Carer program | Collaborative Care Skills
Learn new skills to help your loved one overcome an eating disorder.
Caring for a person with an eating disorder is a long-term and skilled commitment. Yet friends and families are often expected to provide care without any training or support.
Butterfly’s Collaborative Care Skills Workshop is for anyone caring for a loved one experiencing or recovering from an eating disorder, whether they are a family member, friend, colleague or partner.
Facilitated by trained and experienced peer facilitators, you’ll develop practical skills to support your loved one with an eating disorder in their progress towards recovery.
With evidence-based strategies, this virtual workshop will help you to:
- Understand how eating disorders affect behaviours and what might be happening for your loved one
- Care for yourself
- Identify your caring style and how you can adapt it to help your loved one
- Manage difficult behaviours
- Gain new skills to encourage your loved one’s recovery
- Find community with others who are going through a similar experience to you.
Professor Janet Treasure and her team developed at South London and Maudsley Mental Health Trust developed Collaborative Care Skills Workshops (CCSW) based on a comprehensive model of carer coping.
These workshops were designed to improve carers’ well-being, coping strategies, and problem-solving skills by modifying communication patterns and teaching carers the basic principles of motivational interviewing. These are based on the Maudsley approach.
CCSW is an evidence-based carer intervention that has been shown to reduce psychological distress, burden, expressed emotion and emotional over-involvement in carers of people experiencing an eating disorder. CCSW was introduced and researched for the first time outside the UK by A/Prof Geneviève Pépin and A/Prof Ross King in 2008 at Deakin University, Geelong. Since this time the workshops have be offered across Australia.
The basic content includes:
- An explanation of the complex nature of the illness
- Support skills to overcome isolation
- Understanding the process of change
- Understanding the processes (individual and interpersonal) involved in maintaining eating disorder behaviours
- Understanding the difficulty of getting the correct balance between overprotection with the need for courage to grow
- Managing the tendency to adopt coercive strategies that can increase the determination not to change. Understanding how these polar forces often can split the support team as people pull in different directions or get sidelined
- Adopting and sharing skills to regulate intense emotions
- Becoming an emotional coach who can attend, validate, label and then address (soothe) emotional needs
- An ethos of persistence and determination that can power small change steps
- A collaborative approach with a support team including health professionals and friends and family.
2023 program dates
Where: ONLINE (ZOOM)
Dates: Two Saturdays per workshop
- April 15th & 22nd (registration closes April 7th)
- May 27th & June 3rd (registration closes May 22nd)
- July 15th & 22nd (registration closes 10th July)
- September 2nd & 9th (registration closes August 28th)
- October 14th & 21st (registration closes October 9th)
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm (AEST/AEDT) both days
Fee: FREE (Thanks to support by the Crown through the Tasmanian Department of Health.)
Can’t attend this workshop?
Find out about our free Virtual and Webchat Support Groups for carers of anyone living with a body image issue or eating disorder.
Butterfly’s Virtual Support Groups are facilitated by trained peer facilitators who have lived experience themselves. Anyone over age 18 from anywhere in Australia is welcome to attend.
Our Webchat Support Groups are facilitated by specialist counsellors from our National Helpline. Anyone over age 16 from anywhere in Australia is welcome to attend.
