NURTURING GIRLPOWER

Integrating Eating Disorder
Prevention/Intervention Skills Into Your Practice

2003:Salal Books, Vancouver, BC     ISBN # 0-9698883-4-1   176 pages    $35.00
 

Girls with girlpower:

  • Can ask for what they want
  • Are able to say no
  • Have a wide range of feelings
  • Can express their feelings and opinions constructively
  • Have self-esteem in areas other than 'looking good'
  • Have connections with others that are based on honesty

Something negative happens to girls in the process of growing up. Before puberty most girls have girlpower—they are connected to themselves and to their bodies. As girls go through adolescence they experience major changes in their bodies and their lives. Society pressures them to value themselves solely in terms of how they look and to withhold their feelings and opinions in order to ensure that they do not hurt anyone else. Girls internalize their distress and express their feelings indirectly by encoding them in a language of fat. They lose their girlpower as they disconnect from their bodies and their selves.

Nurturing girlpower is based upon the belief that disordered eating, eating disorders and the other health and social risks that girls face are coping mechanisms they develop in order to deal with feelings and situations in their lives for which they have no other means of expression. Highest among these are the challenges of adolescence and the changes in their bodies and their lives. Preventing eating disorders (primary prevention) means promoting and sustaining healthy development. This is nurturing girlpower. Intervention (secondary prevention) means stopping the behaviors that girls might be experimenting with before these develop into eating disorders. That means restoring girlpower that has been lost.

Nurturing girlpower will provide you with an underlying framework that is based on contemporary theories of brain sex and differences in male and female development and the impact of socialization on girls.  It will provide you with a comprehensive framework on eating disorder prevention that addresses the challenges of adolescence. It will help you enhance your individual practice, assess prevention in your schools and develop prevention strategies for groups in your community.

Nurturing girlpower includes information, skills and strategies that address the changes in girls' bodies and their lives. These include teaching girls about the grungies (their negative voice), body image and body awareness, communication skills, dieting and fat prejudice, why girls are fat, stress management and media awareness and activism. Nurturing girlpower will help you integrate these skills into your practice, develop classroom lessons and prepare presentations for students, parent groups and your colleagues.

Nurturing girlpower provides you with background information on eating disorders and demystifies them so that you can relate to the girl instead of her behaviors. It provides you with counseling skills so that you can intervene with girls who are experimenting with eating disorder behaviors without fear of saying the wrong thing or making it worse. It will help you support girls who do have eating disorders.

Nurturing girlpower provides you with 15 Tools to develop prevention and intervention strategies and to teach skills, 20 Exercises that help you learn about yourself and can be used in your work with girls, and an extensive up-to-date resource section that includes books, magazines, videos, programs and websites.

Nurturing girlpower is designed for use by women (and interested men) with different orientations and levels of experience. It evolved out of the very successful three-day training sessions on prevention and intervention that Sandra Friedman developed for Eating Disorders Project North in British Columbia between 1998-2000.

"Sandra Friedman's work provides an accessible, sensible way in which to understand the fears and frustrations of young women, and how to work with them toward a society in which individuals are valued for who and what they are, rather than how they appear. Ms Friedman encourages each of us to address our beliefs and prejudices in ways that bring relief and comfort, as we develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be female in North American culture. Her ability to integrate theory and practice in ways which are readily understandable encourages us to see the challenges of living in an image obsessed culture as opportunities for growth. "

Merryl Bear
Executive Director
National Eating Disorders Information Centre
Toronto, Canada


I find Nurturing girlpower to be tremendously useful in providing tangible skills for working with girls individually, in schools, and working with the larger community. It is rare to see one resource provide information for such a broad continuum of services. While I have been doing work in this area for a number of years, I learned many new and valuable lessons from this manual and will incorporate them into my work in the community and with individuals.

Lori M. Irving, PhD
Associate Professor, Psychology
Washington State University
Vancouver, Washington


"I like the manual because of its easy flow and content/practice combinations. Also that important values and approaches in working with girls are repeated throughout. I see this as a very useful resource for me to give to practitioners when they are feeling they need an 'expert'."

Sharon Young
Health Promotion Coordinator
Brandon Regional Health Authority
Brandon, Manitoba


"Nurturing girlpower was a wonderful and informative read. All parents and schools should read it cover to cover to understand the complexity of adolescence and how a young girl can fall prey to the insidious illness of an eating disorder. The manual offers hope and inspiration that there is a chance to live in a world where we value one another by more than just our physical appearance."

Jennifer Kelman, CSW
Executive Director
Healing Connections Organization
New York, New York


"I found this manual comprehensive and easy to ready. In fact, once I started reading, I had difficulty putting it down. It written in such a way that a teacher could pick it up, understand it and work with it. This is important when working with educators who are often busy working many other issues/social concerns into the curriculum."

Arlene Carlson
Dietitian/Educator
Prince Rupert, British Columbia

"As a counselor, I found Sandra's book to be an invaluable source of practical information for working with girls who experience disordered eating/and eating disorders.  Sandra writes from a place of really understanding the world of adolescent girls.  Her suggestions for how to build the kind of counseling relationships where girls can feel safe and understood have been indispensable in my work with clients."

Meris Williams, MA

Vancouver, British Columbia

 





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