Find An Eating Disorder Therapist in Oakville, ON.

When clients are facing an eating disorder, they are facing a condition which affects their health, their identity, and ultimately, their future. When treating an eating disorder then, it is vitally important to support the whole person and not just their eating habits. Part of this support involves stabilization techniques aimed at preventing relapses and spirals, while also helping clients regard themselves in a more honest, loving, and compassionate way. We cherish the support we are able to offer clients facing an eating disorder, and we love seeing people overcome by such challenges ultimately become overcomers themselves.

Focusing on your lived experience of your body image, you and I will explore how best to work with the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are helping to keep you from moving forward in a more healthy and positive way. You will benefit from learning mindfulness and acceptance as rich and helpful tools to engage in discover your own personalized strategies for success.

Eating disorder is a mental struggle in relationship to food and body. It usually occurs with other issues such as anxiety, OCD, self-esteem, and perfectionism. There are different types of eating disorder including anorexia, bulimia, and binge/emotional eating and purging. Orthorexia is also an eating disorder that is caused due to unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. For treatment we work with our clients from a whole system perspective to understand every aspect of the client’s life such as trauma, biology, culture, habit and addiction to help clients unlearn their adaptive responses and change their relationship with food and their body.

Eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia, binge eating, and compulsive eating as well preoccupation with weight and shape are quite common in our culture and can be devastating and complex. Often there are severe consequences in terms of productivity, relationships and health. The good news is that it is possible to find our way out of an eating disorder. Whether through individual, family or group therapy, counsellors can assist us in changing our perceptions and behaviours and develop healthy self-esteem, communication, coping skills and emotional well being. (If we could have done it on our own... we would have by now.)

My focus is on examining the underlying trigger-experience of early on-set traumas which unresolved often lead to the symptoms of Eating Disorders. My approach is to help you move through this with immediate daily self-calming strategies that helps with an understanding of the meaning of food as "addictive" or repulsed in this complex psycho-social dynamic. It involves using an Assertive "Voice" quelled that needs expression. Establishing daily eating habits is the core of the change that would promote a cognitive shift from the self-image script set during the traumatic experience to newly-learned behaviours that would re-align with the revised and positive and affirming new script.

I work with your negative body image, from the inside out. "The negative image is understood as a dissociated and shame-based “part” of the personality in need of understanding and compassion, achieved via mindful awareness, “parts” dialogue and trauma processing. Our first step will be to create a healthy separation between the "observing" or aware Self and the part(s) absorbed in the eating disorder via mindful awareness. Once this separation between the "whole" self and part of self is established, the Gestalt polarity tradition (empty chairs) is utilized to develop understanding of the shame-based part. This leads to developing more love and compassion for yourself. You are enough!

Eating disorders are connected to the value that society puts on appearance. In North American and European cultures, the ideal is to be thin. Being overweight is obvious to the world and viewed by society as a shameful condition. This is a demoralizing position to be in. Eating disorders are predominantly an issue for women, who naturally go through changes in their weight. But this is also an issue for men, who can hurt just as deeply if they feel unworthy of love by virtue of their appearance. My approach is to help people feel good from the inside out. I recognize that weight issues can be the source of shame, bullying and marginalization. These are often the areas we work on in therapy.