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GROUPS FOR EATING AND BODY IMAGE PROBLEMS

What to Expect

Our six-week groups for the public combine psychoeducational and psychodynamic elements to give women the tools and insights they will need to begin to understand, heal, and transform their relationship with food and their bodies. Exploration, fantasy exercises, and homework assignments are utilized in each phase of the educational group to encourage participants to personalize and internalize the group experience. 

In the first phase of the group, members are introduced to a
"self atuned" model of eating that is anti-diet and mindfulness based. Participants are helped to use the self-attuned model to eat with their hunger and to stop at fullness, while examining 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 introduces curiosity and compassion as alternatives to the punitive and restrictive methods women typically employ in their efforts to change their relationships with food and their bodies. Next, the group focuses on legitimizing all foods and eliminating dichotomous thinking about food, such as: good and bad, permitted and forbidden, or healthy and unhealthy food groups. Finally group members work on body image, including the meaning of fat and thin and how one's ideas about one's body function psychologically, interpersonally, and culturally.

The WTCI Approach

"...These groups are designed to work effectively with the continuum of problematic eating, from compulsive and binge eating, to anorexia, bulimia, and chronic dieting..."   

All phases of the group's work are 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 women to live in an embodied way in this culture requires an active choice to resist cultural norms.

What to do Next
 Advance registration is required, as under-enrolled groups will be re-scheduled and group size is limited.
Please
register here or for more information, contact Joanne Messina, LCSW, Coordinator 212-501-6033.
    


6 WEEK GROUPS FOR THE PUBLIC

Ginny Laracy, LCSW
Starts March 21, 2012
7:00pm-8:30pm
Location: Flatiron District Fee:  $240

Group Leader TBA
Starts May, 2012
Dates and Time TBD
Location: TBA Fee:  $240

July, 2012
Facilitator, Dates, Time,
and Location: TBD; Fee:  $240


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

"...Our groups are open to women of all colors, sizes, sexual orientations and identities; our only requirement is that women are interested in developing a more harmonious relationship with food and their bodies."