SANDRA SUSAN FRIEDMAN

I am an educator, counselor, consultant and author. I began my professional career as a school teacher in Montreal, Quebec. In 1976 I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, received an MA in psychology and went into private practice hoping to help girls and women come to terms with their preoccupation with food and weight. For the next ten years I also facilitated workshops with a professional colleague. As more and more young women and girls came forward with anorexia and bulimia we moved from being 'fat' therapists to being 'eating disorder' specialists. Our workshop program transformed from Facing Your Fat to Learning to Love Yourself. While the names changed, the dynamics remained the same. Underneath the bingeing, fasting, purging and dieting were the stories of women's everyday lives. Feeling fat had little to do with body size. It was an encoded way of expressing difficult feelings and of communicating about painful experiences.

In 1992 I shifted part of my focus into eating disorder prevention and developed JUST FOR GIRLS—a group discussion program based on relational theory that addresses what happens to girls in the process of growing up female that encourages them to define themselves by the numbers on the bathroom scale. As the program made its way across Canada and the United States, it became valued as a prototype for addressing other health and social risks to which girls are vulnerable. In 2003 I revised the manual and after many requests for resources included a small section for boys.

When my book WHEN GIRLS FEEL FAT: Helping Girls Through Adolescence was published by HarperCollins in 1997, my husband, Dan, and I spent nearly 3 months driving across Canada and back promoting it. Along the way I facilitated professional training workshops and did public information presentations for community groups—more than 30 engagements in all. I met and spoke with hundreds of mothers, fathers, mentors and girls. The most exciting part was the realization that although my book was originally intended for mothers and other adult mentors, it was being widely-circulated and read by girls themselves. Since that time I have done hundreds more public speaking engagements, conferences and professional training workshops throughout Canada and the Pacific Northwest in the United States. WHEN GIRLS FEEL FAT was published in the United States and Israel in 2000, and Italy in 2001.

From 1998 to 2000, I was involved with a project to build caregiver capacity in rural communities in northern British Columbia. Eating Disorders Project North was designed so that local professionals, organizations and interested lay people could address the continuum of disordered eating—prevention, intervention, psychological treatment, and medical diagnosis and management)—within their communities using local resources.

Eating Disorders Project North provided participants with a series of three-day training sessions on eating disorder prevention, on early intervention and on psychological treatment in order to raise their awareness, increase their knowledge, enhance their existing skills and provide new skills. Separate training sessions for area physicians assisted them with diagnosis, medical management and referral of individuals with eating disorders. Participating communities were supported in developing integrated teams of community members and service providers, strengthening existing teams and developing a northern network of support and information.

I developed and facilitated the training sessions on eating disorder prevention and on early intervention. The training sessions drew a diverse range of participants, almost all of whom were female. They included public health nurses, psychiatric nurses, dietitians, nutritionists, elementary and secondary school teachers and counselors, women's center counselors, drug & alcohol and mental health counselors, sexual assault counselors, social workers, family support workers, child and youth workers, university students, fitness and dance instructors, volunteers and parents. NURTURING GIRLPOWER: Integrating Eating Disorder Prevention/Intervention Skills Into Your Practice evolved out of this project. In 2003 I completely revised the manual and included more skills and activities.

.BODY THIEVES: Help Girls Reclaim Their Natural Bodies and Become Physically Active evolved out of the experiences and mentorship I received as a board member and co-chair of proMOTION Plus: the B.C. organization for girls and women in physical activity and sport.  BODY THIEVES adds a necessary dimension to preventing eating disorders, to addressing smoking and other social/health risks to girls through its emphasis on the benefits of physical activity and sport as a means of helping girls become and remain connected to their bodies—especially as they make the transition through adolescence. It also addresses the current war on obesity and promotes Health at Every Size.

In 2003 my husband Dan and I moved from the densely populated urban West End of Vancouver, BC, to the rural Sunshine Coast—a 95 km strip of land 40 minutes away from West Vancouver by ferry and with a population of roughly 27,000 people. Our street of 12 houses has no sidewalks and ends in a ravine which makes it a safe playground for kids—most of whom are preadolescent and adolescent boys. I became immersed in boy culture watching (and dodging) the ongoing road hockey games in front of my house, returning endless soccer balls that were trying to root in my garden, seeing the daredevil antics of boys on bikes and getting to know all my neighbours.

And so JUST FOR BOYS was born. JUST FOR BOYS is a group program that addresses the societal pressures on boys to conform to a rigid and traditional definition of masculinity and the health risks (including eating disorders and body image disturbances) that they are vulnerable to. JUST FOR BOYS helps boys build resilience and teaches them skills so that they can cope with these stressors in a healthy way.

If you would like more information about my work or would like to arrange professional training, presentations or consultation, please review my professional services. Use  salal@salal.com to leave an e-mail message, or contact me by phone or fax: 

Sandra Friedman
Salal Communications Ltd.
Tel + Fax:   604-885-5998