Many do not know, but for several years, my child has been struggling with depression aggravated by an all-consuming-Eating Disorder. I carry around a backpack that doubles as a family records filing cabinet. Most days you can find me in a lobby waiting at any point in time most days of the week. I have had time to learn a lot about myself and my children in all this ‘down-time’. Specialists are there to help the parents understand this disease somehow… to convince their own children to believe they can trust the process. The message is: choose Recovery… Eat, Please, because caring for the physical body nutritionally will make you feel better than whatever relief the starvation OR self-harm may temporarily give. It is just SCIENCE…. and guess what these kids do? Flip the middle finger in the face of Science, every single day. To these boys and girls, Eating, is not a form of nourishment, it is considered a form of torture or punishment.
Looking at hospital stats… the success rate of ED recovery is LOW. You check your child into these facilities they will most likely be in a holding pattern until you can find, hopefully, a better solution. The idea is to change the direction of which a life has started to head horribly off course. Once a child gets entrenched in some types of disordered behaviors, it ‘quite literally’ feels near-impossible to reverse. The options are CBT, EMDR, ECT, DBT…. the options to attempt every letter of the alphabet. All you need to have is the energy, money, and enough hope to keep grasping at the sands of time as it falls through your hands. What then happens, the kids just dig in their heals, learn new bad behaviors, they get physically healthy, you bring them back home, and the process restarts. Not unlike the recovery process with a drug addiction.
In 2012, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer… in 2016, I achieved a remission, now Time has become a foreign concept to me. To live in a community, be a part of something bigger, now seems a foreign concept because, who would want to invite friends in to help you navigate a situation such as this? I often forget what day of the week it is because they all seem to run together now.