They said "It's His Treatment, Not Yours"
By Abigail Natenshon

You've probably heard this warning before: "It's his treatment, not yours." "Stay out of your child's affairs, disease, treatment, food," you might have been told. “You'll only make things worse” One parent testified to me that things did get worse when she discussed eating with her child. "I needed to back off totally," she said, "and refrain from ever mentioning food to show my son that he could be in control of himself and to let him know that what he does, he does for himself, not for me."

Backing off is not necessarily incorrect. But neither is it applicable to all children throughout all (and particularly the early) stages of recovery. When your child is responsive to recovery, he will need emotional space to accomplish his goals independently. However, if you opt for a hands-off posture prematurely, before your child is capable of responding appropriately to and for himself, you may be doing him a disservice. Without your input he may choose not to recover or may flounder about in the recovery process.

Even if your input does little more than evoke opposition, at least you will have stimulated some self-awareness and perhaps helped him face certain issues, whereas a passive response to an active disease can only make matters worse.

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Therapy Is About Making Changes

Change develops out of ferment and signifies the breaking apart of an old system. A potent diagnostic and treatment tool, change indicates where the patient has been and where he is going; its rhythm sets the pace of treatment. The process of change need not be disruptive if it takes on the simple and gentle quality of fine-tuning certain aspects of the patient's existence. The goal of change is not to be right but to be flexible—not to take control of external forces but to accommodate and adjust to them—in other words, to roll with life's punches.

The mark of a successful treatment process is change in behaviors and thinking, whether in the form of an epiphany or a tweaking perceptible only to the patient. All change, from the least significant to the largest and most dramatic, begins with one small step. The cumulative impact of small steps may not be apparent at once, though you and your child should see changes of various sorts and degrees almost immediately with the advent of treatment. Behavioral changes will generally be easier to discern than those confined to emotional expression. With patience you will see your child's small steps grow into big ones.

You may also see that even small changes may evoke big anxieties in your child—these minor alterations may lead to potentially enormous and unsettling consequences. Your appreciation and support of the changes he has made can be extremely important to your struggling child.




Reprinted from When Your Child Has An Eating Disorder, A Step-by-Step Workbook For Parents And Other Caregivers, Jossey-Bass, 1999.