I did Pilar, the New Maudsley skills workshops, read three books and consulted an ED specialist. This gave me a cerebral understanding of the disorder and the road to recovery and avoided me taking on the “Rhino” mantle. However, despite this, it took six months seeing my daughter going through the horrors of this disorder to really get it!

It was like a possession in her head that she had not invited in. It was a screaming negative voice about everything to do with nutrition and staying healthy. To help conceptualise it I treated it as an element  “external” or separate to my daughter – trying to treat my daughter with compassion and trying to face down the ED – sometimes they were in disguisable, especially when months of progress could be eliminated in a few days! Did I selfishly get frustrated at times at the impact of the ED directly on my life and plans? Yes! But it was only a small fraction of my daughter’s suffering and life and plans impact.

For a long time, our role became to stop her deteriorating further, with the prospect of setting her on the road to recovery a distant dream. We hoped for an eureka moment, which many parents said eventually came to their person, with no common thread across people! Our daughters came after about two years. We’ll never really know what the core catalyst (if there is such a thing) to rebuilding herself was. Maybe it was her steely determination of old, supported by a scaffolding of us staying the course, (almost) never giving up hope, managing to get a private psychiatrist (hens’ teeth), accepting medication to manager her anxiety, an inevitable hospital admission, while continuing to give her a glimpse of a fulfilling life.

Now, when my daughter apologies for the disruption caused to our lives, I respond that it wasn’t her but the ED and she has nothing to apologise for but that if I ever discovered that she invited the ED in I would be very cross!