(NEW) In Person Training – Working with Eating Disorders and Trauma Re-enactment Syndrome

Many clinicians treat eating-disordered clients with varying degrees of success. It is a difficult, persistent problem that is particularly challenging because of its chronicity and high relapse rate. In-patient settings barter discharge for “goal weight”, yet patients often return, with no greater insight into the behavior. This workshop is for both beginner and advanced practitioners, and offers a paradigm shift, re-framing eating disorders as clients’ attempts to enact, re-story, and resolve traumatic experiences that they can’t verbally articulate.

Using case studies, clients’ journal entries and artwork, we will process the “meta-communication” of eating disorders within the context of “trauma re-enactment syndrome”. We will identify the specific ways in which anorexia, bulimia, bingeing, and other eating disordered behaviors serve as a re-enactment, perpetuation of, and response to prior traumatization including physical, sexual, emotional abuse, and neglect. We will de-pathologize the behaviors and view them as metaphors. We will process common psychosocial triggers as well as the diagnostic red flags and potential medical complications.

We will then explore specific treatment strategies designed to take the focus off of traditional interventions (dieting, calorie counting, food journals, weigh-ins) and focus, instead, on offering clients alternative, safe ways to articulate and re-story their trauma experiences. A variety of creative interventions will be discussed including incorporating psychoeducation, journaling, using art therapeutically, “parts work,” re-grounding for dissociation, and implementing CARESS, an alternative to a standard safety contract. These strategies will help clinicians address both symptoms and long-term healing in an outpatient setting.

Registration for each workshop closes one day before the workshop date.

If you want to sign up for this course and missed the registration deadline, please don’t worry. You can still contact Gerri Baum at gerrib@theferentzinstitute.com or call 410-409-7061 to inquire about joining the class. We will do our best to accommodate you. We appreciate your interest in our workshops and look forward to seeing you soon!

The Ferentz Institute, Inc. is an approved sponsor of the Maryland Board of Social Work Examiners for continuing education credits for licensed social workers in Maryland. CEU approval for all trainings is also granted to Psychologists, LCPC’s and MFT’s and approved by the Board of Professional Counselors and Therapists and the Board of Examiners for Psychologists in Maryland. Reciprocity has also been granted for clinicians in Washington, DC, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan and Texas.  If your state is not among this list, we encourage you to check with your state licensing board to see if they will grant reciprocity.

The Institute maintains full responsibility for all programming. In order to provide Category 1 CEUs for all of our trainings, the Maryland Board of Social Work Examiners requires online workshops to be live, interactive, and experienced in real time. Therefore, none of our trainings are recorded for later viewing.