The Hunger On My Bones: 10 Week Intensive Psychotherapy Group
At seventeen, I started to starve myself
I thought that love was a kind of emptiness
And at least I understood then the hunger I felt
And I didn't have to call it loneliness
- Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine, Hunger
This fall I am offering a 10 week intensive psychotherapy group program for those individuals seeking a comprehensive approach to treatment and understanding of their eating disorder symptoms and patterns. This program will progress as follows:
week 1
What are YOU hungry for?
As we introduce ourselves in a small, intimate, yet dynamic setting, we will begin to explore the psychic hungers just below the surface of YOUR eating disorder symptoms. This process may help you develop fresh insight to your patterns of psychic and physical emptiness, fullness, hunger and desire.
week 2
Cravings, Longings & The Hungry Self
As we continue to get to know the group environment and setting, this week will address complex, unconscious urges that provoke and sustain eating disorder symptoms. This exploration may help you make conscious your unconscious motivations.
week 3
Feast, Famine & Fears
As the group dynamics become prominent, we are able to identify both in ourselves and each other what lies latent in respect to eating disorder behaviors and how fear and anxiety grip the behaviors in the face of potential relief from symptoms. When you understand these personal concerns you can become more aware of your resistances to relinquishing your eating disorder patterns.
week 4
The Body Speaks What the Mind Cannot Digest
As eating disorder symptoms and resistances become more obvious in the group dynamic, this week we talk more transparently about how the body becomes the vehicle for the expression of feelings when our minds and words are prohibited and cut off. This connection can become an important tenet for sustained remission of eating disorder behaviors and expose how talk therapy is essential in maintaining awareness.
week 5
Living in a Material World: Hurdles toward Happiness
Although this group is primarily based on the psychodynamics of eating disorders, it would be remiss to discount the pressures and influences of our environments. This week we incorporate both familial and societal ideals for our bodies and the impacts of the material world on the development and dynamics of eating disorder symptoms.
week 6
Fasting Women & Starving Souls
Integrating the first 5 weeks of psychological work, this week we start to piece the puzzle of our inner lives together and devote ourselves to the dynamic relationship of satiety, fuel and our psychic hunger. Addressing this relationship will enhance your capability to use words rather than your body to digest emotional experiences.
week 7
Shame, Silence & Creating a Voice
Moving toward the end of this 10 week process group, resistances, concerns and anxieties understandably begin to surface. This week we will focus on the shame and silence existing in the context of this group and attempt to use each other as raw material to breakthrough rather than breakdown resistances and move forward with a voice.
week 8
Sweet Intoxications
Again, as this is a psychodynamic group, we move along a natural continuum of life and can expect set backs. We will use this group to discuss the meaning of such regressions and how they inform and propel us forward.
week 9
Minding the Body and Valuing our Appetites
With only one additional session together, this session will focus on what has been revealed about the mind and body psychodynamic relationship and the importance of valuing our physical, emotional and psychological appetites.
week 10
Bringing It All To The Table
The termination process in psychodynamic psychotherapy begins when therapy starts which means that we are always thinking about the end of treatment. In this final group session, each member will have the opportunity to Bring To The Table their insights, goals, aspirations and thoughts about therapy and life ahead.