Find An Eating Disorder Therapist in Hazel Dell, WA.

Does food exert a powerful and negative influence in your life? Does food provide the comfort you do not have in your relationships? Together, we can look at the powerful attraction that food has for you and work to overcome it so that food is put in its place: noticing when you are full, able to savor with pleasure what you eat and eating to provide nutrition and healing for your body. We will work to strengthen real self love and compassion in order to break the enslavement to food.

Eating disorders are increasingly more common for men and women in the modern age, especially with the popularization of social media and prevalent addictive foods. Therapy for eating disorders will support you in realizing that control over your diet and health is possible. Together, we will work though the emotional components of your relationship with food, find healthy substitutes other than food to meet your emotional needs, and support confidence in your ability to maintain your new changes in your relationship with food.

There is a commonly held view that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice. Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that cause severe disturbances to a person’s eating behaviors. Obsessions with food, body weight, and shape may also signal an eating disorder. Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. To reduce or eliminate binge-eating and purging behaviors, people may undergo cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is another type of psychotherapy that helps a person learn how to identify distorted or unhelpful thinking patterns and recognize and change inaccurate beliefs.

Eating disorders are a disruption of one's relationship with food, certainly. But more importantly, they represent a rupture in one's relationship to Self. Eating disorders can last a lifetime without targeted intervention. Eating disorders can also be an extension of other struggles, such as childhood adversity, trauma, neglect, abandonment, and other experiences that impact Self esteem. True hope is found in those who have triumphed over addiction and abuse, and have survived broken hearts. Healing begins when we reach out and connect with others. Eating disorders can be life-threatening. Don't suffer through them alone.

In treating some eating disorders, it is important to recognize the cognitive distortions and/or traumas that have made the need to control so important to the client. In other eating disorders, the need to control is displaced by a need to soothe and comfort oneself. In most of these cases, an integrative approach of emotion-focused work, dialectical strategies, as well as cognitive behavioral treatment can many times give the client the tools that they need in order to find better ways to cope and live.

While most eating disorder issues are treated by cognitive behavioral methodologies or specialized outpatient/inpatient programs, Grey Matters International and the work of Kevin J. Fleming, PhD provide relief first and foremost for the brain of one suffering from an eating disorder----without giving them medication. We believe that the neural circuitries responsible for the compulsive behaviors with eating are not necessarily only a neurotransmitter issue but of overused neural networks that affect the harmonization, balance, and decisions of the whole brain. Contact kevin@kevinfleminphd.com or 877-606-6161 to learn more about this safe and effective alternative.