Emotion Focused Skills Training (EFST) for Eating Disorders – 6 CE Credit
Abstract
Eating disorders and disordered eating presents a complex and challenging journey, not only for those directly affected but also for their families and the professionals who work with them. The significant medical and emotional complications often lead to perceptions of individuals with disordered eating as unmotivated or difficult to treat, contributing to alarmingly high rates of relapse, chronicity, and mortality. This has fostered stigma, fear, and a sense of hopelessness surrounding eating disorders, along with skepticism about the potential for full recovery.
In Emotion-Focused Skills Training for Parents (EFST-P), we offer an alternative perspective. We approach eating disorders/disordered eating as an individual’s attempt to cope with painful emotional experiences, recognizing that each person has agency in their own journey toward recovery. As such, we emphasize the importance of the individual taking an active role in their healing process, with parents serving as critical sources of support and guidance along the way.
EFST-P trains professionals in an emotion-focused approach to eating disorders and equips them with the tools necessary to coach parents effectively, so they can confidently play their essential role in the recovery process.
This program recognizes the unique challenges faced by parents of individuals with eating disorders and concerns, acknowledging that parental self-efficacy can often be more impactful on treatment outcomes than the individual’s own sense of self-efficacy. Our interventions focus on empowering parents with the tools they need to support their loved one’s recovery, including:
- Developing deep empathy for their loved one’s struggles, as well as for their own challenges as parents
- Addressing the “competing motivations” that hinder recovery, both within their loved ones and themselves, as they confront their own fears
- Making amends for past wounds and losses
- Restoring the faith in themselves needed to establish and maintain healthy, non-judgmental boundaries that are crucial for recovery
Through this comprehensive approach, we aim to provide the support and resources necessary to foster hope and promote lasting recovery.
Intended Audience
- Therapists & Mental Health Professionals seeking specialized skills in working with disordered eating.
- Social Service & Healthcare Professionals wishing to expand their capacity to support individuals with disordered eating by enlisting the healing power of parents.
- Educators & Professional Caregivers: looking to enhance emotional support in their roles
Learning Objectives
Emotion Focused Skills Training (EFST) for Parents is an innovative, ultra-simple and quickly effective parent support program.
EFST supports parents by empowering them as active, primary agents in guiding loved ones (of any age, little, adolescent or adult,) through the behavioural, emotional and relational challenges of everyday living and relating, as well as through the challenges their loved ones face when struggling with a mental health issue, a physical health issue, or any other special challenge. This is an emotion-processing, skills-based approach that gives parents simple, practical tools that they can implement immediately in their family.
These skills include how to navigate the confusing world of their child’s feelings, how to work with challenges in their child’s motivation, and how to restore their ability to set appropriate boundaries while also restoring positive, productive relationships with their children of any age.
Developing a new understanding of how struggles with emotional processing is at the foundation of eating disorder development and treatment
Understand the healing power of families and why the are integral to eating disorder recovery
Learn this simple and effective system to guide parents/caregivers and also to support your individual clients with eating concerns:
- Navigate their own and their child’s emotions
- Enhance their own and their child’s motivation for change
- Transform problematic relationships in the family
Presenter
Dr. Michelle Emmerling
Dr. Michelle Emmerling is a Registered Psychologist at Emmerling Psychology and co-founder of the Alberta Wellness Center for Eating Disorders. She has worked alongside and collaborated with Dr Dolhanty for almost 20 years. As such she has been involved almost from the outset in the work of first, bringing the emotion focused approach to eating disorders, and second, developing a central role for parents in their loved one’s recovery from their eating disorder.
Michelle is an expert trainer in Emotion Focused Skills Training. She has witnessed, on too many occasions to count, the power of training parents to support and guide their loved one’s recovery from a disorder that continues to thwart much of the professional and clinical world. The success of parents in facilitating and supporting recovery has instilled in Michelle a passion for passing this approach on to others and inspiring those she mentors to master the techniques and become experts in delivering the model. She has delivered EFST trainings and provided supervision in the approach nationally and internationally.
Michelle’s specialties lie in Emotion Focused Skills Training and Emotion-Focused Therapy, and in the treatment of eating disorders in individuals, families, and couples. She brings to her training role additional expertise in anxiety, depression, and perfectionism, and in EMDR, Mindfulness, IFS, and Somatic Experiencing and Body-based Skills.
Cancellation and Refunds
Cancellation and refunds may be applied for by email or phone call to the PAA Continuing Professional Development Officer. Cancellations received fourteen (14) days prior to the Continuing Professional Development activity will receive a full refund of the registration fee, less a $35.00 + GST processing fee. PAA reserves the right to cancel any activity, in which case a full refund of the registration fee will be provided.
Continuing Education Credits
The Psychologists’ Association of Alberta (PAA) is approved by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) to offer Continuing Education (CE) for psychologists. This workshop is offered for six (6.0) hours of CE Credit. Full attendance at the workshop is required to receive Continuing Education Credits. Partial credit will not be awarded, and late arrivals or early departure will preclude awarding of Continuing Education Credits. PAA maintains responsibility for the program.