Eating Disorder Program
Living a healthy, fulfilling, and productive life requires certain key ingredients. Most importantly, and the basic necessity to stay alive, is food and water! However, there are times when food becomes an enemy, an obstacle to healthy living, and rather than providing nourishment food and eating may come to take on unhealthy and damaging functions. If you are reading this you, or someone you love—your child, your sibling, your friend—may be experiencing problems with disordered eating.
At Insight Treatment Program we understand that human beings have many needs – psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physiological. The goal of our integrated treatment approach is to help your teen and family heal within a bio-psycho-social perspective. We focus on areas such as affect regulation, communication, boundaries, dependency, intimacy, trust, attachment, spirituality, and the tasks of adolescent development including development of abstract thinking, coping skills (decision making, problem solving, conflict resolution), belief systems, identity exploration, emotional experiences, supportive friendships, and renegotiation of relationships with adults.
Many teens also suffer from co-occurring substance use disorders (often as high as 50%), mood disorders, anxiety disorders, self- harming behaviors, and/or personality disorders. Our individualized treatment approach is designed to offer support and insight to your families within this co-occurrence of disorders. Our treatment approach draws from several modalities as appropriate to our clients’ treatment needs including: cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, trauma based, spiritual, existential, experiential, and 12-step facilitation.
The basic goal of the eating disorder therapy is to help clients learn to understand the function their eating disorder serves for them; to help them understand the relationship between mood and food; to learn healthy ways to cope with stress; and to improve relationships with self, family, and friends.
WHO, WHAT, and WHERE
Who: Teens: Ages 14-19
What: Monday Night Therapy Eating Disorder Support Group; Individual Therapy; and/or Family Therapy
Where: Insight Treatment Center, Sherman Oaks
The Insight Eating Disorder Track is for kids, ages 14 to 19, who are experiencing symptoms of eating disorders. These symptoms include: dysfunctional eating behaviors, disordered eating patterns, experimentation with disordered eating or purging, and/or repeated episodes of bingeing, restricting, and purging (vomiting, laxatives, and/or over-exercising).
The Monday Insight Teen-Support Group for Dysfunctional Eating Behaviors will meet from 6:30 to 8:00 pm at Insight Treatment Center.
The Group will be a place for kids to come and find support and learn to express themselves in a safe place. Various group topics will include body image, social pressures, peer pressures, family issues, nutrition, and identity development. The group will explore core issues around dysfunctional eating and will support the kids to help them discover the function that their eating disorder symptoms serve for them. The facilitators will work with the teens to help them learn how to identify, clarify, express, and cope with their feelings in healthy and mindful ways.