Individual Counseling

What would you give just to get a break?

Wouldn’t you love to create a life from which you didn’t need a break in the first place??

So many of my clients began their therapy walk with me holding on to extreme feelings… overwhelmed with the burdens they carry.

When people walk into my office, I can almost see them clutching onto their own personal “griefcase.” (Ok, full disclosure: I prefer “griefcase” because “emotional baggage” is cringe-worthy; it’s overused and reeks of psychobabble!)

The problem with always toting that “griefcase” …

… is that it can affect our relationship with food and affects our bodies.

As you would imagine, everyone’s griefcase is filled with different emotional battle scars.

While there is not a straight line linking any one particular issue to the causation of an eating disorder (they are much too complex for that), the combination of certain factors can bring on the onset of problems with food and body image. Together in session, we will explore your unique issues and create a road map to healing that is specific to your wounds.

The fact is, unresolved feelings of anger, grief, shame, or pain that caused you to turn to or away from food will continue to haunt and affect you until they are properly faced and processed.

Right now, they own you. They control you.

But it is not just your painful feelings that need healing.

You are so much more than that!

Your mind, body, and spirit work together with your emotions; when one of these is out of balance, your life is as well. And somehow believing a different body size will make way for a happy life free from the anger, grief, shame, or pain is grossly misleading and destructive.

Changing your weight will not solve your problems. That is a billion dollar lie the diet industry and our thin-obsessed culture has been profiting off for decades.

Here’s a look at what we’ll do together…

A lot of our work will center on understanding your current convictions surrounding food, the diet culture, and your body image.

While we do this, we’ll explore your deeper wounds from past experiences that are festering and need true healing.

We’ll help you create emotional guardrails in your life. Yes, that’s a fancy way to say “boundaries,” but I prefer “guardrails” because it feels less like psychobabble and better communicates a sense of self-protection.

In therapy, we will initially begin the work on re-educating you on the ways we all use food in our lives. We’ll learn about how the role our “thin-obsessed” culture touts creates feelings of being ‘not good enough’ and somehow in need of fixing.

We will work to stop the constant “body project” we find ourselves in.

There is no diet plan and no weight loss plan in therapy. We will explore how our thoughts about ourselves and our bodies affect our motivation, self-esteem, and sense of purpose in life.

We will begin written exercises to start to actively listen to your inner critic and hear what it is trying to say to you… how it is trying to get your attention through using excessive food or food restriction. You will learn how your frustrating behaviors surrounding food are a means of coping with perceived imperfections, possible past trauma, and a false sense of who you are.

We will challenge unhealthy patterns of thinking and work to replace those thoughts with rational and healthy thoughts.

You will be taught with written exercises to learn the difference between your “eating disorder voice” (that fuels shame and discontentment with your body and body image) and your true, authentic voice that knows you are more than your body – that your mind, soul, and emotions are a significant part of who you are and that they want and deserve to be heard.

Learn how to say ‘No’ to demands on your time that deplete you…

… and reinforce your belief that you must constantly perform in order to be accepted – to be valued.

You will learn how to recognize all your hunger cues and to learn to trust your body.

You will begin quite of bit of narrative repair work that will put you in touch with the deeper parts of who you are. I sometimes call this work “emotional vomiting.” The exercises help release the pain and are specific to your life… your griefcase, if you will.

Through this process, you will learn how to become less outer-guided by the world and more inner focused while still interacting with the world. It is work and takes time, but it is so worth it.

It will help send the false, inner critic voice back into the void of nothingness from which it came; and you will develop a life free from your disordered eating.

And I love, love, LOVE to challenge my clients…

… with probing questions to help them see not just the problems, but also the potentials in their life.

For example:

When fear comes your way, what is your go-to coping mechanism?

Our internal fears often influence the decisions we make. When has fear helped you make a good decision?

What comes to mind when you think of “guilt”? Or “shame”? How often do these emotions show up in your day-to-day life?

If your binge could talk, what would it be saying to you?

Individual counseling will stretch you.

It will exhaust you. But it’s normal to sometimes feel exhausted after a session, because therapy is difficult work!

You are challenging your core beliefs and you are digging into yourself – both seeing brand new things, as well as familiar old things in new ways. This takes energy and time to process.

This is why I describe so strongly in my ABOUT US section my belief that it takes a courageous person to walk into a therapy office!

Lost your way? We can find the path… together.

Forgotten your voice? Together, we will help you find it again in small, manageable steps.

Forgotten what joy means? Together, we will learn the difference between joy and happiness.

Forgotten what self-trust is like? Or maybe you never had it? Together, we will plunge into the messy turbulent waters of developing your ability to take care of yourself… and how that will set you free from living only to fulfill the expectations of others.

Let’s get you the tools you need to protect your wounded self as you grow in self-reliance, compassion, and freedom.

Ready to give individual counseling a try? Contact me for a brief chat or for an appointment: (713) 269-3972.