We have a daughter who developed anorexia when she was 16 years old. It changed our lives individually and as a family in a profound way. Someone said to us in the early days that it’s as if an unwelcome, uninvited stranger comes to live in your home and wreaks havoc. Initially, there was a desperate attempt to understand this disorder fully and fix it quickly. We read extensively, did the Pilar and Maudsley programmes and embraced anything we could, to try and make sense of what was happening to our daughter, to our family. It can be very challenging for a couple to negotiate how to be  together in this disturbance. Valuing different perspectives is so challenging but we discovered that it was essential in maintaining some stability for our daughter and the family. I believed that an eating disorder was best treated at home and yet despite our best efforts and with excellent professional support things were not improving. We held her in a place for a while that slowed deterioration but was nowhere near recovery.

We lived with hopelessness and with fear as we watched her slowly slip down a cliff not knowing where the bottom would be and what that would mean. Any feelings that we were experiencing were, I believe, only a fraction of what our daughter was enduring in herself. Remembering this helped us to be understanding and compassionate with her and ourselves and reset as quickly as possible when things became too much at times, and they were often too much.

A bottom was reached, and our very unwell daughter was admitted to an eating disorder programme here in Dublin. She has done very well and is in recovery now and we hope that this will strengthen and be maintained over the next months. Anorexia is a complex disorder and hard to grasp and what brings about recovery is perhaps equally complex, it’s not one thing.

Try to hold hope and believe that recovery is possible -which is no small ask.