About this course
If you, as a clinician, medical provider, or dietitian were to identify three of your personality traits that you express productively, what would they be? What are three of your traits that you tend to express unproductively at times? Everyone has personality traits. Traits originate genetically while they are continuously shaped environmentally. Who you are as a clinician, medical practitioner, or dietitian, and who your clients are and who they are not, is grounded in one's traits. Temperament is the biological foundation of your personality, consisting of traits, and their neurobiological and genetic underpinnings. Multidisciplinary research has found that eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa, and binge eating disorder each have common traits that increase vulnerability for illness onset. Temperament is trans-diagnostic and should be treated from a multi-disciplinary approach. As technology improved since the early 2000s, a growing body of genetic, neurobiological and trait research addressed what was happening on the inside of the brain for those with eating disorders (ED) compared to those without ED. This activated the iterative development of a temperament based therapeutic approach now called, Temperament Based Therapy with Support (TBT-S). While the evolving treatment integrated brain-based research, it was continuously refined from adolescent and adult patient feedback. TBT-S research outcomes have included multiple cultures and have consistently reported significant improvements in patient symptom reduction over time. While temperament is continuously impacted by environmental influences, treating to client traits and the neurobiological aspects of their temperament, TBT-S interventions studies reveal strong outcomes regardless of cultural influences. This IAEDP workshop will describe the biological bases of ED through a temperament-based lens to help each participant better understand why their clients tend to respond as they do. It will also experientially introduce participants to TBT-S. Participants will take part in applying the five core temperament based principles of TBT-S to augment ongoing adolescent and adult ED therapies. Each participant will "try on" or practice two TBT-S trait-based intervention tools and learn why a temperament based approach with support persons is needed to motivate and maintain change. The workshop will also introduce participants on how to work with their clients' traits to experientially explore how to use their own traits to decrease their binge eating and purging or restricting symptoms. Symptoms can be eliminated, traits cannot. Participants will explore how to work with their traits from a strength-based approach. Clinicians and dietitians will practice how to help their clients shift their destructively expressed traits into more productive expressions to allow themselves to be the best of who they can be. Participants will also learn how and why to include support persons in segments of treatment. Support is the "S" of TBT-S. The workshop will conclude by summarizing that TBT-S treats to the traits to manage symptoms with supports. TBT-S has evolved and developed as a research/practice-based approach with the growth in technology and neurobiological and genetic research since the early 2000s. It is now being described as a revolutionary approach for the future of eating disorder treatment.