Living With Food: The Science Supporting Eating Disorder Treatment

By Dr. Lucene Wisniewski and Sarah Emerman

Often times individual therapy is an indicated and vital part of eating disorder treatment. If the need for individual therapy is determined, our assessment clinician will match you to your individual therapist based on personality fit and the treatment that the therapist specializes in. For example, if a dialectal behavioral therapy treatment plan is indicated, she will want to match you with a therapist who specializes in dialectical behavioral therapy. While she will do her best to make the best match possible, when you first meet your therapist you will want to ask yourself if it feels like a good fit. Ideally this will be the person with whom you will share your struggles. Therefore, at your first individual therapy appointment your job will be to judge how comfortable you feel with your therapist, while taking into consideration how comfortable you typically feel when first meeting someone new. Your therapist’s job in the first session will be be to get to know and understand you. While you will have already told the assessment clinician details about your eating disorder symptoms, your individual therapist will often ask these questions again, as she will want to hear the answers directly from you.  

The other important part of the first session will be to discuss your expectations and goals for individual therapy. If you have an eating disorder, individual therapy will not just be about talking and feeling better, the focus will be on changing your behaviors and learning how to generalize skills. The therapist will therefore help you to determine your goals and figure out how to reach them. Each week you can expect to review food logs, discuss how the previous week went from a behavioral perspective, and set an agenda based on things both on and off your diary cards. You will also review any homework assigned from the previous session and set new goals for the week.

At CCED individual therapy is primary. Other services such as nutrition, psychiatry, skills group, and higher levels of care are considered to be adjudicative to individual therapy. It is with your individual therapist that you will discuss treatment planning and problem solve how to get your needs met and meet your goals in a collaborative way.  

If you are interested in finding a therapist at CCED, please contact us at (216) 765-0500.