Is it the Therapists’ Role to Discuss Food Resources with their Clients?

Viewing Food Insecurity Through the Lens of Attachment Theory

by Daniel Frazer, LCSW

11/5/2025

Recently, a therapist colleague I supervise was surprised that I had suggested they check in with their psychotherapy clients, especially those they know to be lower income, to see if they had plans or needed resources for the impending reduction of SNAP benefits, rising costs, and surging under-employment many of the clients we provide psychotherapy

for face.

This colleague, like many, had supervisors who emphasized that our role as therapists is not to see to the concrete resources our clients need and to “get out of” case management minded interventions. One of my own supervisors, prior to getting my independent license, was also of this mindset, bleating at me that “It gets in the way of treatment.”

Increasingly, MSW programs and students seem to prioritize psychotherapy skills over the field’s origins in social and economic reform and systemic awareness, the values that made social work distinct from psychology.

We can view food insecurity through the lens of attachment. In attachment theory, caregiving teaches safety and predictability.

Hunger mirrors inconsistent caregiving and the basic need for nourishment becomes unsafe, unpredictable, and reinforces hypervigilance and excessive self-reliance rather than trust in both others and future outcomes.

This unpredictable access to food trains the individual to anticipate threats, not unlike inconsistent emotional caregiving. When we do not seek to intervene on the hunger and insecurity of our clients, we’re missing the opportunity to model for the individual how to advocate their needs. Through empowering our clients to resolve hunger, we help to repair the dynamics of inconsistent caregiving both through the societal and familial lens.  

Having grown up in poverty and spent much of my career in crisis intervention and case management where I supported hungry and at-risk college students—it never occurred to me not to ask about basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare during my psychotherapy sessions. Even when providing OCD treatment or anxiety therapy, mental health is inseparable from a person’s real-world resources and sense of security.

It should come as no surprise that all mental health conditions and their presentations are worsened by the individual's socio-economic status. There have even been studies done that suggest that OCD expression may be heavily influenced by and perhaps a discrete risk factor related to the parents’ socio-economic status (Yilmaz et al., 2022).

With the changing political climate and the social rejection and manipulation of SNAP benefit recipients, we as psychotherapists, social workers, and other counseling professionals risk becoming complicit through inaction, silently reinforcing the neglect and insecurity we are trained to heal.

Providing resources for hunger is good psychotherapy.