The Radically Open DBT Workbook for Eating Disorders: From Overcontrol and Loneliness to Recovery and Connection

A groundbreaking workbook to help you develop healthy coping strategies, build a solid support network, and stay on the path to recovery.

If you’ve been in therapy for an eating disorder, such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, your past treatment may have focused on helping you control your emotions and contain your behaviors. However, research now shows that many people with eating disorders actually suffer from emotional overcontrol. Based on more than twenty years of research, this breakthrough workbook offers skills based in radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO DBT), a proven-effective, transdiagnostic approach for treating disorders of overcontrol (OC).

With this compassionate workbook, you’ll learn how to move beyond the unhealthy coping strategies that keep you feeling isolated and lonely, find tips for building a solid support network and enriching social connections, and develop your own personalized plan for staying on the path to recovery. You’ll also find assessments to help you determine the root cause of your OC disorder, exercises for increasing social engagement, and skills for improving social flexibility, trust, and intimacy.

Having an eating disorder can make you feel like you’re alone in the world. Even if you’re in recovery, you may have days when feelings of isolation are too much, and you may feel tempted to fall back into unhealthy patterns of eating or restrictive eating. This workbook will help you build your own “treatment tribe,” a group of people that help lift you up and support you as you find your way to a full recovery and a rich, meaningful life.

Karyn D. Hall, PhD, is founder and director of Dialectical Behavior Therapies Center in Houston, TX. She is a radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO DBT) supervisor, and is a certified Linehan DBT Board of Certification clinician. Hall provides both individual and team supervision in RO DBT and DBT. She specializes in the treatment of individuals with maladaptive overcontrolled coping.

Ellen Astrachan-Fletcher, PhD, FAED, CEDS-S, is midwest regional clinical director at Eating Recovery Center and Pathlight Mood and Anxiety Center. She is a lecturer at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, and associate professor of psychiatry at UIC. She has more than thirty years of clinical and teaching experience in the field. She is a nationally recognized expert in the field of eating disorders. She coauthored The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bulimia, which is used at eating disorders treatment facilities throughout the country.

Mima Simic, MD, is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, and joint head of the Maudsley Centre for Child and Adolescent Eating Disorders (MCCAED) in London, UK. She was consultant to the adolescent DBT team, and led development of the intensive day treatment program (ITP) at the Maudsley Hospital. Simic is an internationally recognized expert in the field of child and adolescent eating disorders. She is senior RO DBT clinician, senior trainer, and supervisor for the Maudsley family and multi-family therapy for eating disorders.

Foreword writer Thomas R. Lynch, PhD, FBPsS, is founder of RO DBT; and author of the seminal text, Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy.