Experiential Therapeutic Activities
There is no substitute for experience. Fledgling changes in awareness, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are consolidated and integrated by intentionally-focused and processed new experiences. This is a key to any successful eating disorder treatment program.
Outdoor Experiences and Challenges
These exercises, both formal and informal, are designed to challenge individual limits and foster cooperation. Such exercises confront isolation, avoidance, perfectionism, self-consciousness, and unproductive competition. At the same time, these activities also enhance self-confidence and worth, positive social interactions, appropriate risk-taking, and non-compulsive fitness activity (for example: mountain excursions, hiking, canoeing, challenge courses, skiing, etc.). Outdoor experiences will be individualized according to the client's health status, treatment level, and ability.
Expressive Therapies
Individuals with eating disorders often have difficulty with self-expression. These less direct forms of therapy encourage the management of emotional distress and the integration of new awareness and insight with new behaviors. Expressive modalities include music, art, and movement therapies.
Fitness for Fun
With the excessive focus that eating disordered individuals have on weight and body size, fitness is often distorted into compulsive, extreme, and rigid exercise routines. To help clients combat related mind-set and behaviors, they will engage in non-routinized fitness activities that are both healthy and enjoyable. Clients will have some choices in determining the kinds of fitness activities in which they engage. Examples include yoga, low-impact time-limited aerobics, strength training, tai chi/self-defense.
Facing Food and Body Fears
Clients have typically built up fears toward an avoidance of many normal life activities–for instance, eating certain kinds of foods, going grocery shopping, going to the mall, trying on clothes, looking at oneself in the mirror, wearing clothes that fit, gaining weight, "mocktail" parties, etc. This experiential element allows clients to, incrementally, face their fears about food, appearance, and social engagement in a supportive and encouraging environment. They will also be helped to process where their fears come from and to gain mastery over high-fear/avoidance situations that might otherwise trigger them.
Therapeutic Homework and Activism
During individual and group therapy, clients will receive homework assignments aimed at facilitating additional discovery and consolidation of new insights. As clients progress to more advanced stages of recovery, they will engage in therapeutic activism activities that allow them to use the discoveries they have made to help others. (For example: petitioning fashion magazines about the excessive thinness of models, speaking on recovery panels, writing a newspaper or magazine article about recovery, mentoring new clients in the program who are just beginning their recovery, etc.)
