Course Description

The most severe cases of eating disorders can often be diagnosed as chronic when they maintain the same symptoms over time. Without response to the most common treatment protocols and behaviors with food and rejection to the body. Although improvements can be achieved, they are usually temporary and sooner or later, the patient ends up back to square one. In the most common treatment protocols, dissociation is not considered as part of the problem that contributes to the severity of psychopathology. Without the work with dissociation and the dissociative parts, the disorder comes to crystallize. When identifying dissociation in eating disorders, it is important for clinicians to conceptualize the most severe cases where the meaning of food, eating and other behaviors related to the body become the expression of what happens in their inner world. It is important to identify and understand the most frequent dissociative parts in these disorders. Both types of eating disorders, from the restrictive ones to the overeating ones provide a clue as to what they protect and mean to the client. By understanding and identifying dissociation, and its role in these disorders, we have the key to resolving the most difficult cases. It will be relevant to know which part refuses to eat or eats too much. The phobias between parts and how the phobia is focused on the symptom with food. The change from one part to another and how the eating disorder changes with the part is activated. The difference between parts, their characteristics, and the adverse life experiences or traumas may be associated. Conceptualizing and preparing specific treatment plan will help to have more tools and resources for working with the most serious cases that up to now have caused concern among professionals due to the seriousness with which they arrive.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify serious cases of eating disorders from the perspective of the internal world and dissociation rather than from a focus on food-related symptoms.
2. Participants will be able to identify the parts associated with the different eating patterns.
3. Participants will be able to describe how the parts can function as independent disorders.

Presenter(s)

Natalia Seijo, Psy

Natalia Seijo, Psy, is a psychologist and psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorders, psychosomatic disorders, dissociation, and complex trauma. She is the director of an outpatient clinic which she founded 24 years ago in Northern Spain. She is a trainer with EMDR Europe. She is currently developing her doctoral thesis on the prevalence in dissociation of outpatients in Spain and is also researching on different projects on eating disorders. She teaches EMDR and eating disorders workshops for the Spanish EMDR association and is a presenter at international conferences and workshops on eating disorders and psychosomatic disorders. Her publications in the eating disorders field link trauma, attachment, and dissociation. She is co-director of the master of eating disorders program at the Complutense University of Madrid. She also teaches on eating disorders and psychosomatics disorders and defenses in therapy as a Master of EMDR at the University of UNED Spain and a program of trauma and attachment in University of Valencia in Spain. She collaborates with several universities in providing programs to train students on the clinical aspects.