Body image dissatisfaction and how to improve it
Quick tips on how to improve your body image.
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Managing an eating disorder during COVID-19
How to look after yourself, mentally and physically, during lockdown.
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Self-monitoring in CBT
Self-monitoring is a key component of CBT-E for eating disorders. You will be asked to start keeping a daily record of your food and fluid intake, physical activity (if relevant), and disordered eating symptoms (e.g. bingeing or vomiting), as well as the situations, thoughts and emotions that you had at the time you were eating…
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Common Cognitive Distortions
When a person experiences an unpleasant or unhelpful emotion, it is often preceded by unhelpful thoughts. Often there is a pattern to such thoughts – we call these unhelpful thinking errors or cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are not unique to people with eating disorders, in fact everyone will use cognitive distortions to a greater or…
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What are schemas?
Schemas (sometimes called ‘early maladaptive schemas’) are enduring patterns of thoughts and feelings that develop during childhood or adolescence and persist throughout our lives. They consist of beliefs, feelings and memories about the self, others and the environment, which we accept without question. We all have schema, but the extent to which they affect our…
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Coping styles
Schemas can trigger distressing thoughts and painful emotions. In order to avoid these, we typically develop certain ‘coping styles’. These often form quite early in life, and quickly become established. However, what might be a helpful way of coping when we are young can often become less helpful as time goes by. In fact, these…
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What are schema modes?
In schema therapy you may also look at your modes. These are a temporary mindset, which includes both how you are feeling and how you are dealing with it. We typically experience a mode shift when our schemas are activated, or someone “pushes our buttons”. In other words, a mode is a combination of the…
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Radically Open Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT) is a new evidence-based therapy for people who are overcontrolled. It stems from the idea that it is possible to have too much self-control. This is something we see a lot in people with anorexia, and can also be seen in chronic depression or autistic spectrum disorders. What is…
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Mindfulness in DBT: how can it help you?
There has been a growing recognition that we have a tendency to live our lives on autopilot. We may find that we have driven to work without remembering every turn we have made, or we may engage in daily activities, such as cleaning our teeth, whilst thinking about what we have to do that day….
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Assertiveness and DBT
One of the skills training modules in DBT is “Interpersonal Effectiveness”. The focus of this module is to help you build and maintain healthier relationships with others, with a lot of focus on communication skills. These skills are useful for anyone, but are particularly important for people who have experienced trauma or struggle with an…
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What is Compassionate Questioning?
Compassionate questionning refers to questions that you can ask yourself to try to access a more compassionate view of yourself or a situation. Most people are able to be considerably more compassionate towards others than they are to themselves. It is this ability to be compassionate to others that you can try to access and…
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Understanding Shame
Shame is a self-conscious emotion – in other words it is an emotion about the self. To experience shame we have to have an ability to think about ourselves through the minds of others; to think about how others might see us. Shame is not a single emotion – it is made up of various…
