I still find visits to the GP triggering...

Every time I walk into our GPs' surgery, I get SO VERY ANGRY. Today I had to take my mum in to see a GP and - zap, pow! - my anger took off into the upper stratosphere.

Basking in some serious 'me time'

One thing I have learned in the aftermath of my son's eating disorder is to 'allow' time for myself. For so many years I focused on One Thing Exclusively: my son, and his recovery from anorexia. Then, as his recovery from anorexia began to come on leaps and bounds, I blogged like crazy here, wrote books, did talks and other stuff in the world of eating disorders.

So what is my son, Ben, up to this summer?

I just thought I'd give you an update on how Ben (now aged 23) is getting on with life now that the eating disorder is well and truly behind him...

Digging around to find the 'raw me' as a foundation for my life from here onwards

The little girl who
was about to get ticked off
on her first day at school

When I was 10 or 11, I used to walk back from orchestra rehearsals on a Saturday morning (violin...) via Woolworths in the city centre. Woolworths was famous for its 'pick'n'mix' sweets (candy). I'd pick a bit of this, a bit of that until I had a bag full of my favourites. Beginning to reconstruct a post-trauma life uses a CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) technique (from Rosenthal's book Your life after trauma) that's a bit like pick'n'mix.

This technique helps you to see the wider picture of who you really are, at the core. The 'raw you', if you like. And to home in on the characteristics you want to keep and discard those negative characteristics or thought processes that you don't - those traits that may have come about as part of the trauma, weren't true to the 'real you', are no longer relevant at this point in your life, were just downright destructive, and so on.

Do we parents really want to 'pick up where we left off' before the eating disorder struck?

A great view from the top
(see penultimate paragraph)

Most probably not. Or at least that's the case with me. My journey through my son's battle with anorexia stripped away all the cr@p and superficial stuff of life to allow me to draw on those 'core' resources that have always been part of me and to use them to get my son through the eating disorder. I threw aside all the clutter and trashy stuff, and what emerged was the real me because there simply wasn't any room in my life for anything that wasn't part-and-parcel of the core resources I needed to get my son well.

My 'negative trauma story' re-written into a 'positive trauma story'

One of the first exercises in Michele Rosenthal's workbook 'Your life after trauma - powerful practices to reclaim your lost identity' is to re-write / change your negative trauma story i.e. a short description of your current feelings about who you are as a result of going through the trauma (in our case the 24/7/365 stress of getting our son or daughter through an eating disorder). I jotted down my own version and it ended up looking something like this:

Are you, the parent, having a spot of bother with PTSD following the eating disorder?

I first mentioned PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) three-and-a-half years ago at the end of 2013 in this blog post from December 2013. And, as you'll know if you've been following my blog, I've been struggling with PTSD ever since. Or, more accurately, C-PTSD (Complex or Chronic PTSD - the result of lengthy exposure to trauma). I also know of other parents of young people with eating disorders that are currently struggling with trauma-like symptoms. As their son or daughter recovers from the eating disorder, they - the parents - find themselves debilitated with this confounded C-PTSD thing.