Abigail Natenshon would be available to speak about some, or all, of the specific topics described below, in any combination, on site or on-line. Accommodate the unique needs of your staff or audience, as well as the time available for the presentation you seek, by combining the speaking topics that most directly address the concerns of your participants.

Abigail is available to present 90 minute workshops, half-day workshops, or day-long (or longer) teaching/experiential events. She is also available for small group education and case consultation.

Treatment techniques that work with generalist treatment cases simply don't cut it when it comes to the treatment of eating disorders. Clinicians are hungry to understand exactly what sets this treatment and its protocols apart. For eating disorder cases that may take months, years or even decades to heal, training workshops highlight the essentials of care provision, offering a bare bones structure for shepherding the healing process, step-by-step, from diagnosis to recovery. These opportunities also provide a superb milieu for small group training and case consultation.
In addressing what we practitioners do with these clients and how we do it, Natenshon translates research and theories into much needed and practicable applications through her insights and expertise, ripe and well-seasoned over four decades of immersion in clinical practice. A focus of her teaching is on the practitioner's unique requirement for self-awareness leading to a creative and flexible use of self in practice.

Of interest to psychotherapists, nutritionists, medical doctors, educators and athletic coaches, as well as parents and families, training workshops speak with relevance to all those who interface with eating disordered individuals and their families, professionally and in the course of daily living. Most professionals who treat eating disorders have not been formally trained to address the unique and diverse body of knowledge and professional challenges involved in treating and healing these disorders. That is, however, not meant to imply that therapists are unprepared to meet these tasks; in fact, most generalist practitioners have already mastered the skills they require. What clinicians are lacking is the guidance to know which of these to use, when, how, and with whom, to effectively heal these disorders.


Speaker's Objectives
Participants will learn to
1. Recognize the unique qualities that set eating disorders practice and treatment apart. The basic structure and fabric of eating disorder treatment is action-based and change-centered. The work is intentional and collaborative, limit-setting yet loving.
2. Discover the unique personal and professional challenges required of professionals treating eating disorders. Within the therapeutic relationship, the practitioner models mindful self awareness and life skill mastery as a prerequisite for the patient to achieve the same. Eating disorders heal largely through human connections.
3. Utilize treatment tools, strategies and nuts-and-bolts practice techniques; the basic structure and fabric of treatment is action-based and change-centered.
4. Discover the learning capacity and role of the "plastic" brain as it effects eating disorder recovery.

To achieve breakthroughs for successful outcomes with your eating disordered clients, whether you are a novice clinician or an experienced practitioner, you will find the following curriculum to be specifically applicable to skill-building and professional self-awareness in personal preparation and readiness to treat this challenging patient population.

Talking Points

Session 1: What makes eating disorder treatment a unique specialty?

• What ED are and are not. Implications for the patient and the family.
• Uniqueness of nature of disorder, and of their victims.
• The unique challenges for treating practitioners makes ED care a treatment apart
  

Session 2: The therapist's unique use of self

• Use of the therapist's self needs to parallel the depth and complexity of the disorder.
• Therapist deals with same uncertainties/ambiguities within the treatment process as do their patients.
• Handling extreme resistance.
• Trust building in the face of resistance
• The therapist as role model, "ideal parent"
• Transference and counter-transference issues
• When ED therapists are in ED recovery themselves.
• Caring for oneself; finding support
  

Session 3: Differential Diagnosis

• Diagnosis, an on-going process through recovery, defines not only of pathology, but client's capacity to change, progress, within current milieu.
• Diagnosis as crisis intervention; multiplicity of goals and agendas
• Decoys to disease recognition
• Bringing knowledge and anticipation to the process: discovering a "constellation within a cluster of stars."
• Diagnosing co-occurring dysfunction
• Managing patient resistance
• Managing trust development; coming back for a second session
  

Session 4: The critical first session

• Who to include? The role of family members
• Staying in the moment with an eye to the past
• The therapist as educator
• The empathic therapeutic connection becomes the fabric through which learning happens
• Assessment strategies
• Patient leaves with action plan, referrals, guidelines for what happens next
  

Session 5: Partnering with the treatment team

• The therapist as case manager
• Working with the nutritionist and MD
• Communications, division of labor; wearing many hats
• Using the school as resource
• Involved and educated parents and families become MVPs on the treatment team
• Offering support; dealing with dissention, resistance in other professionals
  

Session 6: Modes, Methods and Milieus

• Brain science supporting the science of relationship ass the most important intervention leading to psychiatric change.
• CBT, Maudsley Method and the field's own "civil war." Resolution is in integration
• Families and family systems
• Modes: Outpatient, IOPs,hospitalization, residential and halfway housing.
• Innovation: Embodied mindfulness and other "outside the box" modes that work
  

Session 7: Treatment Strategies: Nuts and bolts

• Engagement ambiguity
• Understanding (Prochaska and DeClemente's) Stages of Change as they relate to ED treatment.
• Strategies to motivate and handle resistance
• Managing counter-transference
• Case management
• Client comes away with learning from each session
  

Session 8: The brain as it relates to healing change; treatment innovation and the mind/body connection

• Pioneering brain research and the role of relationship, healing, and the mind-body connection in the treatment of eating disorders. Schore, Siegel, Doidge
• Mindfulness and mentalizing
• CBT and the human connection.
• Embodied mindfulness and the re-integration of the self through somatic education. Feldenkrais and ED treatment
  

Session 9: Recovery

• Combat training for life itself. Recovery resides is in accessing capacities for change in behaviors.
• Prognostic indicators
• Timing for recovery, and it implications.
• What is ED recovery progress? How much evidence does one need?
• Finding evidence for success in failures; seeing possibility, not pathology.
• Standing firm for complete recovery
• It's not necessarily over, when it's over.
• Aftercare
  

Session 10: Consultation for cases presented by participating students