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  • Psychotherapy in West London
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Psychotherapy in West London

Psychotherapy & Counselling with Marcus Gottlieb

Therapy for Eating Disorders in London

Counselling for Eating Issues, Binge Eating, Compulsive or Emotional Eating, and Support for Intuitive Eating with Marcus

Therapy for Eating Disorders addresses the relatively milder forms of anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where medical or psychiatric intervention is not considered necessary. You are able to function reasonably well in many areas of your life, but eating issues are spoiling your happiness and satisfaction with life.

  • Does it ever strike you that the only time you’re not thinking about food is when you’re eating?
  • Do you ever wonder what weight you’d be if you had a healthier relationship to food?

Eating should be a delicious pleasure that you can experience every day of your life, without guilt or shame and without doing harm to yourself.

As a psychotherapist Marcus works with issues around eating, and eating disorders, in creative and effective ways, in order to help you move on from an unhealthy, obsessive and damaging relationship with food.

The road through therapy leads from Emotional Eating to Intuitive Eating.

What Causes Emotional Eating?

Emotional Eating is when we use food to either manage or numb out difficult emotions. Simply living life entails having emotions and sometimes they’re not nice ones – grief, sadness, envy, shame, anger. Often we don’t understand our feelings, don’t know how to express them or don’t have the opportunity to express them healthily and safely.

Emotional Eating (Compulsive Over-eating or Under-eating) is in many ways an effective method for controlling life, in order to make life more bearable for us, by numbing our feelings. The numbing is achieved by either filling ourselves up or tensing ourselves up to not feel our hunger.

“Self-care is never a selfish act. It is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have.” Parker Palmer, educator and activist

Intuitive Eating is when we are truly connected to our needs and wants, and able to focus on meeting or satisfying them. We experience our appetite rather than override it, and we can attend to it without shame or guilt.

When we practice Intuitive Eating, we feel safe with ourselves, and don’t need to over-control our world.

One of the factors that keeps us in a state of Emotional Eating is a psychological attachment to a certain type of ‘drama’:

  • Craving is ‘drama’, fancying something is not.
  • Dieting is ‘drama’, eating well is not.
  • Avoiding social engagements (you’re on a diet, you’ve no nice clothes) is ‘drama’, enjoying life is not.
  • Procrastination is ‘drama’, taking yourself gently by the hand saying ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk’ is not.
  • Overreacting to your slipups is ‘drama’, ignoring them is not.
  • Perfectionism about your eating or about your body is ‘drama’, accepting yourself is not.
  • Complaining of lack of ‘me time’ is ‘drama’, taking time for yourself is not.

How to Learn Intuitive Eating

The key eating skill to learn, or possibly re-learn, is how to tune into your body, especially the sensations we call Hunger and Satisfaction.

In therapy you will learn to gauge your hunger, and practise eating what you want and stopping when you don’t want any more. It’s a natural ability you’re born with, but that attunement to yourself has become lost or distorted in the course of your life.

Usually certain contexts make it easier to learn to tune in and listen to your hunger and your satisfaction. For example, a calm interlude of time, when you can sit at a table and eat off a plate, makes it harder to distract yourself from your body’s sensations.

In the course of therapy for eating disorders many obstructive and unhelpful beliefs can emerge, which get addressed using a number of therapeutic approaches. In many cases there are childhood memories or significant associations that reinforce your beliefs and assumptions. For example, thoughts such as:

  • ‘I’ll be criticised if I don’t finish what’s on my plate’
  • ‘I’m bad if I eat as much chocolate as I’d like’
  • ‘It’s weak to eat between meals’ and so on.

There can be a deeper layer of beliefs that also need exploration and airing, e.g.

  • ‘I am weak’
  • ‘pleasure is a bad thing’
  • ‘I am unworthy and unloveable’
  • ‘sitting at a dinner table has distant but real echoes of childhood unhappiness for me’

You very likely have your own list of personal taboo foods, by the way, not just chocolate, but numerous foods that you think you should avoid.

How can I help someone with an eating disorder?

If someone you care about is suffering from eating issues or an eating disorder, encourage them in a supportive way to reach out for professional help, and do everything you can to support them. The best attitude to try to maintain is to be honest, caring and often also firm. These are many useful resources online, for example Eating Disorder Hope website or this help guide ‘Supporting a partenr with an eating disorder‘, It may also be very helpful if you come for some sessions with Marcus in order to sort out your own thoughts and feelings, and so that you don’t yourself get overwhelmed by the situation.

Therapy for Eating Disorders and Eating Issues

Therapy with Marcus utilises, amongst other methods:

  • cognitive and behavioural approaches
  • imaginative exercises
  • rituals
  • motivational work
  • art therapy and other forms of creativity
  • gestalt methodology for exploring your tendency to bully or criticise yourself

Therapy for Eating Disorders in London with Marcus

Get in contact with Marcus to set up an appointment or to have an initial conversation about Therapy for Eating Disorders and Eating Issues.

 

Contact Marcus


Resources and articles on Eating Disorders and our realtionship with food

Thoughts of a life long comfort eater
A recent Guardian article throws light onto the emotional pull of ‘Comfort Eating’

Ending The Myth of the Ideal Shape
A recent article in the Guardian newspaper by ex-bodybuilder Taryn Brumfitt campaigns to
ditch diets and end myth of the ideal shape …read the full article

Anorexia Is No Longer My Best Friend
A recent article in the Huffington Post explores Hope Virgo’s challenging relationship with food
Anorexia Is No Longer My Best Friend

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West London Psychotherapist with Client | Notting Hill Therapy

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Pesso Boyden Group with accredited practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Group with accredited PBSP practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Therapy (‘PBSP’) is a philosophical process for becoming whole.

It is a respectful, interactive group process that heals by embedding new memories in the brain and in the body

Most people consciously or unconsciously have memories – explicit or implicit – of 

1. deficits 

2. traumas 

3. having to take care of others when we were too young – e.g. protecting a sibling, providing the joy in the life of an unhappy parent, unconsciously becoming the ‘spouse’ of a widowed parent, or making the world right after hearing stories of injustice. 

When any of these three categories of memory appear in the client’s work, the client and therapist work together to externalise them, in order to illuminate the client’s ways of handling life and to facilitate change. The client is always in charge of this process – people and incidents from the client’s past will be symbolised in the here-and-now either by people in the group or by objects in the room, all chosen and placed by the client. 

The therapist then works with the client to facilitate an antidote to what happened in the past – a new memory which provides what the client needed at that particular time in their past, from a specific kinship figure. This new memory may be developed over several sessions in a number of steps. In the Pesso approach we don’t change our history; however, we do change our response to our history, leading to a new perspective. 

The way is opened to possibilities of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning, integration and connectedness.

 



Deborah has worked as a Performance Coach for over 16 years having trained with Coach U. Her background is in the arts as an actor, theatre director and artistic director. She has worked with a wide range of people from all walks of life. Having first encountered Pesso Boyden as a client, she felt inspired to do the training herself. Since graduating in 2013 she has been running Personal Development workshops using the Pesso Boyden system and is now accredited by the official PBSP U.K. organisation.

Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Marcus Gottlieb is a highly experienced London-based psychotherapist with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Having trained alongside Deborah directly under Al Pesso and his closest collaborator Lowijs van Perquin, he is steeped in the work of PBSP and a strong believer in the client’s genetic impulse towards health and expression of their unique potential and individual destiny. He became an accredited Pesso Boyden therapist in 2021.
An Introduction to the Pesso Boyden Method

 

An opportunity to learn about and observe the distinctive techniques of this respectful body-based psychotherapy.

Suitable for both psychologically interested professionals, people seeking personal development/CPD and for people not in the therapeutic professions seeking to address entrenched issues. For all those who are interested in living a larger life. A special price of £35 for the day includes lunch and refreshments. CPD certificates will be available.

PBSP (Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor) is a powerful, deeply respectful, psychotherapeutic process that uses feedback, ritual, objects and role players in a unique manner to heal the traumas, wounds and losses that affect our personal map of the world.

Its central goal is the imaginative creation of an ‘ideal’ healthy past that a person’s brain processes so that they emerge feeling differently about themselves. As Albert Pesso said, ‘Humanity is responsible for the meaning that surrounds us. The task for each person is to create a meaningful life and then live it with existential courage and passion.’

As well as gaining new perspectives, clients often experience increased pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness following a PBSP session and find themselves psychologically freer to make the changes they wish for in their lives.
Date: Saturday 7 October 2017
Venue: Notting Hill, London W11
Time: 10.00 am – 4.30 pm
Cost: £35 (inc lunch & refreshments)

 

Register Your Interest


Boarding School Survivor Syndrome Conference

BOARDING SCHOOL: Surviving the Syndrome
Broken Attachment and Childhood Trauma

University of Brighton

Saturday 9 September 2017
9.30 am to 5.00 pm

Conference for psychotherapists, counsellors, mental health workers, boarding school survivors and other interested people.

Conference overall aims are to:
§ Present key aspects of what has been published about the psychological and other effects of boarding.
§ Explore helpful therapeutic approaches for clients who are former boarders.
§ Consider current research and a possible agenda for future research
§ Enable networking amongst those interested in this important topic

Chair: Pam Howard, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton.

Speakers: Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien, Alex Renton, Thurstine Basset, Anni Townend, Olya Khaleelee.

Group Discussion Facilitators: Marcus Gottlieb, Leslie Lund, Nicola Miller, Simon Partridge, Boarding Concern Directors.

For more details, contact Laura Williams:
southcoastevents@brighton.ac.uk

Pesso Boyden Workshop with Ana María Ruiz Sancho and Marcus Gottlieb

 

Pesso Boyden Therapy is a respectful and highly respected, body-based psychotherapy with distinctive techniques aimed at addressing entrenched issues. It is an interactive process that creates new body-based memories to heal emotional deficits of the past.

An exceptionally powerful personal development tool, it uses feedback, systematic procedures, objects and role players in a unique methodology, in order to repair the early traumas, wounds and losses that can powerfully influence the brain’s map of the world.

In shifting underlying perspectives, the way is opened to the possibility of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness, and an enhanced freedom to effect longed-for changes.

It is expected there will be between 8 and 12 participants, with an absolute maximum of 15. The day will start with an explanation of Pesso Boyden and an experiential introduction, followed by 4 actual client sessions of an hour each.

Venue: Philadelphia Association, 4 Marty’s Yard, London NW3 1QW
Date: Saturday 3 June 2017
Time: 0930 to 1800
Cost: £75

Register Your Interest



Ana María Ruiz Sancho is an experienced psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. She is also a specialist in group dynamics and an Institutional and Team Motivation Consultant.

Ana is the Founder and a Director of VocAcción, as well as being a qualified Pesso Boyden psychotherapist.


Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor

Marcus Gottlieb works with relationships, sexuality, abuse and trauma, with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Qualified in Pesso Boyden as well as other psychotherapies, he is also an Alexander Technique teacher.

Contact Marcus

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