Brian Nuckols

Licensed professional counselor in Pittsburgh, PA. I work with children, adolescents, adults, and couples across seven clinical areas: child and teen therapy (DBT-A), infidelity and betrayal trauma, eating disorders and ARFID, gambling addiction, couples therapy, neurodivergence, and depth psychology. The common thread is patterns that do not resolve with standard approaches, where evidence-based treatment needs to meet the deeper question of why the pattern exists.

If you're here because something is wrong, you're in the right place.

Areas of Practice

Recent Writing

Why Dieting Causes Binging: Restraint Theory Explained

In 1985, Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman published the experimental work at the University of Toronto that demolished the willpower model of binge eating. Restraint theory proposes that cognitive dietary restraint, not hunger or lack of discipline, is the proximal cause of the disinhibited eating that follows a breach of a self-imposed rule. Four decades of subsequent research, including Eric Stice's dual-pathway confirmation, have substantiated the basic mechanism and informed why Christopher Fairburn's CBT-E drops dietary restraint early in treatment.

The Obesity Clinic That Discovered Trauma: Vincent Felitti, the ACE Study, and What Your Binge Is Holding

In the late 1980s, Vincent Felitti ran the obesity clinic at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. He could not understand why his best-outcomes patients were the ones who quit the program, until he began following them up and discovered what his liquid-diet protocol had been treating without knowing it was treating. The ACE Study grew out of those interviews. What the study found about the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and adult health outcomes, including binge eating and body size, reorganized the epidemiology of trauma in the United States and has not yet reorganized most of the treatment the culture offers.

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