Emotion Speaks: an emotion-focused approach to recovery from “eating disorder” and “eating distress”.
The SPEAKS model has been researched and developed by Dr. Anna Oldershaw, Dr. Helen Startup, and Professor Tony Lavender (2025), a passionate group of Emotion-Focused, and Schema therapists who have been working to understand the emotion-processing difficulties that are so often central to the development and on-going-ness of eating disorders and eating distress. Such emotion-processing difficulties can contribute to a sense of a “lost emotional self”, and related loss of contact with, and in some cases fear or avoidance of, the important and self-guiding information that our emotions can offer us.
In arts of listening, I am glad to work with those who are living through experiences of eating disorder and eating distress, using the approach developed by Dr. Anna Oldershaw and her colleagues in SPEAKS, as well as drawing from the ongoing research that is being produced by Emotion Focused Therapy researchers regarding best practices for working with these complex experiences.
Here is an animation produced by SPEAKS researchers and practitioners that offers a flavour of how eating distress and disorder are understood to develop, how these experiences can get stuck, and how an approach like SPEAKS can seek to support and offer a path towards change and growth:
