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Eating Disorder Recovery at Life Healing Center
At Life Healing Center we are committed to helping clients gain freedom from the painful and repetitive struggles and life-interruption that accompanies eating disorders. Our treatment process combines a gentle, structured exploration of the emotional triggers that exacerbate struggles with food, along with practical tools for managing stress, handling relationships and healthful living.
Our clients are each assigned a master's level, licensed eating disorder’s therapist and a Nutritionist during the course of their stay with us. In addition, our psychiatrist and on-call physician provide ongoing involvement where needed.
Eating Disorders Treatment at Life Healing Center offers multiple phases of support, each designed to meet the specific needs of residents at distinct stages of eating disorder recovery. Based on the progress of the client, these stages shift the therapy process from an initial focus on identifying and decreasing harmful symptoms to a later focus on healthy living, self-regulation and personal autonomy.
Phase One is designed for clients who are experiencing frequent symptomatic acting out with food and distorted body image. Residents in this phase often describe their world as a constant battle with food and their body. For these clients, the tension between the eating disorder and their healthy adult self is all consuming. In this phase of treatment we work with our clients to de-emphasize the focus they have placed on food and their bodies, encouraging greater emotional distance from the disorder.
Phase Two asks our clients to be less defined by the eating disorder itself. Instead, we encourage them to begin to focus on the future - on making life work and achieving their life potential. Residents at this phase describe a growing ability to tolerate and manage the underlying emotions that fuel their disorder. In this phase of treatment, our clients are offered a much more moderate degree of external structure coupled with increased self-regulation and self-defined boundaries. It is at this stage that active family therapy may be recommended through one of our structured family weekend programs.
As residents move through the phases, it is not uncommon for issues to arise that which they need to shift back into a higher level of structure to negotiate a stressful time or to safely examine a specific issue. For some, an unresolved trauma or past loss will present in treatment requiring resolution. At Life Healing Center, we see each client as having unique and individual needs and expect that treatment will accurately mirror those needs to respectfully support our client's safety and personal growth.
Phase Three now offers the client who has achieved stability and self regulation of their recovery process through Phases One and Two, the ability to focus attention and more specifically address underlying issues, such as trauma, or grief and loss. The interplay between the eating disorder and underlying issues, as well as pitfalls to undermining one's recovery process is specially highlighted.
