Treating eating disorder patients who have had traumatic experiences: a self-regulatory approach.

Eating disorder (ED) patients are presenting with increasingly complex symptom pictures consisting of layers of potential interaction between their eating disorder, impact of their traumatic experiences, and their social environment. Consequently, clinicians are challenged to utilize approaches that efficiently and effectively organize treatment for this particular population. This paper describes an therapeutic organizational model, based on self-regulation theory, that clinically has been found to be useful and effective for working with complex, multi-symptomatic ED patients.