Today, in light of all that's been said and done in recent years regarding eating disorders, we're even more convinced of the necessity of finding new avenues to deal with this type of disability. In utilizing previously defined diagnostic categories and standardized interventions in the face of anorexia, the therapist feels partially paralyzed, impotent and inefficacious. This doesn't mean that the literature dealing with this problem should be discarded, but the very nature of the problem forces us to profoundly reconsider.

Based on these considerations, about one year ago , we began a therapy group for eating disorders. From the start we felt the need to maintain a setting free from the influence of specific theoretical references and operandi. This choice has been a laborious one to bring to fruition, first of all because it forced us to face deeply dramatic situations from a totally experimental perspective. Also because it meant having to "be there" every moment, immersing ourselves completely in the suffering that our clients were manifesting, and being "with" them in the horrible battle they were fighting, tolerating their tendency to self-destruct, listening attentively and participating in the "crazy" reasons that motivated their behavior, sharing the pervasive and recurring feeling of emptiness that devoured us together.

For several months we lived with uncertainty of a group that should have begun but didn't really succeed in taking off. However between getting farther and then closer to our goal, at the end of our session we always had the feeling that we had achieved a meaningful experience. What pushed us ahead many times, was really the feeling that in our three hours together with the girls, and "authentic" exchange had taken place. In certain moments we had "touched" the living bodies that laugh, cry and display emotion. Thus the group was born. Perhaps it was born when an element of differentiation was introduced: that of drug-dependency.

Adding a client who was struggling with her drug dependency, forced the participants to look from their own experiences at this powerful and oppressive symptom. Discovering the profound correlation between those that battle slavery from drugs and those battling the tyranny of food, gave the group permission to interject different ways of expression their individual discomfort. This discovery had the liberating effect of having the girls come out from the cover of an eating disorder perspective, but instead to share their problems as those of "persons".

In this way, the group represents the possibility of integrating a relational experience that appears difficult and laborious. The isolation one endures when suffering from eating disorders hides a profound fear of sharing with another feelings of uncertainty and self-devaluation.. The group puts these girls in contact with such fears, encourages them to express them, and experiments in all ways to slowly circumscribe and redefine. To be part of the group means in effect to expose oneself to the judgement of others, to integrate into oneself, the perceptions that others have of us and to become knowledgeable of those parts of us that we have in relation to others. all of this brings a modification of one's self-image, which for the anorexia/bulimic has been congealed, blocked, and limiting.

The experience of sharing and identifying, but also recognizing differences in the group, serves to break down the rigid and static images these girls have of themselves, and permits them to integrate and try new ways of representation, in which they can welcome elements of contradiction and ambivalence. In the exchange with other members of the group every girl is forced to be aware of the necessity of having inside and bringing forth both the good and the bad, but it is just this discovery of the possibility of having this polarity of experience that liberates one from the need to be "empty" and from the "all or nothing" way of thinking.. To remove oneself from the painful waters of a self-image rigidly build of a painful sense of inferiority, and on the presumption of striving for perfection, means freeing one's energy to utility for the difficult task of individuation that seems to be blocked.

In the last times, we asked ourselves if it would be useful, or even necessary to have the group meet for intervention with their family of origin. Certainly the literature has amply described the existing dysfunction in the family systems of those with anorexia and bulimia, giving responsibility to the entire nuclear family. Our intention is to maintain the group as a privileged therapeutic setting and to finalize the intervention around the parents on the subject of anxiety provoked by the intensity and drama of the symptoms, and to obtain with clarity and precision the collaborations of the parents in the difficult journey toward the identification and liberation of their daughters.