Carolyn Costin

Carolyn recovered herself from anorexia nervosa over twenty years ago. Her own recovery is a primary factor in her understanding of and establishing empathy with her clients. The combination of her personal experience and extensive training as both a therapist and an educator have given her a special aptitude for grasping the underlying conflict, stresses, perceptions, distortions and self-worth issues involved in disordered eating and related issues. Carolyn believes that clients need empathic but firm attention in order to be healed. Carolyn gains her clients' confidence and cooperation in solving their problems. Carolyn originally founded The Eating Disorder Center of California which continues to provide outpatient therapy for individuals throughout southern California. In addition to this Carolyn served as director for several hospital programs but soon realized the need to have a more home-like environment for optimum treatment to take place. Despite her other responsibilities and her busy schedule Carolyn continues to maintain a hands-on approach at Monte Nido™ providing both individual and group therapy. Carolyn's unique combination of experience, training, and passion have led to national recognition as well as many accomplishments in the field of eating disorders. Carolyn is a frequent speaker at national eating disorder conferences and is a member of several national eating disorder organizations. She writes and is quoted frequently in several magazines and publications. Carolyn is also the author of two books and another small manuscript and is on the editorial board of The Eating Disorder Journal of Treatment and Prevention. Carolyn attends every national eating disorder conference and stays versed in the etiology and treatment of eating disorders on the cultural, developmental, biological and psychological levels. Under Carolyn's direction Monte Nido provides a wide variety of therapies, activities and experiences, including all those expected in any sophisticated and accredited eating disorder program. However, all of this takes place on a much smaller scale in a home-like environment. Carolyn believes that in each of her clients, to a greater or lesser degree, there exists a "healthy self" and a separate "eating disorder self. " The eating disorder self has it's own set of needs, feelings, thoughts and behaviors which are different from those of the healthy self and need to be understood. Empathizing and working directly with this eating disorder self to learn why it exists and what it needs is a key part of Carolyn's philosophy of recovery. Carolyn and her staff work hard to understand every client's healthy self and eating disorder self. The ultimate goal is to align with each client's healthy self, nurturing and strengthening it so that it will then have the motivation, desire and skill to deal with the eating disorder self. Carolyn has developed several unique strategies along with a creative, soulful, individualized approach which achieves extraordinary results.