Sermon #6: Happy to settle for 'good enough'? Noooo!

Carrie Arnold's 6th point on her excellent and informative list is: 6. There is hope for recovery. Many people with anorexia recover and go on to live happy, fulfilling lives...and you can be one of them.

Ben was getting frustrated at CAMHS as I continued to push for full weight restoration (which I did most of the time, me being me..).

"I don’t know who’s right: the NHS for telling me it’s okay to stick with 'good enough' and stay as I am - or the rest of the world that's telling me I must be properly ‘weight restored’ in order to recover," he complained.

"Well I’m more than happy to settle for 'good enough'," said CAMHS. "In an ideal world we’d love you to return to the weight and physique you were before the anorexia. But in many people this just isn’t possible. They simply can’t handle it. So we need to come to some sort of compromise and I’m happy for you to stay where you are. Yes, if you got sick or something else resulted in weight loss you would be underweight because you don’t have any 'buffer zone'. But I’m happy to settle for 'good enough' if you are.”

I have no idea if the plan was to move the goalposts in the future and aim for higher.

But the problem was, Ben was about to be discharged from CAMHS, so we never got to find out.

This conversation is something that's stuck in my mind ever since. Not surprisingly it has made things more difficult for me in the push to get Ben back to his optimal set weight.

The things is, he absorbed CAMHS' advice like a sponge. This could be bad - as above. Yet it could also have been so very good. Because, if they'd made it clear that "good enough" isn't "good enough" and "excellent" is, then I believe he would have cooperated.

And it would have made my job so much easier once he was discharged last March.