The Charis Treatment Process
with Bring Your Brokenness

This is usually our longest phase of treatment and includes, but is not limited to, refeeding, rest, spiritual healing, mood stabilization, family therapy and support, and the reestablishment of a healthy relationship with food.

We will work to restore body, mind, and heart through daily groups, individual psychotherapy, family sessions, individual sessions with a registered dietitian, experiential therapies, and collaborative care with our medical teams. Our patients, alongside other women in recovery, are supported by a 24-hour mental health coaching staff. This recovery “family” is an essential part of our treatment process. While in treatment, our goal is to create an amazingly loving, safe, and supportive environment to allow for the transition of letting go of the eating disorder. We believe it is none like any other you will ever experience.

Restoring the body: Regardless of one’s eating disorder, the body is holistically compromised, confused, and needs restoration to health so that all systems are functioning safely and optimally.

• Our patients attend spiritual growth and educational didactics for nutrition, neurobiology, mindfulness, and skill building through various therapeutic models dependent on individualized treatment planning. Many support groups are experiential and process oriented including movement; equine-assisted; expressive art, music, and psychodrama; and exposure groups. 

• With support from medical providers, we identify any health issues that may be a consequence of the eating disorder and/or an obstacle to recovery. Our goal is to resolve these issues and create a viable path to healing. 

• Our dietetics team strives to restore a healthy relationship with food while restoring the body to optimal metabolic and cellular health. Our delicious and nutritious meals encourage moving toward food as our life force and source of pleasure in a healthful, balanced manner. Our Farm to Table program allows patients to learn to work with their hands in a garden and gather eggs from chickens, reinforcing God’s plan for us to use food for nourishment and life. Culinary groups offer a supportive environment to work in the kitchen and prepare meals and snacks.

• We emphasize a mindful movement program to reconnect to the wisdom of the body as we seek to repair painful detachments used as a means of coping, sometimes in the form of exercise compulsion and sometimes complete body avoidance. Modalities include yoga, music, nature walks, meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction and reestablishing sleep and rest cycles.

Restoring the Mind: Although we cannot separate body and mind, much of our “felt” experience ultimately affects or informs our thinking and the behavioral choices that follow. Often our behaviors or actions are reactive and automatic. Sometimes actions were intended for good, but now have interrupted our ability to live a life well lived. Additionally and unfortunately, many with eating disorders also have backgrounds of trauma. Trauma is defined individually, but we approach all therapy from a place that is trauma-informed. All staff are trained in creating safe healing environments through their therapeutic presence. Trauma changes the nervous system to respond to life in exaggerated ways rarely allowing for a peaceful existence. 

• Our approaches to psychotherapy most often include IFS, DBT, CBT, and ACT.

• We occasionally use EMDR, an evidence-based trauma treatment that accesses memory and disengages the emotional responses to it. 

• Animal-assisted therapy is often used to create a relaxing home-like environments of care, as well as helping to co-regulate our patients’ nervous systems.

Accessing our patients’ thoughts and emotions and uncovering behavioral insights and patterns often best occurs through experiential or nontraditional therapeutic methods. Our experiential and movement-based therapies have a strong presence in our schedule, including but not limited to weekly music, gentle yoga, creative arts, equine, and gardening assisted therapies.

Restoring Family/Relationships: We believe that all people were meant to be in relationship. For us to be well in body and mind, safe and secure attachments are necessary. Whether that be our family of origin, family of choice, or even church family, everyone needs a safe and supportive place to land. Our goal is to facilitate in the restoration and healing of relationships, being careful not to blame or alienate. In-person or virtual family group therapy is an important part of our therapeutic services wherein families are supported, educated, and lead through a structured process of restoration.

Faith: Everyone comes from a different faith background, and experiences are just as varied. Our goal is to help each of our patients to restore or establish faith as a place of safety, empowerment, guidance, and peace. We believe that restoring faith is an essential aspect of long lasting recovery, but we also respect that it is a personal choice. Our integrated Christian values are not required or forced upon patients, but rather are intended to expose our patients to the best of what a relationship with Christ can offer, should they choose to consider. Fully integrated faith-based treatment means that all direct patient care staff have a personal relationship with Jesus. Out of that relationship flows the way we live, work, and serve. We aren’t perfect, but we are authentic. We love our patients as Jesus loves us, with utmost humility, respect, care, and concern. Moving away from an identity in an eating disorder, life experiences, or social conditioning, we focus on the discovery of our spiritual identity.

As we restore, we learn to see ourselves in the light of our true identity, apart from the eating disorder. In the Restory phase, often overlapping with the restorative phase, therapeutic services focus on restorying the narratives that led to this place of intense struggle. As the stories each patient has survived are processed, negative core beliefs are identified. Clinicians aid in reframing those thoughts and lead the patient in realigning each core belief with truth. We learn that we are not defined by our past, and learning the truth frees us to tell a new story. The Restory phase often utilizes more exposure-based treatment methods, according to individual treatment plans.

Continuing to RESTORE and RESTORY, patients find newfound strength and energy to live in freedom – REFRESHED - according to God’s plan. Refresh is an ongoing phase of growth. Our focus in this new model of living is love - God, self, and others - and our actions flow from it.

In most cases of the Refresh phase, patients will live off-property and attend groups and/or sessions 6 days per week (PHP). This begins the facilitation of transitioning back into normalized living while providing an initial higher level of support during this time to allow for processing of triggers that present as the patient functions outside of the protected environment of the treatment facility. This phase of treatment also incorporates preparation for discharge with varied tiers of support including, but not limited to, working through the aftercare plan with treatment providers; finding support groups and beginning attendance of virtual groups; joint therapy sessions with the home and Bring Your Brokenness treatment teams; and assistance in vocational and living decisions. We provide professional referrals and are dedicated to the support and education of our outpatient referral partners so that our patients have a network of providers to continue living restored, restoried, and refreshed lives.