Abstract
Due to the notoriously high failure rate of eating disorder treatments, and the ever-increasing size of this clinical population it seems salient and necessary to attempt to discover which aspects of psychological interventions clients have found useful in helping them to overcome their eating problems. A counselling interview approach with a semi-structured interview schedule was used to elicit the personal accounts of ten female participants who had been diagnosed with an eating disorder and who had received some form of psychological intervention. The research aim was to explore firstly, if and how they had developed an insight into the link between their feelings and their disordered eating during or following treatment and secondly, if and how this had helped them to recover. Data were subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 1997) which generated several common themes. These indicated that participants perceived there to have been precipitating events prior to the onset of their eating disorders which had caused them to seek a form of control in response to feelings such as a sense of inadequacy, ineffectiveness and low self-esteem. Their accounts described how they believed that therapy had helped them especially in developing a more positive sense of self through exploration of dysfunctional cognitions and developing interoceptive awareness through self-monitoring of eating disordered behaviour and feelings, and through positive identification with other eating disordered individuals in group situations, such as Overeaters Anonymous.