4
WEEK GROUP FOR PRACTITIONERS
Lela
Zaphiropoulos, LCSW
Fridays, April 13, 20, 27, May 4, 2012
9:00am - 10:30am
Location: Upper West Side; Fee: $150
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 four-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, four-week group members are introduced to a
"self-attuned" eating model that is anti-diet and
mindfulness based. Over the four 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.
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