Welcome to Eating Disorder Recovery
Joanna Poppink, MFT
If you're looking for support, inspiration, education and treatment opportunities for eating disorder recovery for yourself and/or those who you love, welcome! This site is dedicated to helping adults: individuals, couples and families, to overcome eating disorders and navigate their personal eating disorder recovery process. Eating Disorder Recovery offers:
- Support for individuals suffering from eating disorders
- Support for families and friends of people struggling with eating disorders
- Suggestions for recovery including crisis management
- Education about eating disorders, recovery options and available treatment
- Guidance to effective treatments for physical and emotional well being and health
- Opportunities to share your experience and wisdom
- Discussion forums
- Listings of available recovery resources
Site contents: articles that address specific eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating, and purging, DSM-IV-TR eating disorders descriptions, literature research references, extensive list of eating disorder sites, access to Joanna Poppink's comprehensive list of national and international eating disorder in-patient programs and opportunity to Q & A. Joanna Poppink MFT, created this site. She is a Los Angeles psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorder recovery. She works privately with adults who suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, binge eating, bulimia nervosa, purging, and with people who are trying to understand and help a loved one who has an eating disorder. Her clinical work addresses the psychological and emotional aspects of recovery. She refers to physician specialists in the field when medical care is required.
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Help Yourself -
Coping Strategies
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Thursday, 16 April 2009 00:00 |
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When you are acting out your eating disorder, you eat whatever will knock out feelings you don't want to have or simply cannot bear. You know what the binge foods are that do the job for you. And you know the consequences you experience later.
But what do you eat to nourish your body, keep you fit, feed your brain and equip you to function in the world in an optimum way? People in early recovery from an eating disorder ask, "What should I eat?" They ask this even if they have been seeing a nutritionist and studying various food plans.
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Help From Others -
Psychotherapy Methods
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Monday, 16 March 2009 18:01 |
What happens when a person with an eating disorder starts therapy?
This is a brief summary, from my point of view as a psychotherapist specializing in treating people with eating disorders, of what can happen in the first few weeks of therapy with a person seeking to begin recovery.
People come to my practice because they suffer from an eating disorder. They are usually frightened, often desperate, sometimes angry, sometimes shy and always in emotional pain.
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Help Yourself -
Coping Strategies
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Monday, 16 March 2009 18:40 |
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Perhaps the biggest challenge confronting people in recovery from eating disorders is their own humanity. Whatever strengths, frailties and personal quirks a person possesses, those qualities will eventually show up for good or ill in their methods for coping with stress.
People wanting to improve or speed up their recovery come to me saying, "I know what I'm supposed to do. Why can't I do it?"
That's a fair and reasonable question. Unfortunately, these people too often have already decided that their answer lies in controlling, minimizing or eliminating their normal human emotions. Some people think that success in giving up eating disorder behaviors is equal to becoming automatons with no feelings and a surface facade of agreeable charm.
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Help Yourself -
Coping Strategies
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Monday, 31 August 2009 19:50 |
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More insights are coming as I do the prewriting and thinking for my eating disorder recovery book. Here's what feels like a big one for me today.
So many people call, write and share their pain and frustration in finding their way out of their eating disorder and into a life of freedom. In looking for various structures that will hold what I want to say in this book I came upon the basic and familiar outline of a classic play. A classic play consists of Act I, Act II, Act III.
The plea for help from a bewildered and frightened person struggling to find release and recovery from an eating disorder, in my immediate way of thinking, comes from Act II. We can't skip Act II. And just about any playwright will tell you Act II always gives the writer, the producer and the director trouble. Are you in Act II of your recovery?
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Help Yourself -
Coping Strategies
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Monday, 16 March 2009 18:42 |
You are really searching for information now. You are checking out self help manuals, exploring affirmations, reading the symptoms of eating disorders, scaring yourself with medical information on the consequences of obesity, starvation and purging, lurking on eating disorder discussion lists, writing notes and information requests to online authors and psychotherapists.
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Help From Others -
Psychotherapy Methods
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Monday, 16 March 2009 18:58 |
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Recently a colleague asked me, "Do you try to get your clients to diminish their bingeing behaviors from the beginning of therapy, before you together have explored the feelings that are fueling that behavior? I know there are differing views on this, and I would be interested in hearing yours."
When I heard this question, several points of equal value, in my opinion, arrived simultaneously in my mind concerning therapy work with eating disorder patients. Since writing is linear I can only communicate one point at a time. Please understand that these considerations are simultaneous.
My first thought was that I don't try to 'get' my clients to do anything. I want them to heal and develop the capacity to live a fulfilling and satisfying life. But what that means to them and how they specifically accomplish that falls into the realm of their personal values, decision making and evolution.
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