Weight issues and disordered eating are regular presentations in therapy. This training looks at some of the issues in families, couple and sexual relationships when one person has an eating disorder. It explores the experiences of those affected, and what that means for providing effective therapy.
Eating disorders including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and other specified feeding or eating disorders (OSFED). It is estimated that between 1.25 and 3 millions people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder with around 25% being male.
Most develop during adolescence the most common age range being 16-40 years old, though increasingly cases are seen in younger and older age groups. Research suggests that individuals who have family members with eating disorders are more likely to develop disorder themselves. It is therefore vital as psychosexual and relationship therapists that we have a working understanding of these conditions.
An eating disorder is a form of communication, wordless and hard to interpret, usually aimed at someone in the household. It is an indication of distress and needs to be put into words that can then be discussed, processed and worked on to facilitate an outcome.
This process is made difficult because even if the target can be identified, the disordered eater rarely knows what it is about in that the disorder is at an unconscious level. The therapeutic task is therefore to make conscious the purposes of the disordered eating and enable the management of the disorder within the couple or family by other and less destructive means.
About the Trainer
Julia Buckroyd is Emeritus Professor of Counselling at the University of Hertfordshire. From 2002 -2008 she was Professor of Counselling and from 2004-2008, Director of the Obesity and Eating Disorders Research Unit. She has been working in the field of eating disorders since 1984. Her original training was as an academic historian but she re-trained first as a counsellor at Birkbeck College, University of London and then as a psychotherapist with the Guild of Psychotherapists. Her first post as a student counsellor in 1984 was at London Contemporary Dance School where she became interested in eating disorders. Her first book on eating disorders, Eating Your Heart Out, (2nd edition, Vega, 1996) derives mostly from this experience. From 1994 – 2008 she worked at the University of Hertfordshire while continuing her clinical work as a therapist. Her work with dancers, including work relating to eating disorders was published in The Student Dancer (Dance Books, 2000)
In the past ten years she has applied the insights of therapeutic work with eating disorders to obesity, as well as continuing her work on eating disorders, and has been carrying out a research programme to explore whether psychotherapeutic groups for obese women are effective in creating sustained weight loss. This work is ongoing with a programme of research in this area. Her account of this research and the group programme that she developed was published in 2007 (Julia Buckroyd and Sharon Rother, Therapeutic Groups for Obese Women; a group leader’s handbook, Wiley). She has also sought to support work on psychological aspects of all forms of disordered eating via conferences and publications. She and Sharon Rother completed an edited book in this area (‘Psychological Aspects of Eating Disorders and Obesity’, Wiley) published in 2008.
For four years, from January 2004 to December 2007, she was editor of Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, the research journal for BACP. In this role she continued the journal’s mission to make research accessible to practitioners and to support the development of counselling and psychotherapy research in the UK.
Since her retirement from the University of Hertfordshire she has been applying her research to clinical work including a pilot obesity service in a PCT. She has also developed a programme for emotional eaters available to the general public, Understanding your Eating, which is being developed as a commercial project www.understandingyoureating.co.uk. She has published an account of her ideas for the general reader in Understanding your Eating (Open University, 2011) In addition, Professor Buckroyd offers supervision, workshops and consultancy to a wide range of organisations on psychological approaches to all forms of disordered eating and related issues.
