Supporting Your Daughter Through the Challenges of Advanced Recovery

When my daughter was first diagnosed with anorexia I was completely lost as to what to do. In the beginning I felt extremely scared and confused. I didn't know where to go for the appropriate help. I turned my attention to every piece of material I could research and read about eating disorders. I joined several Facebook groups in hopes I could read and connect to others that are going or have gone through it. I grasped onto every small piece of hope that I could. I was truly feeling helpless. Then we finally got an amazing team of doctors who specialize in eating disorders. That is when we really saw everything start to shift and I knew we were finally getting the help we needed. My daughter immediately got admitted to the hospital. Once out of the hospital we started FBT (Family Based Treatment) at home. It wasn’t easy, but we finally had a direction and we knew what she needed to do in order to recover. So we dove in head first and plugged through every meal. Some days were really hard and others not as much. But we stayed the course.

Fast forward to now, over a year later and I’m happy to say although my daughter still struggles some days, she has worked extremely hard to get to this point in advanced recovery. But now what? I’m learning there is a lot of gray area at this point in recovery. She continues to meet with her Dr, Nutritionist and Therapist, but as her parent, here I am confused all over again, just in a slightly different way. She’s had some hurdles in this stage of recovery, ones I never even considered. We all desperately want things to start to shift back to a more “normal” teenage way of life for her, but how? Is that even possible? How does she get to this maintenance point of her eating disorder? These are all questions we are currently tackling. This point of recovery is not as black and white for us as it was in the beginning.

We have an amazing team and support system backing us up, trying to help us figure this all out. I also have the confidence of knowing that I am that much more knowledgeable about my daughter's eating disorder, opposed to in the beginning. I’ve learned that asking A LOT of questions and continuing to advocate for my daughter, even at this stage of recovery, is just as important as it was a year ago. It definitely is not easy, but this all gives me a sense of comfort that we will get there, we will figure this out for her!