Working with Disordered Eating

Organised by:

Counselling Service, Birkbeck University of London

Description

BIRKBECK TRAINING SERIES 2024-25

Background

The Student Counselling Service at Birkbeck, University of London launched The Birkbeck Training Series in September 2018 in response to need for specialist short-term HE specific training and a space for counsellors in the sector to meet and think together about the challenges of our work. This year we enter our seventh year in bringing the series to you.

The theme of this year’s series is the Psychodynamics of the body: When the body talks, how do we listen?

The body has traditionally been treated as a biological object. We experience it as a vehicle that carts our head around and we don’t notice (or ignore) it when the check engine light comes on. Others of us live on the surface our body, experiencing a shallow interface between our body and the environment. But it is through the body that we relate to other people and the world around us.

However, most of us live in our heads, which is why often we see a significant split between the treatment of the mind versus that of the body. It is for the same reason that we can find that much of the work we do with our clients can become a cerebral exercise, leaving out a crucial aspect of their lived experience and the impact that the countertransference can have on us.

So how then do we understand and help clients who come to us struggling with physical pain/ailments, dysregulation, those who have experienced trauma or attachment wounding and have developed defences to cut off contact with their bodies or are struggling to put into words the source of their emotional distress and are overridden with physical symptoms?

In a world of screens where people are becoming more disconnected from their bodies and more influenced in terms of how they should feel about themselves, therapy becomes a grounding space to bring attention back to two bodies in a room, the importance of understanding that how we feel begins in our bodies and re-establishing the link between mind and body.

The aim of this series is to focus on the embodied experience of our clients, to help them understand their body narratives in relation to their experiences, to develop a deeper understanding of the psychodynamics of body presentation in our work and to remind us of the impact and work our bodies do while working with our clients.

With that in mind we would like to invite you to join us for our 2024-25 Training Series.

TRAINING 2: Working with Disordered Eating by Linda Cundy

Wednesday 26th February 2025, 1:00pm-5:00pm

About the Workshop

According to the charity BEAT, approximately 1.25 million people in the UK have a diagnosable eating disorder with one quarter of these being male. There are many more whose relationship with food is “disordered”.

This half-day workshop will focus on these subclinical manifestations and explore parallels between patterns of attachment and self-feeding. While insecure attachment to food may not be the presenting issue nor immediately evident, it is symptomatic of more pervasive difficulties with self-care, personal boundaries, agency and mood that are often highlighted when a person is separated from their familiar others and environment.

Under-eating, over-eating, mismanagement of diabetes and digestive disorders, obsessive preoccupation with ‘healthy’ diet, and links between neurodivergence and eating are fairly commonplace. We will consider what the client’s body and body size might communicate about attachment and defences, linking this with Bick’s notion of psychic skin, and reflect on how this may be addressed in online or in-person counselling. Ethical considerations when working with individuals at risk of developing major Eating Disorders will be addressed.

Workshop Themes

-Disordered eating (rather than Eating Disorders); what this might look like and who may be affected
-The relationship with food as a portal into the client’s attachment history, coping strategies/defences
-The body as an attachment communication
Working with these issues with a time-limited model online or face-to-face.

About the Speaker

LINDA CUNDY is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and independent trainer. She has twenty-five years’ experience of teaching, providing training, conference papers and presentations, and is the Attachment Consultant to the Bowlby Centre.

She is also an author who has curated and four books including:

Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era (2015, Karnac), Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment (2017) Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working with Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred and Shame (2018), and Attachment, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen (2021).

She has written a number of articles for professional journals and continues to be involved in training on a freelance basis and plans to spend more time writing.

For any queries about the training, information about discounted tickets or group bookings, please contact:

Aditi Dhar
Email: counselling-services@bbk.ac.uk

Book tickets