Abbie's Personal Statement: from One Parent to Another

Recently, in the process of putting together a keynote address for an audience of eating disorder health professionals, I asked myself …. "what I have earned the right to tell them?" Typically, when people immerse themselves in the treatment of a specific disease as I have done for the past several decades, there is some kind of substantive motive underlying and propelling their passion. A great many eating disorder specialists are motivated to become clinicians having recovered from their own eating disorders or have been through the recovery process with a loved one. I am often asked by prospective clients seeking out a therapist who can relate to their problem first hand, "Have you ever had an ED?" With a strange sense of something that feels like apology, I am forced to say "no," even while hastening to assure them that one need not be a horse to be a horse doctor! In actual fact, I love food and eating and have had a healthy relationship with food all of my life. I love to cook, and to nurture my family through food preparation and presentation. When my children were growing up and living at home, there was a hot dinner on the table every night. It was the best way I knew to insure sitting down together face to face and sharing each other's lives.

There IS a certain depth of understanding that comes of personal life experience, however, and on a very deep feeling level, I have served my time personally on the front lines of life's ordeals and struggles… if not with an eating disorder, than through the birth of my daughter 26 years ago; Elizabeth was born with a brain dysfunction that left her virtually unable to move, and therefore unable to develop neurologically from her first moments of life. I believe that the "hook" that lured me into parental advocacy for their child's eating disorder treatment and recovery was my own personal experience as a parent advocating for my own daughter's survival, dedicating myself to doing what had to be done to insure that she could have a life of movement, growth, development and freedom. The lessons I learned so poignantly through our experience in providing help for Elizabeth throughout her young life helped her to surpass all of our fondest dreams of success for her. These lessons have been my inspiration in advocating for parents who require bolstering, empowerment and mentoring in their efforts to sustain themselves and their eating disordered child in the face of hopelessness, despair and "nay-saying." It was, in fact, through my primary interest and personal identification with parental advocacy that I first learned of the profound gratification and rewards of treating and healing eating disorders. Today I wear two hats…even as my children are grown and gone from the nest... of parent and professional…enabling me a continuing sensibility and responsiveness to parental neediness…to raw fear, to the complexities of family relationships that are so vulnerable to being thrown off balance, to a dependency and reliance on professionals who may or may not understand fully the condition they treat and who most likely do not know the child as well as does the parent.

Parents have typically been held responsible for causing their child's eating disorder, as has been the case made in the professional literature for the past hundred years. Equating parental involvement with intrusive interference, the commonly held misconception is that parental participation in treatment corrupts the process, breaching the child's confidences and stunting the child's budding autonomy and independence. Recent research has borne out the thesis that I first presented in my pioneering tribute to the benefit of the substantive involvement of parents in their child's eating disorder recovery, When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers. (Jossey Bass Publishers). Studies concur that it is NOT parents, but heredity that predisposes a child to developing a clinical eating disorder. Though parents may play a role in pulling the trigger, it is genetics that loads the gun.
The key to a child's successful recovery from an eating disorder is proactive and appropriate involvement of parents in the child's on-going and ever-changing support and recovery as a member of the child's treatment team.

I believe that though professionals may be expert in diagnosis and treatment, in the mastery of treatment tools and strategies, no one knows quite as much about his or her own child than does the parent. A pediatrician renown for his diagnostic acumen once told me a piece of information that I have always held as gospel… "Trust the parent. The parent knows." It took me four months and the diagnosis from the chief pediatric neurologist at the most prestigious hospital in the city of Chicago before I could persuade Elizabeth's pediatrician of the reality of her problem.

In my work with children, young adult patients and their parents, my goal is to help parents identify what they have been doing RIGHT… to recognize what they already know, so that they can discover what they need to learn to enable their child's recovery. Parents need to be reminded about what they do BEST… caring for their child responsibly, confidently, and lovingly. They need to give themselves permission to take charge of what might otherwise become a dangerous and life threatening situation, moderating their level of involvement as the child becomes capable of resuming self-control, self-reliance and self-regulation. The need for an authoritative and compassionate parental presence in a child's life, when it comes to eating disorders or any other aspect of life during the growing up years…remains a constant.

In parenting Elizabeth as an infant, my husband and I faced impenetrable odds, uninformed doctors who did not know what they did not know, who were capable of seeing nothing more than pathology and limitation. I became a student of profound life lessons about the creative and proactive use of self in facing problems that demand resolution, in creating possibility where there had once been only the impossible. What I took away from past life experiences, I now bring to my present ones in the form of undying optimism, the drive for innovation, and a bulldog tenacity and determination never to say "never." I envision possibility in all the negative spaces of life, imaging and envisioning the wide berth and immense flexibility of potential. It is this potential which I bring to my eating disordered clients, refuting and countering their own intractable image of body, self and future.

An "opportunity junkie" by nature, I find myself incapable of saying "no" to options that could offer new growth and learning. I am clearly Machiavellian in doing whatever works…. in this, it helps that I was never awfully good at rule-following. In my mid-fifties I became a student and teacher of the Feldenkrais Method, the technique that brought Elizabeth out of the mire of disability to a life of normalcy. This mind/body method teaches options and alternative thinking, offering the opportunity to experience and envision the self in unique and novel ways. I believe that self-awareness is key to effective function, as a person needs to first know what he/she does, in order to do what he/she wants.

I believe that the most valuable learning in life typically comes disguised and dignified in adversity and in the need to respond to it. As human beings, having to confront and deal with problems large and small is a regular part of our daily diet...what separates the men from the boys is HOW WE USE OURSELVES IN DISCOVERING THE MOST EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS. The more available and open we can be to new ideas and the exploration of new approaches, the better we will be at fixing what needs repair. And that's the bottom line.....not being "right." Mistakes are life's way of offering us the capacity to seek a better way. To quote Albus Dumbledore and J.K.Rowling, "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are….it is our choices."


Abigail is the author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers and Doing What Works: An Integrative System for the Treatment of Eating Disorders from Diagnosis to Recovery
She is the Founder and director, "Eating Disorder Specialists of Illinois: A Clinic Without Walls" and host of websites, www.empoweredparents.com. www.empoweredkidZ.com and www.treatingeatingdisorders.com


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