The holidays can be difficult when you or a family member is struggling with an eating disorder. It can seem that your relationship will always be broken, thanks to the endless lies, the fights about food, how any conversation seems to end with at least one person running out of the room crying. I know to some parents, it seems easier to let your child be rather than confront the disorder. It helps keep the peace, at least temporarily. Its easy to believe that if you require the sufferer to do the one thing they are most afraid of (eat, not purge, not binge, etc), then they will hate you forever. Although I dont consider myself fully recovered (its kind of a semantics issue, and Im happy to discuss it with anyone separately!), I am here to say that pushing your kid towards recovery is the best way to start healing the relationship. When youre neck-deep in your own eating disorder, it really does feel that the world is against you. No one gets it, no one will leave you alone, even your own thoughts are a frightening place to be. The hostility becomes almost a matter of self-protection. Even long into recovery, it seemed this way. Starving, purging, and overexercising were the only things that made sense or brought me peace. But eventually, that shifted. I dont know what it was. I really dont. But I do know that things started to get better. For a long time, most of my interactions with my parents were fights about food and weight. Not anymore. We have a great relationship. This long, rambling post is really to just say: hang in there. Recovery is possible, even if it takes longer than you ever anticipated.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 21:42:07 +0000
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