Individual Psychotherapy Treatment
Every client will be matched with a licensed therapist who has training and experience in the treatment of eating disorder issues, with whom they will meet 3-4 times weekly, depending on need. Individual therapy sessions will assist the client in exploring the patterns and meanings of her eating disordered behaviors and beliefs, assist her in developing insight into her needs and challenges, create motivation and strategies for change, and facilitate maintenance of a balanced, healthy lifestyle.
Group Psychotherapy Process Group
Process groups are daily therapeutic groups that encourage members to share with others in a safe environment. Clients must be well into readiness stage 2 before they can join a process group. The ideals of process group include honesty, empathy, self-awareness, mutual help and cooperation, non-judgement, and appropriate assertiveness. Process groups facilitate a sense of hope, relationship building skills, belongingness, optimism, and communication.
Body Image Group
Body Image Group focuses on supporting and challenging clients as they identify and practice small, incremental steps toward body acceptance through body desensitization. Over the course of this group, clients can learn to challege and replace dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors related to their bodies, food, and the displacement of emotional concerns onto appearance and body image, thus normalizing the relationship to the body.
Spiritual Growth Group
Avalon Hills believes that an evolving sense of spirituality (universality, connectedness, and "faith" in something greater than one's ego) is an important aspect of a balanced, healthy life. The group will not espouse any specific religious principles and regards all faiths as valid expressions of the desire for a spiritual connection. Each individual is encouraged to develop a worldview that works for them in creating a positive lifestyle.
Psycho-Educational Classes
Psycho-educational classes are structured and semi-structured small group classes that are geared toward particular stages of readiness and are content-specific to some of the hallmark issues of recovery from eating disordered behaviors. Examples of class descriptions:
Nutrition Sanity
This group focuses on teaching clients intuitive eating skills, debunking nutritional myths, and facilitating a sane approach to achieving a balanced style of eating. There are no foods considered "illegal," no "counting" rituals, and no malnourishment war stories in this or any of the aspects of the Avalon Hills program.
Compulsion Management
Certain eating disorder behaviors have a compulsive or addictive quality that needs to be addressed. This class teaches about models of addiction and methods of breaking free from balance-inhibiting additions.
Skills-Building
Eating disorders serve a function, and cannot be dealt with effectively unless the individual learns other ways to cope and get their needs met. Skill areas include: stress management, personal boundary recognition and enforcement, self-soothing and affect management, amelioration of cognitive distortions, and positive relationship building.
