D. between 2007 & 2009
http://www.drjoannedolhanty.com/eft/