Eating, Drinking, Exercise, Body Image

Do you feel stuck with food, exercise, alcohol or other substances, or body image wars? If you feel embarrassed or shameful for tendencies or urges, it can feel overwhelming and isolating, but you aren’t alone. There is hope.

When your relationship to food, substances and/or movement has become prescriptive instead of intuitive, you might tend to reach for nourishment and energy based on shoulds, musts, ought-to and have-to. How might this lead you to sweeten, stuff or restrict your core hungers?

Ideally, what we consume should be both pleasurable, intuitive and energizing, but our confusing diet-focused culture and many times underlying trauma can both contribute to a dysfunctional dance and unhelpful narratives surrounding what we put into our bodies, how we restrict sustenance, how we stuff pain, and how we energetically take up space every day.

There is a way to untangle yourself from the body and food wars; There is a way to gain clarity and relief from food, exercise, alcohol and other take-the-edge-off, quick-fix urges and habits. It first takes courage to ask for help, and then practicing curiosity and compassion for yourself as you grow.

Family therapy that helps to make meaning of both emotions and behaviors can be a rich serving of reconnection for a family by supporting a unique combination of what works best for each family.

One meal at a time, one session at a time, one bite at a time, one expression of a feeling at a time, families explore how to reconnect in a sustainable way. This makes it easier and more enjoyable to create new family rituals together, renew mealtime connection, and re-feed the family literally and figuratively on a deeper level.

The M-Bodied Family Approach offers body-based, cognitive, and relational ways to use presence at the family table to help support the relational dynamics that crave tenderness and attention. Instead of focusing on behaviors or compliance, or instead of only focusing on roots of the distress, or instead of only focusing on changing thoughts, M-Bodied offers this integrative body-mind approach with a unique focus on offering invitational practices, supporting relational dynamics, and teaching practical body-based techniques for nervous system regulation.

When families are more aware of power differences, nervous system awareness, and relational areas that are hungry for support, parents and caregivers are better supported in their own nervous system and ability to self-handle in order to provide the necessary co-regulation for their children. This paves a path for the physiological and metaphorical hungers to be better fed.

M-Bodied® Therapy offers:

*Psycho-education related to nervous system science as well as how early attachment patterns and developmental trauma—both from a multi-generational lens—can wire our nervous system and impact how we sense our hungers and feed ourselves literally and figuratively.

*How multi-generational patterns and family dynamics can be used as a valuable resource with which to connect and re-pattern for healthy embodiment and reconnection with the body and mind, individually and collectively.

*Specific body-based co-regulation practices for nervous system regulation to invite a more rhythmic digestive pace and deeper relationship with your body-mind-spirit as well as a richer connection with others.

Eventually, with more bodily awareness and knowledge about relational patterns—with self and others—as well as eventual cognitive therapeutic skills, you can begin to more easily connect the dots and find new ways to love yourself, nourish yourself, and healthily connect with others.