The Relational Montage of Eating Disorders
An Interpersonal Approach to Treatment
Saturday 26 June 2021
A live webinar with Professor Jean Petrucelli
- This event will not be recorded
- Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 23 June
When a person struggles with an eating problem, their relationship to food can read like a taboo love affair involving anticipation fuelled excitement, intimacy enveloped in secrecy, and disappointment and emptiness when it is over.
READ MORE...For sufferers of eating disorders, disavowed longings are experienced as insatiable, powerful, and dangerous, while their symptoms act as a defence against the dangers inherent in an intimate exchange – something which requires a tolerance for uncertainty and vulnerability beyond patients’ reach.
In this workshop, Professor Jean Petrucelli will present a detailed, practical exploration of how one works analytically with this group of patients. Such an approach goes beyond symptom alleviation by seeking to understand the plethora of interwoven factors that may lie beneath, such as cultural influences, neurobiology, attachment theory, self and affect regulation, self-states, body-states, and the intergenerational transmission of body image. It allows time for issues of desire, appetite, relatedness, and body obsession to be explored in order to enter this ritual-filled world. The work contains clinical conundrums in reaching these often “unreachable” patients; it examines complicated negotiations between direct interventions, and space for the symptoms to communicate feelings.
FULL PROGRAMME
14:00 BST (09.00 EDT)
Introductions
14:05
An overview
People with eating disorders were once considered a population too dangerous to work with in terms of the life-threatening medical consequences. But it is the unrelenting internal dialogue and the consuming behavioural rituals that briefly quieten the tortuous thoughts that cause the most suffering. There is an endless stream of fear-based judgments, rules, demands and threats that can take over the mind and sometimes drive a life into the ground. Understanding how the symptoms of eating disorders represent an embodied metaphor for experience with others in a socio-cultural matrix requires first, an overview of cultural influence, etiology, history, the role of the family, and the nature of desire. How do we as therapists learn to speak “their language”, a language of food and bodily concerns, while introducing and integrating mindfulness in our clinical work? An interpersonal treatment perspective utilising action oriented techniques with eating disorders has much to offer.
14.45
Q&A
15.00
Break
15.15
Clinical applications utilising the interface of concepts of neurobiology, attachment, affect regulation, and the analytic relationship
The underlying body-mind issues we find with our patients with eating disorders can be viewed as a split-off mind-body function that is enacted in many areas in life. Here we shall look at the confluence of psychological factors, interpersonal factors, social factors, biological and neurobiological factors, attachment and affect regulation issues at play in creating the perfect storm of health consequences through the symptoms of eating disorders. One may conceive of an eating disorder as an attempt at self-cure, which fails and leads to further isolation and helplessness.
16.00
Q&A
16.15
Break
16.30
The low spark of high heeled girls: The clinical interface of hyperdeadness and hyperawareness
Patients with eating disorders hold shameful frightening secrets that create psychic terror and physical body tyranny. Their body-states are fluid and shift with anxiety and the fear of being shamed as the secrets they bring to therapy reveal a basic ambivalence between the urge to retain and the urge to expel. Their relationship to secrets could be thought of like their relationship to food: the tensions of wanting and not wanting to know themselves and be known in revealing their secrets to another; doing and undoing, depriving and over sharing. This presentation touches on the complex dialectical relationship between patient’s bodily experience, mental anguish, and the loss of their vitality, which is often highlighted in being ‘centre stage.’
17.15
Q&A
17.30
End