'Processing' five crucial months in Autumn/Winter 2009/10

Something that's been coming to the surface loud and clear over the past week or so is the anger, helplessness and powerlessness I felt during the months from September 2009 to the end of January 2010 when we were trying to get my son diagnosed and treated for his escalating anorexia. This helplessness and panic has come across in my nightmares as well as in the daytime, which is kind of strange because I've been feeling pretty numb at the same time.


Today my therapist and I looked at those months in detail while I held the little EMDR clickers in an attempt to 'process' the emotions and store them away as history rather than present day angst.

I was going to write about that period here, however I've already written about it many times in this blog and you can download past posts as PDFs by clicking here.

To be honest, I just can't go 'back there' at this very minute; I spent quite a lot of time 'there' this morning, going through how I was feeling and attempting to change my feelings of helplessness and 'should have tied myself to the railings' (because no-one was listening to me) into feelings that I did the very best I could, given what I knew about eating disorders at the time.

We also talked about the panic I felt as I realised that, if the NHS wasn't going to treat my son anytime soon, I'd have to find private treatment for his eating disorder. And being in the terrifying situation of not know where on earth to begin.

How curious that I chose the person who is now my EMDR therapist! She was working as a private CBT therapist back in 2009. It's really helpful that she remembers that period well even though, as she admitted, there was little she could do to help as my son was sinking pretty fast by that stage.

I think she's as shocked as I was and am about the way I was ignored and my son's anorexia was treated so very lightly, almost as if it were the common cold rather than a deadly illness.

So there I was today, in the EMDR session, kind of acting some of this out in the way I might do today if I came across that GP who wasn't listening to me but was listening to my son who was insisting that he was absolutely fine and it was just his overprotective old mum worrying unnecessarily...

I said that I'd feel 10 feet tall and the GP would be tiny. I'd be prodding him with my finger, reading the riot act and physically shaking him, then forcing him to sit through hours or days-worth of eating disorder training conferences. I'd also force him to read my book while I sat there and watched him.

Anyway, apologies if this post isn't very fluent and clunks along a bit. My brain feels like mush after this morning's session and my eyes are sore.