End the Food Fights with Your Child: Replace Control with Connection

Parenting a child with an eating disorder is frightening, confusing, and exhausting. It leaves a parent feeling helpless, angry and too often filled with blame. In this show, Dr. Tom Wooldridge returns to Psych Up Live with his invaluable new book, End The Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder. This is not the discussion of a treatment manual or a substitute for professional care. It is a book that offers parents new ways of responding to a child with an eating disorder that foster healing in conjunction with professional care received. By giving parents tools, Dr. Wooldridge, invites them to understand that Eating Disorders are not made of behaviors alone. Eating disorders convey meaning in what is shown, withheld, repeated or denied. As you will hear, by supporting and expanding the parents’ understanding and response to the eating disorder, Dr. Wooldridge makes it possible for parents to reduce their fear and enhance the healing process for all.

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C

Dr. Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C, is a tenured Professor and founding Dean, School of Psychology at Golden Gate University. Dr. Wooldridge is a board-certified clinical psychologist, certified psychoanalyst, and certified eating disorders specialist–consultant, licensed in both California and New York. A Brown University graduate, he has authored six books with publishers including Routledge and Guilford Press, published more than 25 peer-reviewed articles and serves on the editorial boards of JAPA and Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, held an assistant clinical professorship at UCSF Medical School. At GGU, Tom has received the Outstanding Research Award twice, and the Judith Browning Outstanding Teaching Award.