New Year’s can be a stressful time for anyone working on recovery from an eating disorder, mood disorder, or trauma disorder. The world around you continues to tell you to “change yourself” and “New Year, New You”! I hear from many of my clients how stressful these comments and this time can be. Many of […]
Hosting a Guest with an Eating Disorder at Thanksgiving
So, you are having someone over for Thanksgiving that has an eating disorder and you are looking for some information about how to best support them (or at least not make a major faux paus!) Congratulations, you have already taken the first and most important step – trying to get yourself educated. The second, equally […]
Self-Compassion for Parents
Back to school? Already? Whether you are the parent of a school-aged child or helping your young adult child move into a dorm or first apartment, transitioning from the carefree, schedule-free days of summer to managing new school and extracurricular schedules, social calendars, and homesickness can make for a bumpy transition. As summer winds down […]
The Science Behind “I Feel Fat”
“Fat” may be an attempt to describe a change or a challenge in proprioception. Proprioception is your sixth sense- it’s how you know where your body is in space. Take your hand and place it behind your hand. How do you know it’s there? You can’t see/hear/feel/touch/taste/smell it. And yet, you know where it is […]
Chronic Pain and Eating Disorders
The Battle of living with Chronic Pain and an Eating Disorder March is Disability Awareness Month, and the week of February 21st was National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Both are serious illnesses that can be interconnected. Living with a disability can be a lot of work and navigating finding help can be an exhausting process. […]
10 Tips for Dealing with Stress from a Washington DC Therapist
1. Breathe Deeply Taking a deep breath is a cliché for a reason. When we breathe deeply, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the “rest and digest system”. It tells us that we are safe and that we can stand down. When this system is active our heart rates slow down, our […]
5 Ways that Living in Washington DC is Stressful
There are any number of wonderful things about living in the greater DMV area, from the diversity of people and cultures to the free museums. Nevertheless, when real estate blog Movato took a look at stress levels across American cities, Washington DC came out right on top (1). 1. The High Cost of Living […]
Feelings Need to be Felt, Not Fixed
Feeling our Feels Parents tell me all the time “I just want my child to be happy.” A parent’s job is to protect their child, so it makes complete sense to want to protect them from feeling discomfort or distress. However, “fixing it” or trying to get children to not feel uncomfortable emotions is not […]
8 Therapist Recommended Books to Help Cultivate Your Body Image and Self Worth
Frequently, my clients ask me for recommendations to continue to explore their body image and self-worth. Below you will find a list of eight, yes eight, body image books because I couldn’t just minimize the list to five. These books range from helping you explore the origins of your body image, to societal implications of […]
Understanding the Stages of Grief
Looking at the Stages of Grief as non-linear You might have heard about the “Stages of Grief”, which are often talked about as though you progress through one stage to another. What Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the woman who came up with the model, actually said was a word closer to “aspects” which has been mistranslated from […]
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