Food for Thought

As therapeutic practitioners, do we work with specific symptoms or the client as a whole person? If it’s the latter, we try to help them in therapy to make sense of their unique relational environment, the influences that shaped their early experiences, how these were internalised, swallowed and digested or spat out, and how past experience continues to shape their present lives. Clients’ relationship with food, and the place of food in their relationships, can provide insights into these different ingredients of each person’s self-narrative. Stories of feeding and being fed have a valuable place in the therapist’s consulting room.

Feeding the baby – breast or bottle – can be a huge source of pleasure, satisfaction and intimacy for parent and infant, providing the context for secure attachment to develop. But for parents with disrupted or difficult attachment histories, in which their own dependency needs have not been met, the feeding relationship is likely to become the focus of a host of unconscious representations and overwhelming feelings of guilt, anxiety, hostility and rejection.

This presentation will explore some of the ways in which the feeding relationship can go wrong, and discuss the developmental risks to the baby.

Feeding the baby – breast or bottle – can be a huge source of pleasure, satisfaction and intimacy for parent and infant, providing the context for secure attachment to develop. But for parents with disrupted or difficult attachment histories, in which their own dependency needs have not been met, the feeding relationship is likely to become the focus of a host of unconscious representations and overwhelming feelings of guilt, anxiety, hostility and rejection.

This presentation will explore some of the ways in which the feeding relationship can go wrong, and discuss the developmental risks to the baby.

Mary-Jayne Rust
Ecopsychology and Food
For many our relationship with food can be deeply painful and may reflect our very earliest relationship with mother and her body. In a similar way our collective relationship with food reflects our relationship with Gaia, Mother Earth and our dysfunctional relationship with her body; this manifests in numerous ways, from consumerism to industrial agriculture and the abuse of our nonhuman relatives. In this free-range talk I will look at some of the ways we are healing from our giant eating problem: therapy on allotments, making conscious food choices, growing food, re-wilding self and land.

Rebecca Smith
Trauma, dislocation and allotments: growing people, crops and community
Food growing is a rewarding and challenging skill that encompasses the personal, inter-relational, and draws on a deepening connection with nature. Voltaire advised a garden can reveal much of life to us, and through the act of nurturing seeds into harvests, gardeners suffering from trauma, dislocation, deprivation and mental ill-health find solace, connection and meaning. Rebecca will share vignettes of moments in the process that she has encountered with clients, from two decades of horticultural therapy practice.

It has been said, ‘you are what you eat’. But what about how you eat? And who you eat with? Even where you eat? All of these experiences, to varying degrees, make us who we are. This presentation will bring together research evidence from psychology and physiology, as well as clinical experiences, to explore how food is a powerful means of communication, over the lifespan, both intra- and interpersonally, across different affectional bonds. We will see how attachment research tells us about food love stories, but also, how food sharing is not always caring.

This seminar recording will be available on Wednesday 29 June

Food and feeding are important ingredients in couple relationships; how individual tastes, preferences and needs are negotiated exposes significant dynamics and acts as a meaningful message between partners.

This seminar will include a brief presentation of a hypothetical couple, illustrating ways that the reality of food, and the couple’s use and abuse of it, revealed the dynamic of their relationship. Again, with the focus on food, the concept of ‘the couple fit’ will then be explored, in relation to both couple and individual therapy, where there may be use of ‘working with the couple in mind’.

Harmful events in early life have many long-lasting consequences for mental health, as we learn from our work with clients. Research has also demonstrated a link between adverse childhood experiences and our relationship with food, including an increased risk of a range of serious health conditions resulting from what and how we eat. Why might that be? And what is the role of psychotherapy in addressing clients’ self-harming eating habits?

Charles Brown
Eating Disordered: The Appropriation and Distortion of the Male Body with Special Reference to Black Bodies
In this presentation I will discuss the male body, its appropriation and destruction. Implicit assumptions and expectations of the male body and the environment it inhabits may be understood and recognised as products of history, of cultures and politics, and traumatic enactment, not simply borders or evolution. This discussion suggests that eating disorders are positioned as a form of cultural and political labour undertaken by men to embody the myth of the ideal body, and for others the repudiation of social mores.

Jeff Lane
The Men Who Feed the Nation
Drawing upon his long history and experiences of farming and food production Jeff will consider how men have played a part in feeding the nation. The physical labour involved, and rites of passage into productive adulthood, has a powerful impact on men’s bodies, psyches and sense of identity which is absent for many men in contemporary society. I will also consider the evolution and development of tools as means of preparing food and offer some thoughts regarding men’s relationship with tools and how that may impact on their sense of self in our modern ‘tool-less’ society.

Clients’ relationship with food – childhood memories associated with being fed, recipes that connect them to families, communities and cultures, political and social values regarding food production, their attitude to feeding themselves and other people – can provide the therapist with rich ingredients to work with. This portal into the client’s visceral experiences is often overlooked unless eating difficulties or weight are the presenting problem. For this seminar, two experienced therapists, Nailah Husbands and Tamar Posner, have agreed to be interviewed about the place of food in their own life stories and journeys; journeys through time and across the globe.