Disordered Eating in Families and Relationships

This video is part of our larger conference on Disordered Eating, which can be found HERE.

This presentation looks at some of the issues in families and relationships when one person has an eating disorder.

An eating disorder is a communication, wordless and hard to interpret, usually aimed at someone in the household. It is an indication of distress and needs to be put into words that can then be discussed, processed and worked on.

This process is made difficult because even if the target can be identified, the disordered eater rarely knows what it is about. The therapeutic task is therefore to make conscious the purposes of the disordered eating and enable the management of them within the couple or family by other and less destructive means.

The presentation will enable participants to recognise the significance of the disordered eating as communication; facilitate the understanding of the meaning of the eating behaviour, help the couple/family to discuss/communicate previously unmanaged issues in the relationship(s) and explore other means of managing the issues that arise from this process.