DBT Therapy for Eating Disorders

DBT Therapy for Eating Disorders

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are susceptible to eating disorders. DBT Therapy for Eating Disorders.  These disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, food addiction, and sugar addiction. Individuals with a predisposition to eating disorders show some of the same risk factors in such areas as biological, psychological, and social that leads to the development of personality disorders as well. These maladaptive eating patterns range from one extreme to the other. The underlying causes of continuing these self-destructive eating patterns are negative emotions, thoughts, and beliefs coupled with low self-esteem and a low sense of self-worth. The individuals also lack insight into the long-term damage such patterns cause emotionally, psychologically, physically, and socially. The reason that individuals lack insight is because they become stuck in an emotional mind-state of distorted negative thinking and irrational beliefs which leads to the ineffective coping with the food addiction and the eventual negative consequences of the behaviors.

Recovering from eating disorders can be one of the most challenging things that an individual can do because it becomes an addictive means to cope with difficult and intense emotions. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT treatment) offers a means for individuals to learn new coping skills that offer hope and positive outcomes. Residential DBT treatment offers many skills to implement that help individuals move forward and start to make new choices. Through learning to become mindful, bringing down emotional intensity, improving interpersonal relationships, tolerating distress, and thinking and acting dialectically (effectively) we learn how to replace our old ineffective or self-destructive coping with positive coping. If the person with the eating disorder is looking for hope in successful recovery from the self-destructive eating patterns; the old negative coping must be replaced with new positive coping skills.