Paradigm Shift

The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (WTCI) is renowned for its pioneering work on women’s relationship to food, feeding, and their bodies. Since the publication of Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist Issue (1978), the faculty of The WTCI has further developed a theory and practice of working with the full range of eating problems, explicated in Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model (1994). We have found that our unique six-week groups can be a powerful tool for women as they journey toward a place of peace in their relationship with food and their bodies. (Please read below for a more detailed description of the group model.)

Groups are facilitated regularly in various locations in and around New York City throughout the year.

To obtain further information about our groups please visit our website www.wtci-nyc.org, or call Joanne Messina, LCSW at (212) 501-6033. To register, click HERE. We encourage early registration, as groups can fill up quickly!

Six-Week Groups for

Eating and Body Image Problems

In a therapist-led supportive environment, participants in our six-week groups are introduced to the process of relating more comfortably to food and one’s body. The diet culture has caused most women to become disconnected from their innate ability to feed themselves in accordance with bodily appetite and in a way that is emotionally nourishing, as well as physiologically and psychologically organizing and sustainable. Our six-week groups help women rediscover this lost relationship with their bodies and needs. Because we regard all eating problems as expressive of the emotional and social struggles women experience, these groups are designed to work effectively with the continuum of problematic eating, from compulsive and binge eating, to anorexia, bulimia, and chronic dieting. Our groups are open to women of all colors, sizes, sexual orientations and identities. Our only requirement for participation is an interest in developing a more harmonious relationship with food and one’s body.

Our six-week groups combine psychoeducational and psychodynamic elements to give women the tools and insights they will need to begin to understand, heal, and transform their relationship with food and their bodies. Exploration, fantasy exercises, and homework assignments are utilized in each phase of the group to encourage participants to personalize and internalize the group experience.

The group begins with an introduction to our “self-attuned” model of eating, which is anti-diet and mindfulness based. Participants are helped to use this model to eat with their hunger and to stop at fullness, while examining why they might feel compelled to eat at times when they are not physically hungry and/or to restrict their eating during times when they are. The group also attends to the complex emotional experience of satiety/fullness and how one can begin to register satisfaction and bodily limits in the eating experience with increased ease and security. The self-attuned model introduces curiosity and compassion as alternatives to the punitive and restrictive methods women typically employ in their efforts to change their relationships with food and their bodies.

Next, the group focuses on legalizing all foods and eliminating dichotomous thinking about food, such as good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, or permitted and forbidden food groups. Finally, the group addresses issues of body image and embodiment, including the symbolic meaning of fat and thin and how one’s ideas about and experiences of one’s body function  psychologically, interpersonally, and culturally.

All phases of the group’s work are informed by a psychodynamic perspective and by the conscious and explicitly articulated awareness that we live in a culture that encourages women to live in disharmony with their bodies and that, for most, an embodied life requires an active choice to resist cultural norms.

To obtain further information about our groups visit our website, or call Joanne Messina, LCSW at (212) 501-6033. To register, click HERE 

Registration is very limited for our groups and workshops, and an event will be closed if over-enrolled and canceled if under-enrolled; please register early.