"Life stops until you eat," say the eating disorder experts

It was F.E.A.S.T., I think, that coined the excellent phrase: "Life stops until you eat" - a phrase which I've heard many, many times on the F.E.A.S.T. forum, Around The Dinner Table, when it comes to getting your eating disordered child to eat. On Tuesday, the US-based Kartini Clinic's Dr Julie O'Toole blogged about the same topic. The topic talks about how to continue to get your child to eat and put on weight once they've been discharged from formal treatment for their eating disorder. In a nutshell, whenever they resist, you tell them that "Life stops until you eat". As Dr O'Toole says: "No friends, no going out, no cell phone, no parties, no car, no clothes shopping, no college visits. The first job is to nourish the body and all else comes after that." Indeed the focus of Family Based Therapy (FBT) as an evidenced-based model for the treatment of anorexia in adolescents is, first and foremost, "Life stops until you eat".

Trying to describe why this is Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder, and wondering what can be done about it...

Each of the therapists I had for my (what I assumed was and what was diagnosed as) PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) attempted to get me to believe and accept that my son's eating disorder, and all the horrors that came with it, was in the past. The idea was to 'process' the nightmarish memories so my brain began to accept that it was history and I could start to live a post-eating-disorder life free of nightmares, anxiety, fear, dread and all the other stuff that was causing nasty symptoms and making me feel 'strange' and 'trapped'.

Again, on the topic of PTSD, why PTSD therapy will never work for parents like us

I've been feeling frustrated that, after all the therapy sessions and treatment models I have received over the past few years for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I still feel the way I do. So I began googling and came across something called Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder (CTSD).

Sometimes I can talk or write about eating disorders and sometimes I can't...

It's funny how sometimes I can visit the Around The Dinner Table Forum (for parents of young people with eating disorders) and blog here, and sometimes I just can't. Sometimes I can talk about what we call 'the ED years' (the years my son was suffering from anorexia) and sometimes I just can't. And sometimes I can update my eating disorders website and sometimes I just can't.

Just when I thought the PTSD had almost been fixed...

If you've been following this blog you'll know that I've had problems with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which began a few years ago. Last year I had 30+ sessions of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) therapy which helped a lot in that it 'processed' many of the memories of Ben's eating disorder years. That's not to say that I 'forgot' these memories, I could never do that, but what the EMDR did do was to let my brain realise that these events / memories are in the PAST and not in the PRESENT, making them a little less traumatic to deal with.

Two bits of news!

The first bit of news is that my new eating disorders website is up and running. I still need to do a few tweaks and add some more pages, but the 'look and feel' is there now. (I know I updated it a short while ago, but I wasn't happy with it, so I've given it a refresh as well as adding a security certificate for safer browsing.)

The second bit of news is that I've just returned from a weekend in Brighton where I met up with the other new Board members of the national charity Men Get Eating Disorders Too. A month or so ago I was invited to join as a Trustee.

What's making me jump for joy today?

Remember how the eating disorder stole my son's social life as well as so many other things in his life? Remember how, for a very, very long time, he was unable to go to school or meet up with his friends? How, gradually, the boy who'd been so popular became so very isolated and alone, so much so that on his 18th birthday in December 2011, he was virtually in tears because he was celebrating alone with just me and his dad?