This week is about wants and wanting. Whether it’s about food, relationships, goals, or something else, wanting is typically a challenge for folks with eating disorders. This week we look at wants and wanting. We will engage in an experiential on how to access your innate knowing and let go of a need for permission in order to desire what you need.

We will look at how to identify a supportive relationship, break down barriers to connection, ask for what you want with greater ease, and have a better sense of your “yes’s and no’s. In many ways eating, taking in food, is intimate. This week acknowledges that. We will look at the role of intimacy or lack of it, in your eating disorder and look at ways to easefully increase capacity for intimacy.

Bonus: The transformative power of sex
Week 2 will have an extended session for those who want to know more about sexual intimacy and ways in which sex can support recovery. This section is optional as not all members of the group will feel comfortable and/or ready for this conversation. I am happy to answer questions about this ahead of time and encourage you to take care of yourself. You will still get the full benefit of the program if you do not attend this one — it’s just a bonus that many may find helpful.

I’ve worked with so many people that struggle to regard themselves the way they would regard almost any other human. In this session, we will explore ways to access the innate sense of worth that wants to grow inside of you or that has been neglected due to survival responses based on past negative experiences.

This week is about embodiment and transitioning from the idea of improving your body image to befriending your body and delighting in the wisdom that it has to offer you. We will engage in practices of trust in yourself and trust in your body.

Embodiment isn’t just about you and your body. It’s also about the environment supporting your body, what lets you know you are here and what lets you know that you are safe. This week is about accessing a sense of belonging and orienting to the safety that is present for you, even if it sometimes feels scarce.

Bonus: Fat Liberation and Divesting from Diet Culture
Diet culture has found a home in this world and that poses many obstacles to recovery. Week 5 will feature this optional bonus session focused on consciously stepping away from this culture into acceptance and body liberation. While the entire program is developed through the lens of fat liberatory practices. I wanted to offer a space to explore this very directly in addition to the way that such practices have influenced the entire program. This bonus session will focus on more cognitive practices of awareness and divestment.

That’s right! We are more than halfway through the program before we really start talking directly about food — but don’t worry, everything we’ve covered so far has played a role in improving your relationship with food and your responses to it. Recovery can come in many forms and look different for different people, but you can’t recover from your eating disorder if you aren’t taking in nourishment. AND nourishment isn’t sustainable if you are muscling through every meal, obsessing over what you eat, or if you aren’t working towards cues that align with your innate wisdom. We’ll cover nervous system regulation at meal times and supporting the process of nourishing and digesting with sensory tools.

This week, we’ll look at what really lights you up inside and how you know that you’re having real fun on a somatic level. We will discuss perfectionism and the sneaky ways in which it gets in the way of the mobilization for fun and adventuring.

Imagination is often celebrated at earlier phases of our lives, but we have an imagination for the duration of our lives, and it can be an incredibly powerful agent for our recovery. Building on past weeks, we will play with engaging the imagination and your capacity for dreaming. We will tie week one to imagination and explore ways to allow wanting what we dream of.

So many folks in eating disorder recovery struggle with rest and relaxation. Many struggle to settle and others can’t seem to mobilize out of a collapsed state or “fake rest”. We will engage in an exploratory exercise to help you find new ways of supporting your body through rest without freezing or collapsing.

In this session, we will engage in integration of what you’ve learned through discussion, sharing, and a final group ritual to end our time together so that you may meaningfully step from this program into your life in the ways in which you have transformed.