I've talked many times on here about how my son's anorexia caused me to develop Complex-PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) - and talking with my friends from the world of eating disorder parents, I'm far from alone. Not surprisingly, many other parents suffer from trauma symptoms, too.
Over the years I've spent a fortune on C-PTSD therapy and used up the NHS mental health therapy allocation ages ago.
Sometimes it feels as if I'm over the C-PTSD and then - whack! - it comes back with a vengeance. This is a real pain when you've been struggling with C-PTSD for so long (going on for a decade in my case?) and you thought you were emerging the other side.
Maybe this resonates with you, as a parent of a son or daughter with an eating disorder like anorexia? Are you suffering from trauma symptoms?
Your child begins to recover and - hopefully - eventually reaches full recovery from their eating disorder, but you, the parent, are still sick.
And Complex PTSD is a weird illness in that, like most mental health conditions, the brain behaves in mysterious ways and you can't always control what it's doing.
Over the last decade, I've read an absolute TON of self-help books on trauma, PTSD and Complex PTSD, and studies show that trauma affects the brain's chemistry and physiology.
Essentially, the brain changes its form and changes what it does.
People say that it's solvable, that you can heal from Complex PTSD, but, to be truthful, I'm losing hope that I'll ever be free of it. My dearest friend, a nurse who worked in CAMHS with eating disorder patients, said: "I don't think PTSD ever really goes away".
I've been through every Complex PTSD therapy there is - from EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) to CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) - but it's still here.
It won't shift.
And over the past two weekends, the symptoms of Complex PTSD hit me suddenly, like a sledgehammer.
I'll maybe blog more about what happened later...
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