Mindful and Compassionate Treatment of People with Eating Disorders

People with eating disorders can so often be undiagnosed, untreated, judged, and misunderstood.

And eating disorders don’t discriminate. Anyone — regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status — can have an eating disorder.

The number of eating disorder cases has risen dramatically over the course of the pandemic, leaving more and more people suffering with a potentially deadly mental illness and lacking the support they need.

It’s never been more important for caring mental health professionals to step into sessions equipped with the confidence and training to face this issue head-on.

This course will provide you with the clinical tools necessary to help mindfully and compassionately combat eating disorders in the mental health field, while learning to assess and treat this widespread issue in your clinical practice.

Inside the Course

Over four live online sessions, you will learn about how eating disorders can impact people from any background, as well as how to non-judgmentally assess and treat them in diverse populations.

You’ll also explore how the nature of eating disorders often necessitates a community or family — rather than individualistic — approach. You’ll learn practical methods for involving family members, friends, and communities. And you’ll learn effective ways to collaborate with professionals from a variety of disciplines, including when to make referrals to medical professionals and how to work together with your client’s doctor to build an informed and multidisciplinary treatment approach.

Dr. Tara Deliberto will then guide you through an exploration of the function of eating disorders through the lens of experiential avoidance. Eating disorder behaviors (e.g., food restriction, avoidance, purging, obsessionality, etc.) will be framed as avoidance of aversive internal experiences such as fear of fatness, fear of the consequences of weight gain (e.g., abandonment, rejection, losing status/power etc.), internal physical sensations (e.g., fullness), and thoughts (e.g., “I’m a failure if I gain weight”).

Through this approach, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of the key similarities and differences in how experiential avoidance manifests for clients struggling with eating disorders versus other forms of mental illness. And you’ll learn how to adapt the various exposure techniques you already know to help clients rebuild their relationship to their bodies.

This content-filled course will cover a range of topics designed to help you create effective and holistic treatment strategies, including:

• The role of food insecurity, colonialism, and trauma in the onset of eating disorders
• How to make appropriate referrals based on medical condition
• Harnessing outside intervention as a way of addressing experiential avoidance
• Cultural factors affecting family and carer intervention
• Methods of addressing experiential avoidance of food
• Compassion-focused therapy exercises designed to foster self-compassion, experiential acceptance, and gratitude
• How to move from positively judging the body to body acceptance
• Helping clients build a respectful, intimate, and two-way relationship with the body
• And more…

You’ll leave this course with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to help break free from experiential avoidance, rebuild relationships, and discover a life outside of their eating disorder.

To enroll, select your pricing option in the right-hand menu and click “Register Now” and we’ll reserve your spot in this training.

This training is worth 8 CE credit hours if attended live. While we can only provide CE to those who are present – i.e. logged in – for all live sessions, Praxis webinars are recorded for later viewing. Registrants may access these recordings at any time for up to six months from the conclusion of the training to which they pertain.

Prior to registering, please review speaker-planner conflict of interest disclosures and complete CE information.