Eating Disorder Therapy
Your world has probably gotten smaller, too. You avoid dinners, birthdays, trips—anything that could potentially involve or be centered around food. It’s not because you don’t care (it hurts to miss out and not show up for the people you love), but because it feels easier than dealing with the anxiety, pressure, or the fear of being watched. So you cancel plans, pull away, and sink into yourself. The eating disorder has seemingly won again, while everything else fades into the background.
- Sitting at a restaurant anxiously scanning the menu over and over, trying to pick the “right” thing, and not being able to focus on the people you’re with
- Spending time in front of the mirror checking, adjusting, grabbing at your body, and trying to see if anything has changed
- Avoiding family gatherings, holidays, or trips altogether—because food is always involved, and it feels easier to just not go
- Feeling like people are watching you eat, judging your choices, or noticing your body—even if they’re not
- Going back and forth between feeling “in control” and completely out of control with food and your body
- Feeling numb, disconnected, or like you can’t fully access your emotions—or getting overwhelmed when you do
Real healing happens when we understand the function of your eating disorder—not just try to stop the behaviors. As much as you might hate it, your eating disorder has been trying to help you in some way—even if it doesn’t feel like it. Oftentimes, the eating disorder has been protecting you by helping you avoid or manage things in your life that feel overwhelming, painful, or out of your control.
Of course, changing the behaviors is an important part of the work we will do together, and we also need to get curious and work to understand your eating disorder, the role and purpose it serves in your life, and why. This process can often bring up shame, and feelings like this naturally come up (that’s human), but we don’t lead with it or reinforce it here, because shame is often what keeps the eating disorder in place to begin with. We come at this from curiosity and understanding the eating disorder, not shaming you or this part of you.
Recovery is about more than food—it’s also about getting your life back.
This work honors that by creating safer, more sustainable ways of living, so the eating disorder no longer has to play the same dominant role in your life. In practice, that means building a relationship with yourself that feels more grounded, more trusting, and less driven by fear or rigid rules. And I’m all about doing this work in your actual life—where the things that are triggering you are happening in real time, and you’re learning how to move through them, not avoid them.
I take a collaborative, flexible, and tailored approach to your care, as everyone’s recovery journey and lived experience is different. For many clients, that includes working alongside a treatment team (dietitian, primary care provider, and psychiatrist when needed) and moving at a pace that supports real, lasting change. Perfection is never, ever the goal because life and recovery are far from perfect. Tolerating that discomfort of imperfection and non-linear recovery is also a huge part of the work. We’re here to make the kind of progress you can actually feel in and outside of the session.
We focus on increasing nourishment and reducing behaviors, because it’s really hard to do deeper emotional work if your body and your brain isn’t getting what it really needs.
Learning how to feel again (without getting overwhelmed).
As the eating disorder starts to loosen its grip, emotions like guilt, shame, and fear come up. We build the tools to tolerate and move through those feelings without needing to go back into old patterns.
Building trust and confidence in yourself.
You can start to see that you can do hard things without engaging in the eating disorder, even if it’s small at first. That’s where real confidence and self-trust begin, and we build on that. This is where we build a solid foundation for more challenges in recovery and more depth therapy work!
Moving out of all-or-nothing and black-and-white thinking.
I work with you to find the grey area, learning that two things can be true at the same time (dialectics), and that recovery doesn’t have to be perfect to be real.
One of the hardest parts of recovery is your body changing. We’ll talk about it, process it, and work through the fear so it doesn’t pull you back into the eating disorder.
Rebuilding your relationship with food and your body.
This includes learning to listen to hunger, fullness, and your body’s cues again (or maybe for the first time) without fear or second-guessing.
Creating space between you and the eating disorder.
Instead of immediately acting on urges, we slow things down, build new coping skills, and create distance so the eating disorder isn’t what’s running the show—you are.
Figuring out the real you outside of the eating disorder.
Your life doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) keep being defined by your eating disorder. We take the time to explore your values, your beliefs, and what actually matters to you.
No. I strongly encourage all of my clients to work with a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders, so you can focus more on the food pieces with them, while we focus here on the emotional and psychological side—tolerating emotions, building coping skills, and doing the deeper work underneath it all.
I look at the eating disorder as a protective part of you—not just a set of behaviors to stop. We work on understanding what role the eating disorder has been serving for you, while also building the tools, support, and structure needed to move toward recovery.
That includes increasing nourishment, learning to tolerate emotions, challenging all-or-nothing thinking, and creating distance from the eating disorder over time. A big part of this process is setting realistic goals and learning how to tolerate discomfort without automatically reverting back to the eating disorder.
This is collaborative, real-life work—not just talking about change, but actually practicing it.
I’ve worked extensively with eating disorders across multiple levels of care, including partial hospitalization (PHP), intensive outpatient (IOP), and outpatient settings. I’ve also held leadership roles in eating disorder treatment programs as a program director. I also bring lived experience into this work as someone who has recovered from an eating disorder myself, which means I understand this both professionally and personally.
I’m not afraid of the complexity of this work, and my professional and lived experience allows me to support you in a way that’s grounded, realistic, and actually applicable to you and your life.
You’re not alone! Many clients come to me after higher levels of care and want help applying recovery in real life. Or they did great in a structured program—until they had to come back to real life and everything got hard again.
This is where we focus on making the work actually stick outside of a program—so it holds in your day-to-day life. Over time, the goal is for the eating disorder to take up less and less space, so it’s no longer running the show, and you feel more in control of yourself and your choices.
Building trust in yourself helps you handle difficult challenges and triggers over time without the eating disorder. And this takes time! You didn’t develop an eating disorder overnight, and it’s not going to go away overnight either.
I work with a range of eating disorder experiences, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), and other disordered eating patterns that may not have a formal diagnosis. Many of my clients don’t always fit neatly into a category—but they know their relationship with food, their body, or control feels overwhelming or all-consuming. Having any of these experiences is enough of a reason to seek support. Whether you’re coming out of treatment, struggling with relapse, or just starting to question your relationship with food, we can work with where you are.
Yes! And this is something that gets missed way too often. Eating disorders show up across the size spectrum. People in larger bodies are frequently (and frustratingly) told to focus on weight loss instead of being taken seriously when it comes to their health or their relationship with food and their bodies. That can delay or prevent people from getting the support they actually need. Eating disorders do not have a “look,” and your experience is just as valid regardless of the size of your body. You deserve care that goes beyond just focusing on your weight.
your healing journey Today.