Adolescents with eating disorders are sending a message of distress to their families and friends. Sometimes they know what is causing this distress but are conflicted about expressing it. Others are not conscious of the reasons for their eating disorder. Psychotherapy is a process that helps clients translate the language of their symptoms and how they use their bodies to communicate emotions.
Dr. Weiner works with adolescents and their families to understand and bring out the messages behind their symptoms. This process begins with slowly building a therapeutic relationship based on trust and openness. Without the formation of this relationship, there can be no movement in therapy.
Treating teens involves more than treating behaviors. The therapist's work is to help people, not just eliminate symptoms. Each client comes with his or her own unique, multidimensional experiences. Therefore, recovery usually involves different types of treatment, including individual, family, nutritional, and group therapy.
Some adolescents may also see a psychiatrist for medication to treat common, coexisting issues such as clinical depression, severe anxiety, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. All clients see their physicians on a regular basis due to the many medical complications that can arise and because medical conditions such as Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and adrenal tumors can masquerade as eating disorders.
Adolescents may require hospitalization or residential treatment to stabilize their medical condition or to more intensively address the issues around their eating disorder. Following discharge from an inpatient setting, they are then able to more fully engage in outpatient psychotherapy.
Adolescents generally push their parents to give them greater independence while they are simultaneously fearful about leaving the comfort of childhood. Teens who are unable to eat in healthy ways are certainly sending out a message that they are not ready to enter adulthood. Parents, too, are often ambivalent about their readiness to let their children leave home.
Dr. Weiner helps teens and their parents struggle through this separation–individuation process and learn to communicate more openly with each other. Uncovering hidden fears, insecurities, secrets, and concerns can lead to healing.
The therapist's job is to create a safe, supportive environment in which adolescents can begin to better understand themselves and others and cope more effectively with stress, while separating themselves from their eating disorders. Once they begin to learn the strength that comes from expressing themselves verbally rather than through the language of symptoms, adolescents find that they no longer need their eating disorders.
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