Anorexia Treatment
Recovering from anorexia is a deeply personal and emotional journey. It affects not only how a person relates to food, but also how they see themselves and the world around them. For adolescent girls, anorexia often develops during a time of major change and growth, making it especially important to receive care that supports both physical and emotional healing. Treatment is most effective when it addresses the whole person—their thoughts, feelings, family relationships, and sense of identity.
Arin Bass is a therapist who specializes in eating disorders. She uses an integrative approach, combining several evidence-based therapies to create individualized recovery plans. The goal is to help adolescents restore nourishment, rebuild confidence, and learn healthier ways to cope with stress and emotions. The following treatment approaches are often used in the recovery process.
Family-Based Therapy centers on the belief that parents play a vital role in helping their child recover from anorexia. Rather than focusing on blame, FBT empowers families to work together toward healing.
At the beginning of treatment, parents temporarily take charge of ensuring their child eats regularly and receives adequate nutrition. This helps the adolescent’s body and brain begin to recover from the physical effects of starvation. As strength and stability return, responsibility and autonomy over food and eating are gradually given back to the adolescent, allowing them to regain independence while feeling supported. In the final phase, adolescent-focused therapy focuses on restoring normal life and helping the adolescent develop a strong sense of identity and confidence.
FBT can be highly effective because it brings the family together around a single goal—helping their child return to health, safety, and emotional balance.
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy helps families heal the emotional disconnection that often develops when a child struggles with anorexia. The disorder can cause tension, guilt, and fear among family members, leaving everyone feeling misunderstood or distant.
In EFFT, families learn how to express their emotions more openly and respond to one another with empathy and understanding. Parents are guided to see the distress behind their child’s symptoms and to provide reassurance in moments of fear or anxiety. For the adolescent, this experience of being seen and accepted helps reduce the emotional isolation that often fuels restrictive eating.
By strengthening emotional bonds, EFFT allows both the adolescent and family to move forward together, building trust, compassion, and resilience.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy helps individuals learn practical tools to manage overwhelming emotions, perfectionism, and rigid thinking patterns that often accompany anorexia. Many adolescents find that DBT gives them the language and skills to understand their feelings rather than avoiding or controlling them through food restriction.
DBT teaches four key areas of growth: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Mindfulness helps patients become more aware of their thoughts and feelings without judgment. Emotion regulation skills make it easier to manage intense emotions such as shame, fear, and sadness. Distress tolerance offers healthy coping strategies for moments of anxiety, and interpersonal skills strengthen communication and boundaries in relationships.
These tools help adolescents face difficult emotions with courage and balance, enabling them to move toward a healthier, more compassionate relationship with themselves.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on how thoughts and beliefs shape emotions and behaviors. For those with anorexia, rigid or self-critical thinking can maintain harmful eating patterns and a distorted body image. CBT helps patients identify these unhelpful thoughts and replace them with more realistic and compassionate perspectives.
For example, instead of believing “I have to be thin to be accepted,” CBT helps individuals reframe the idea to “My worth is not defined by my appearance.” Arin collaborates with her patients to practice new ways of thinking and behaving through exercises, journaling, and gradual exposure to challenging situations, such as eating feared foods or confronting body-image triggers.
By reshaping thought patterns, CBT helps clients rebuild confidence and reclaim a sense of control rooted in health rather than restriction.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy teaches patients how to live with difficult emotions without letting those emotions dictate behavior. For adolescents struggling with anorexia, ACT encourages a shift away from control and toward acceptance—acceptance of thoughts, feelings, and imperfections as natural parts of being human.
Through mindfulness and self-compassion, patients learn to notice critical thoughts without judgment and focus instead on what truly matters to them. ACT helps them identify their core values—such as friendship, creativity, or growth—and guides them to make choices that align with those values rather than driven by fear or self-doubt.
This approach nurtures long-term recovery by helping individuals live a meaningful life even when challenges arise, promoting freedom from the constant pressure to be “perfect.”
Family Systems Therapy views anorexia not as an isolated problem, but as one that affects and is affected by the entire family system. Every family has its own patterns of communication, roles, and expectations. Sometimes, unspoken stress, perfectionism, or conflict can contribute to the development or maintenance of an eating disorder.
In therapy, families work together to recognize and shift these patterns. Parents and siblings learn to communicate more healthily, set appropriate boundaries, and support one another more effectively. The focus is on creating an environment that promotes balance, understanding, and emotional safety for everyone in the household.
When the family system becomes stronger and more supportive, the adolescent feels less alone and more able to embrace recovery.
Psychodynamic Therapy helps individuals explore the deeper emotional conflicts and early life experiences that may have contributed to their anorexia. For some adolescents, the disorder reflects an attempt to gain control, cope with fear, or manage feelings of inadequacy. Psychodynamic therapy provides a safe and reflective space to explore these underlying themes.
Through open dialogue, patients begin to understand how past experiences, relationships, and unconscious beliefs shape their current struggles. This insight helps them develop self-awareness and emotional resilience, allowing them to separate their sense of identity from the eating disorder.
By uncovering and working through these deeper emotional layers, adolescents can begin to build a more authentic and stable sense of self, no longer defined by their relationship with food or weight.
Internal Family Systems Therapy teaches individuals to understand the different “parts” of themselves that influence thoughts and behaviors. For example, one part may be critical and demand perfection, while another feels afraid or hurt. In anorexia, these parts often conflict—one may restrict food to protect the vulnerable one from pain.
IFS helps patients approach these parts with curiosity and compassion instead of judgment. Arin guides them to connect with their “Self,” the calm and centered part of the mind that can listen to and care for each inner part.
This gentle process helps adolescents build inner harmony and self-trust. As they learn to care for all aspects of themselves, the need to rely on restrictive eating as a coping mechanism begins to fade.
A compassionate and personalized path to recovery
Healing from anorexia takes time, patience, and consistent support. No single approach works for everyone, which is why treatment is often personalized and may combine several of the therapies described above. The goal is to help individuals reconnect with their bodies, emotions, and families in a healthy and empowering way.
Recovery is not just about eating again—it is about rediscovering a sense of joy, purpose, and self-worth. For those in Marin and San Francisco, reaching out to therapist Arin Bass, who specializes in eating disorder treatment, can be an important first step toward long-term healing and hope for the future.
At a Glance
Arin Bass, LMFT
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Marin County
- 20 years of experience
- Eating Disorder Recovery Support (EDRS) Sponsorship Chair
- Learn more
