Therapist does not understand EDs?
I've been going to therapy primarily for different issues than a restricitve ED because I hadn't fully realized I had one up until recently. However after a period of eating slightly more my body started the extreme hunger sensations at the end of last year.
I honored it and also suffered through it in the first months, as it felt like constant fear for my life if there was not food around me etc. I got ill like 5 times and my edema hurt during every step. She tried repeteadly to find emotional reasons of my constant eating.
During the hardest times I left feeling flooded with tasks like "try to see if you eat enough legumes and fish" and she did not seem to understand my explanation why it was nonsense.
I do not blame her for not knowing about EH. In my country not knowing about EH is a systemic issue. My psychiatrist, GP, endocrinologist have not heard about it either and had varied levels of accepantance of that information.
I had to contact a well respected NGO that specialises in EDs and read their response about EH aloud to her to finally start believing me about the nature of my hunger.
But she kept diverting again to analyzing my "fear of not having food".
I started feeling better after confronting her and her accepting my criticism. But then again, during our last session where I described being uncertain about some situations being or not being hungry and how weird it seems she stated: "I know you do not have bulimia but when people have bulimia the overeat emotionally so this might be similar." (Which seemed like very incomplete and outdated information to me.) I wanted to discuss the emotional impact of the hunger, not how to recognize hunger itself. I told her sensations of hunger were a topic for my nutritionist.
When I wanted to focus on learning to accept my body she did some comparisions to other people that are "twice as big as me but found their style and look great". Instead of helping me process through the difficult emotions, she seems very action oriented despite being a psychodynamic therapist and me not needing action recomendations. And she looks for emotions where there is biology at play.
She's also provided many tips that seem helpful and has talked about fat people with respect and without judgement. I think she want to be supportive and not fatphobic. But it all feels really amateurish. For the most part, she is probably scared of my weight gain and afraid for my health as she's not experienced this before.
I contacted the NGO if I could also meet their therapist and potentially change therapists.
I do not know, the current one has been really helpful in many areas of my life but as much as I would like to move on from the topic of recovery, I am not there yet and have a lot to work on. Do you think this a correct move? Or am I overreacting?
I feel it is not my role to educate people about biology but I've had to in order to prevent harmul interventions...