Therapist Workshop: the emotional aspect of obesity with Roni Maislish, M.A.

Roni Maislish, M.A. (Psychotherapist and social worker)

I met Roni Maislish through LinkedIn (he is in Israel), as we both work in mental health and specifically with eating and emotions. We both recognize the emotional aspects of obesity and that it can be an emotional-mental-issue.

Roni says, “Most of the time, when people talk about eating disorders, they forget the field of overweight and the emotional side of this field.” Roni created this workshop for therapists, family physicians, dieticians, and related professionals, which I will talk about more below.

Roni’s Workshop

By Roni Maislish

Therapist workshop – The Emotional aspect of Obesity (Introspection through the relationship with food and eating as a gate to change, cure and healing)

Background – How many times you had been surprised by overweight patients that told you to “fix them quickly”, who for years after years trying to lose weight, sometime seceded and then back again, gain the weight back? How many time your faith in your patient dissipate and you felt anger and frustration that he or she is not committed enough to the process like you?

And how many times you felt that you are not able to understand emphatically (near-experience) why those patients cant keep on fighting, controlling and avoiding in their food and eating’s issues? and how many time you realized and told yourself that something is missing?

For all of you therapist from a variety methods and approach who dealing with the emotional aspect of overeating, overweight, emotional eating, emotional non-eating, non-acute eating disorder, obesity and more – you all most welcome to workshop (short educating program) where you become familiar, study and also go in depth to a new dimension which will enable you to see, understand and experience the “food and eating’s issue” not as a “problem to solve” but as a unique way that a specific person use to “tell his story” while integrate and keeping safe his “self”.

And From this kind of listening stance we will be able to make place to our patients, while helping them finding their subjective way toward healing and restoring their wounded, un-develop and neglected self.

The workshop – In the beginning I will present my attitude in the last 15 years (which changing and modifying in time) for dealing with emotional eating’s issues. I will share with you my straggles, dilemmas and personal questions that occupied me since early childhood and connect it to my journey (both personal, academic and professional) and how I established and combined theories which gradually help me to meet myself and my patients from a “different” perspective (that sometime we can feel as if you speak an ancient languish).

Doing so, I will manly focus in two theoretical and clinical paradigms to help us to understand ideas I formulate these years– I call it: “the fat remember”/”the fat’s emotional role” (or, “if the fat will able to talk, what it will say?”):

The first paradigm based on Didier Anzieu’s work (manly his book :”I-Skin”, which written in French “Le Moi-Peau”) who dealt on the emotional-sensorial clothing (“I-Skin”) that a human beings wear from early childhood and making adaptation trough the years to avoid invasiveness and secure the self from hurts and fragmentation. In his work Anzieu present 8 function of this psyche soma’s envelop like holding, handling, protecting and more.

In my work, regarding Anzieu’s ideas, I explore the fat, the overweight, mostly in the abdomen (but not always) and its role to establish and contributing the building of those 8 functions in case that the self no longer develop normally. For instance we will learn together about the connection of the stimulation-shield function in the “I-Skin” clothing to the gaining weight process to build “fat armor” against attacks on the self.

Later on, I will present the “self-Psychology” paradigm while understanding deeply that defense and resistance is not something that the therapist need to break, remove, overcome, or even to melt so we can see emotional aspects and reasons of gaining weight’s process as a reminder from a depress self which struggle to survive non-emphatic world.

This self, as I see it, is still hoping that someone (maybe the therapist) will see beyond the “fat story” and help the patient to restart its “inner self program” and recover those years of deprivation.

Regarding the topic of this workshop and self-psychology, In his second book, “The restoration of the self” (1977, pp 80-81) Kohut refer to the triad: oral fixation, pathological overeating and obesity and present the understanding of the classical approach that deals with drive-awareness and the ability to control the drive (via its suppression, sublimation, inhibition of its aim, displacement, or neutralization).

Instead, Kohut’s claim is that “the child asserts his need for a food-giving self-object” and “the child needs empathically modulated food-giving not food”. If this need remains unfulfilled, Kohut continue, then the child retreats to a fragment of the larger experiential unit, i.e., to pleasure-seeking oral stimulation (depressive eating). Kohut add that increasing awareness to those process renewed movement toward psychological health.

The combination between Anzieu’s theory and Kohut’s perspective, while adding the work of Eigen (Toxic Nourishment, Emotional Starvation), Ogden (The Autistic-contiguous position), McDougall (Theatres of the Body) – will all helps us to build new platforms and ideas which open new possibilities to understand the patient’s pain, to find beauty in the defensive-structure of the patient (his overeating patterns) and further on to develop the patient self-ability to heal and grow himself while seeing us ganging and flexible in our empathy enabling him to change too.

During our learning and in between the theoretical conceptualization that we will create, I will share with you some example from my clinical work. The main part in this section will be the “mindfulness meal” where we will be able, to search different possibilities for introspection of the connection between our relationship with food/eating and others relationship (family, marriage, career, friends, money, faith and more).

In this mindfulness-experiential process, we will use motive like: choice, miss, lose, regret, planning, disintegration, aesthetics and more, to understand how a certain movement from our eating place’s seat to the buffet table represent original self object needs. That will help us to vary and enrich our empathic capability and responses to those patients that their self object need didn’t met yet and have a very complex relationship with food and eating.

For example: One of the participants in the workshop can become aware that the way he choose the food was similar to how others choosing and he can realized that he didn’t ask himself what are his special and authentic needs. Then he can share about that kind of pattern in other relationship (for example – he choose where to study upon his unique need or was it a “social decision”).

That mindfulness experience of understanding will take us, as a group, to discuss how some of our patients will prefer the “socially eating” pattern which can give them a response for their twinship’s (alter ago) needs (they eat the same food like everyone so they feel part of the group, and the world). Those kinds of introspections around the table will encourage us to think about more emphatic response’s possibilities for more kind of needs (mirroring, idealizing).

If we will have enough time we will practice in pair the question: “for what I am really hungry for? (The dialogue between emotional hunger and physical hanger) and mediate on the “role of the fat” and more. We will complete our journey with sharing our experience and understanding, we will ask ourselves what surprise us today and we will have some time for questions and answers.

About the instructor –Roni Maislish M.A (psychotherapist and clinical social worker).

From 2005 I am working with overweight’s patients dealing with emotional eating that come from emotional long-term neglected. I the last 2 year I am working in Tel Hashomer (Sheba) hospital in an overweight treatment center (part of the endocrine institute) while between 2006-2011 I saw eating disorder’s patients (and their parents) in Soroka Hospital.

From 2007 working as emotional eating’s therapist. Leading groups both for therapist and non-therapist, short workshop and year-long dynamic-study groups. Beside working with patients, I involve deeply in education-prevention roles schools, pre-school, eating disorder’s clinics, accompanying nutritionist, mantel health department, and much more .in 2008 I participated in a 5 days retreat in California leaded by Geneen Roth (the author of the bestseller “When food is Love”).

Download Roni’s workshop brochure below.

BROCHURE-Roni-Maislish Download