What is your treatment approach for eating disorders?

We use frontline, evidence-based treatments to target eating disorder thoughts and behaviors. Currently, Enhanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT-E) is widely recognized as the most effective treatment for adults. CBT-E is a transdiagnostic, 20 - 40 session treatment with four stages that are individualized based on your own eating disorder and how it impacts you. CBT-E offers freedom and flexibility in its framework to look at someone's ED with a wide lens. This modification lends itself to supporting gender diverse individuals and other minority groups as it doesn't pretend everyone's experience is the same.

• In addition to CBT-E, we offer an eclectic array of therapeutic interventions from DBT, RO-DBT, ACT, MI, and psychodynamic interventions to meet our patients where they're at.

  • PRIDE CBT-E, which incorporates LGBTQI+ individual resilience, sexual identity and community involvement, body image concerns in context of marginalization and within-community pressures, and uplifts the relationship between minority/intraminority stress and eating disorder behaviors.

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers hands-on skills which can be very helpful during moments of high stress and dysregulation.

• Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT) offers hands-on skills to open up, to practice vulnerability and decrease an intense hyperfocus on control.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) promotes looking at yourself without judgment or criticism, but rather curiosity which can lead to increased empathy and awareness.

• Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a talk technique to help people sort through what they want. It's not a therapy so much as a way to help process change and work through ambivalence, a critical piece of eating disorder recovery and the human condition.

• Humanistic therapy is a strengths-based therapy that builds off the therapeutic alliance and core belief that everyone has good in them with the ability to change themselves and their lives. This is at the root of our ethos and therapeutic approach.
  

how do you address co-occurring trauma?

Trauma informed care: At The Source, we understand that society is often harmful and that no amount of thinking, reprocessing, or reframing can change the objective reality. But by taking an intersectional trauma informed approach, we can help reprocess and heal what we can control in our own lives while building strength and resilience to work through what we cannot control it all.

• Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence based treatment for PTSD that explores the relationship between an experienced trauma and a survivor's related thoughts and feelings. One key part of trauma's hold on someone is caused by ongoing guilt and shame after the trauma which is often related to blaming oneself. CPT looks at these thoughts and provides the ability to examine them in a new light with the goal of deconstructing your "stuck points." As you unpack your stuck points, you can lessen your guilt and shame and therefore lessen your trauma related distress. This work can be done in group and individual therapy, and we at The Source like to implement both as we believe that opening up about our own darkness in a communal setting can be innately healing.

• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a treatment for PTSD and subclinical traumatic experiences that looks at individual memories and reprocesses them to make the recollection of the memories no longer difficult. EMDR is not considered as robust or efficacious as CPT, though it is still effective. EMDR helps people tap into their body and follows a stream of consciousness experience in session which is much less "heady" than CPT. While CPT is effective for many, The Source offers EMDR because not everyone is as cognitively inclined. And, tapping into the body can be extremely healing to challenge avoidance, isolation, guilt, and shame. We offer multiple options because mental health is not a one size fits all, and gender diverse individuals and other marginalized groups need culturally humble, nuanced, care - not a cookie cutter approach.

How do you approach equity?

Equity is at the heart of our mission. We believe in building supportive, resilient communities and ecologies where everyone can thrive. Our approach is grounded in justice, compassion, and a collective vision of healing and empowerment. Our approach to equity includes:

• Two beds consistently available at no-cost or low-cost for individuals facing financial barriers to care, ensuring that financial hardship never stands in the way of healing.

• Full coverage of travel costs and waived copays for residents experiencing financial insecurity, making access to care as barrier-free as possible.

• A portion of our revenue dedicated to supporting underfunded, community-based initiatives that align with our values, helping to create a stronger, more equitable support network for all.

• Paying our staff above market rates, enabling them to move beyond survival and into true prosperity, because we know that when our team thrives, our community thrives.

• A cooperative profit-sharing model for our staff, ensuring that everyone who contributes to our work has a stake in our collective success.

In our pursuit of equity, we also believe in the power of mutual support. We uplift and amplify the work of others who share our vision, believing that together, we can create lasting change. Some of the individuals and organizations whose work we encourage you to support include BIPoC Eating Disorder Conference, FEDUP Collective, Intersex Justice Project, Project HEAL, Galaei, The People's Fridge, National Queer & Trans
Therapists of Color Network, and others who are deeply committed to the well-being of trans people and marginalized communities.

Together, we win. Together, we heal.

More to be added soon!