Hunger, Eating and Eating Disorders
For Coaches, Therapists and Facilitators
A 90-minute Seminar with David Bedrick
We learn to express our deepest needs and desires through food.
AND… though there are genuine health concerns that serve to constrain us, inner criticism and internalized oppression also operate to suppress, oppress and shame our needs and desires by focusing on our eating, body and hungers.
These two forces meet in powerful opposition, creating an epic battle between a life force that inexorably pursues its needs and desires and the immovable forces of societal standards, norms and bigotry that imprison the wide diversity and extra- ordinariness of our needs and desires.
Thus the table is set, literally and figuratively, for the topic of eating, overeating, hunger and eating disorders to be ripe for an investigation of who we are, the forces and traumas that hold us back, and what are hearts and souls truly long for.
“Bedrick offers a deep, astute, accessible, & practice-based path to divesting from the most debilitating mind state - shame.”
—Gabor Maté, MD
CONVENTIONAL METHODS AND THINKING FAIL
Research shows that the protocols, suggestions and disciplines only work about 5% of the time. Hundreds of studies literally replicate these findings.
But the most urgent failing is that these approaches, tools and protocols don’t dive into the shadow and bring light to the life forces and struggles that live in us. They fail to offer a true embrace of the magnificent diversity, love, and life paths that are inherent in the underlying hungers and their powers.
In this seminar, you will be given:
The unshaming understanding needed to light the way to bring healing to this particular suffering
Clarifying and elucidating case studies.
Best practices to use for you and your clients.
Radical somatic tools.
AND… you will bear witness to unshaming right before your eyes as David models the skills and awareness LIVE.
You will learn these 5 best practices for working with Hunger, Eating, and Eating Disorders:
1. Resist Pathologization: Create a space/atmosphere of deep belief in the underlying intelligence in the client’s pattern of behavior. This begins the unshaming process, allowing the client to reveal key details.
2. Learn to navigate, and NOT get caught in, the client’s relationship with their inner critic.
3. Skillfully investigate the MOST disturbing details SOMATICALLY, including their feeling experience, movement expression, and voice.
4. Unearth and unfold oppressive social and personal forces that work against the fulfillment of the client’s life.
5. Integrate frozen and imprisoned “hungers” into the person’s vision for the client’s full life and way of life.
Don't miss this profound training!
Here’s what students have said about past seminars:
“David Bedrick has created THE most powerfully compassionate process. And he, himself, is a wizard.”
“Today I cried, I witnessed others’ experiences and I was witnessed in how my inner critic lashes out at me and tells me I’m not good enough. Than you David Bedrick for teaching us this radical and profound way of healing and meeting ourselves.”
“David is a true ally for all humans. His work on unshaming turns modern paradigms of health and healing on their head in most beautiful way.”
WORKING WITH BULIMIA
It’s rarely helpful to work with eating and purging by focusing only on the eating issue.
Most people do that, believing that overeating leads to self-disgust and that's why they purge.
THIS understanding leads people to focus on trying to change the eating, change the binging (e.g. to not eat two boxes of crackers).
HOWEVER, CONSIDER THIS: If you saw an animal in the wild eating leaves, and those leaves led it to throw up, you would think, "Oh, the animal knows it needs to purge, needs to vomit."
The same thing is happening with bulimia, there's the throwing up, the purging - an action with a somatic energy and expression that the person's looking for!
But people are unaware of doing this. The wellness field mostly misses it too. I am saying: The purging is intelligent; it represents the need to get something OUT. For example, imagine an abused child sat at a dinner table and was unfree to speak. Later they express energetically, ritualistically, all that was held back. That’s what I have discovered through unshaming.
Unshaming leads us to focus more on the purging part because it's usually left out and shamed, something we think we can get rid of by changing the eating pattern but end up denying and dismissing the intelligence of the desire to purge.
“I do this work in some ways but this is incredibly clarifying.”
“This work is so important, it’s profound.”
“So grateful to you, David, and the volunteer for the demos. I learned a lot from your exchanges Deeply moved and inspired by it all.”
“Powerful to watch and hear David respond to the inner critic.”
Eating is a somatic experience; that experience is a state of feeling and consciousness. And, when we believe we are over eating, that experienced is criticized, suppressed, and shamed. Nonetheless, we DON’T STOP because of that suppression. That’s the amazing part; that’s an expression of our true power - a power which cannot be contained!
Can you see the 2 forces in opposition? You could say the eating is "unwilling" to contain itself or be controlled by the forces and criticism against it.
That power, the power to continue eating, against the forces that would limit it, lives in you.
Further, that power is not only for the sake of being powerful. That power is meant for something: To be used to satisfy a hunger that is currently narrowly expressed through certain foods and eating patterns.
Both the power and hunger are living in the shadow.
Unshaming allows that to surface, to be witnessed and embraced, giving you access to that state of feeling and consciousness along with the deeper intention behind that power and hunger.
In this was unshaming is a form of shadow work.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE UNSHAMED IN THE PROCESS OF OVER-EATING?
SEMINAR DETAILS
When: Friday, June 6th
Time: 4:30pm-6pm Pacific
Cost: $29
Please note: the class recording will be sent out to all registrants on Monday, June 9th
MEET YOUR FACILITATOR:
David Bedrick, JD, Dipl. PW, is a teacher, counselor, and attorney. He was on the faculty for the University of Phoenix and the Process Work Institute in the U.S. and Poland and is the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-based Studies where he offers facilitation training to deepen the skills and awareness of healers as well as workshops for individuals to further their own personal development. David’s embodied way of teaching is far more than informational, students are often brought to tears and face to face with their beauty, power, life path and soul.
David’s passion for studying shame arose from his childhood, growing up with a father who used fists and belts to express his rage and a mother who coped by denying and gaslighting his experience. Over thirty years of research, teaching, and working with individuals awakened his heart and mind to how the dominant healing paradigm pathologizes people—seeing our sufferings and ills as something to fix and cure instead of messages to be understood and invitations to deepen our relationships with ourselves and the world around us. In this way, David understands our difficulties as “dreams”—invitations to insight, soul, and the divine unfolding of our lives.
David writes for Psychology Today and is the author of three books: Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology and Revisioning Activism: Bringing Depth, Dialogue, and Diversity to Individual and Social Change. His new book is You Can’t Judge a Body by Its Cover: 17 Women’s Stories of Hunger, Body Shame and Redemption.
His fourth book, The Unshaming Way, was published by North Atlantic Books in November 2024.