Professor Julia Buckroyd delivered the lecture "Working therapeutically with disordered eating: a conceptual framework" at Centrex Conference Centre on Tuesday 23rd June 2009.
Julia Buckroyd is Emeritus Professor of Counselling at the University of Hertfordshire. Her background is in the humanities and in Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Working therapeutically with disordered eating: a conceptual framework
Despite some success with cognitive therapies, therapists are not yet very good at helping people recover from disordered eating states. We seem to lack a way of thinking about misuse of food which would be useful in day to day therapeutic interactions. In her lecture, Professor Julia Buckroyd considers the implications of recent research on attachment theory. The work of Daniel Schore suggests that a person with a history of insecure attachment lacks the capacity to self-soothe and has little trust in the capacity of others to soothe in times of distress. He argues that in that situation we will find other ways of coping, and that food use (in excess or by restriction) is one of the strategies we may use to help us manage our emotional lives. These ideas are supplemented by those of Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman who argue that therapy helps people with these difficulties by creating a secure base within which they can be taught to develop the capacity to reflect on themselves and other people. In this way they bring together what we know about the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the cognitive strategies that can be so helpful. Professor Buckroyd argues that this framework of understanding has the potential to make our interventions more focused and more useful to our eating disordered clients.
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