Transforming Emotional Pain and Rediscovering the Self in Anorexia Nervosa

Wow! This guidebook on SPEAKS, a new and evidence-based theory and treatment for adults with anorexia nervosa is a triumph. It takes therapeutic understanding and working with emotion to a whole new level. In accessible prose and via helpful diagrams the reader is shown very practically, how to help patients find, use and strengthen their emotional selves to facilitate change and recovery. Whatever your therapeutic orientation, this book will be an extremely useful resource. I learnt so much from it.

Ulrike Schmidt OBE, Professor of Eating Disorders, King's College London and Consultant Psychiatrist, Maudsley Hospital

Here is a book that is simultaneously scientifically rigorous, theoretically rich and highly practical. It provides the reader with everything one needs to know to apply this approach. It offers a novel emotion based theory based on the facilitation of the experience of emotion and emotional vulnerability to regain a lost sense of an emotional self. It doesn’t stop here but offers a highly detailed treatment manual, tested it in a feasibility trial based on connecting with and resolving core pain by transforming emotion with new adaptive emotions. This is a must read for anyone interested in the treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and would be an interesting, clinically, and theoretically rich, worthwhile read for practitioners of all persuasions

Leslie Greenberg, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This book presents a guide that has been needed for a long time: an integrated treatment (Emotion Focused Therapy and Schema Therapy) for one of the most severe and difficult to treat mental health presentations, Anorexia Nervosa. Instead of primarily targeting the over control of weight, this new treatment focuses on the underlying emotional issues, which in most treatments to date are not seriously addressed. An absolute must for any clinicians working in this field!

Arnoud Arntz, professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam

The first line treatments for anorexia nervosa have been established for over fifty years. However, the second step for those with a more complex form of illness including forms of neurodiversity has been uncertain. SPEAKS fills this gap by combining strategies developed to shift unhelpful beliefs and emotional reactions that lead development to become stuck and entangled with the eating disorder. This book provides clear illustrations and guidance derived from clinical expertise and research wisdom.

Janet Treasure, OBE PhD FRCP FRCPsych, Professor of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London

Over half of people with AN do not find treatment that helpful. Addressing cognitions and behaviour in CBT helps some but not all, and a different model is needed. Enter the emotion-focused therapies. SPEAKS is one of these, along with MBT, CFT, ICAT, CAT and FPT. This guidebook provides a really clear and effective guide for potential practitioners. It embodies many elements familiar to experienced therapists: Formulating the problem, motivational enhancement, accessing and resolving trauma or pain and what might be called the butterfly effect, in which the person at last goes forward to a more liberated future. Future RCTs should evaluate therapies such as SPEAKS and broaden the evidence base for treatment of Anorexia Nervosa.

Prof Paul Robinson, Consultant Psychiatrist, University College London and Orri