Carer program | Collaborative Care Skills
Learn new skills to help your loved one overcome an eating disorder.
Learn new skills to help your loved one overcome an eating disorder.
Caring for a person with an eating disorder is a long-term commitment that requires unique skills. Yet friends and families are often expected to provide safe and supportive care without any training and/or support for their experience of caring.
Based on the new Maudsley Approach, Butterfly’s Collaborative Care Skills Workshop offers evidence-based training in motivational interviewing and effective communication techniques to aid in the recovery from a loved one’s eating disorder. Carers will also be provided with support around self-care and wellbeing to reduce psychological distress, burden, expressed emotion, and boundaries in level of involvement.
Our trained peer facilitators will draw on the wisdom of their lived experience to encourage carers in their vital role of caring for a loved one, friend or family member toward wellness and hope in their recovery.
With evidence-based strategies, this virtual workshop will help you to:
- Understand how an eating disorder may impact your loved one and the affect this condition can have on behaviour
- Care for yourself and avoid burnout
- Identify your caring style and how you can best lean into it when supporting your loved one
- Manage difficult behaviours and utilise skills to encourage your loved one toward recovery
- Find a community with others who are going through a similar experience to you.
Requirements:
Our Collaborative Carer Skills Workshop is open to any carer 18 years or over who can commit to 2 sessions over 2 consecutive Saturdays. Attendance is required on both days.
All participants of CCSW are also eligible to access one-one-one Peer Mentoring.
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 – attendance is required on both days.
- February 10 and 17 (registration closes 5 February)
- April 6 and 13 (registration closes 1 April)
- June 15 and 22 (registration closes 10 June)
Time: 9:30 am – 3:30 pm (AEST/AEDT) both days
Fee: FREE (Thanks to support by the Crown through the Tasmanian Department of Health.)
We’ll be in touch soon with more information.
If you have questions, please email Butterfly’s Recovery and Support Services Team at RSS@butterfly.org.au or phone 0474 004 443.
If you are currently experiencing a crisis, please call one of the following:
Police & Ambulance 000
Lifeline 13 11 14
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.
