A pilot qualitative study of a person-centered approach to eating distress in women

Abstract

Person-centered experiential (PCE) psychotherapists work with the phenomenology of client experience from within their client’s frame of reference. Consequently, PCE theory does not provide proscriptions or prescriptions of therapeutic practice for helping clients with discrete forms of psychological distress. This research study provides a phenomenological account using person-centered theory for how the complex experiences of eating distress can be understood without relying on the medicalized diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. A pilot qualitative research study was conducted to explore participants’ experiences of eating distress. An inductive and deductive thematic analysis was employed to construct themes within the data; four main themes were identified. Inductive analysis was used to code participant’s experiences, and PCE theory was used to provide a deductive coding of those participant experiences. The data suggested eating distress can be understood as an expression of incongruence, linked to the theory of conditions of worth within the self-concept, characterized by the presence of a dominant inner critic and is often accompanied by intense feelings of shame.