Recently a new therapist asked me, "Do you try to get your clients to diminish their bingeing behaviors from the beginning of therapy or do you explore their feelings first? I know there are differing views on this."

When I heard this question, several points of equal value, in my opinion, arrived simultaneously in my mind concerning therapy work with eating disorder patients.  Please understand that these considerations are simultaneous.

My first thought was that I don't try to 'get' my clients to do anything. I want them to heal and develop the capacity to live a fulfilling and satisfying life. But what that means to them and how they specifically accomplish that falls into the realm of their personal values, decision making and evolution.

Claiming the Lost Self: Emergence of authentic life rising from the shadows

Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women
Seven Part Series Introduction and Orientation
By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Series Note

This Introduction opens Claiming the Lost Self, a seven-part series that traces a woman’s movement from early distortion to the emergence of her genuine identity. Here, you will see how survival patterns that were once required now block truth and vitality. The series shows how clarity and instinct rise from within, guiding a woman from false love and unconscious suffering toward restored meaning, inner authority, and a life grounded in her real self.

Series Summary
Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women, a series, examines how women repress their authentic selves to survive and how, in midlife, their hidden lives press upward to be lived. The series traces the movement from distortion through recognition toward a life they can respect and honor based on their true values. It is for women who want not explanations but the strength and freedom to live as themselves.

This series strengthens and supports a woman as she moves from adaptive self-protection into living her life as her own.

This seven-part work explores how early distortions of care and loyalty bury authentic experience beneath vigilance, compliance, and performance. Adaptation that once provided protection becomes too costly. What a woman tolerates begins to feel unbearable. She senses conflict between how she lives and what she privately knows. The friction itself becomes a sign that something is rising in her that will not be dismissed.

Each article stands alone. Together, they accompany the movement from survival through awakening, recognition, meaning, and lived presence.

 Claiming the lost self conclusion, rising into lived wholeness

Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women — Seven-Part Series

Conclusion
By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Series Note

This is Claiming the Lost Self:  Conclusion.  Chapter 7 of the seven-part series, which describes an essential task for midlife women, traces a woman’s movement from early distortion to the emergence of her real life. It begins with the confusion of false love, enters the symbolic world of dreams, recovers the self that never died, and follows the inner work that restores meaning and brings her toward living wholeness. Healing is not a return to who she was. It is a beginning.

Summary
This final chapter, the claiming the lost self conclusion, describes the integration that makes wholeness possible. When a woman reaches this stage of work, she is no longer organizing her life around survival, performance, or the emotional needs of others. Her inner center shifts quietly. She senses her own presence without rehearsing it. She speaks from what is true rather than what is expected. She does not abandon her empathy, yet she no longer sacrifices herself to maintain someone else’s comfort. She feels intact inside her life as herself.

Shedding in Midlife Women: When the Bark Splits

 By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Summary

Shedding in midlife is not a collapse. It is the quiet but undeniable movement of a woman’s inner life expanding beyond the roles that once shaped her. Trees shed bark when the growing wood beneath them presses outward. Women experience something similar. Old patterns loosen. Earlier identities crack. A deeper self, long forming within, begins to make itself known. In depth psychotherapy, a woman learns to recognize what is falling away and what is maturing into the real structure of her life. This is shedding in midlife as a form of grounded psychological renewal.