Ten Zen Questions

Exploring the Mind from Within

by Susan Blackmore

Emily, anorexia and me

My daughter was too thin to be treated for anorexia.

Published on April 22, 2010 by Susan Blackmore in Ten Zen Questions

I have my lovely daughter back. She has thrown off her anorexia and returned to health and happiness after ten long, sad and scary years. My relief is hard to describe.

I know this is way off the topic of this site, but some of you may be interested in our story, which has come to be told partly because of Psychology Today! After I had been writing this blog for a while I thought that her story would interest PT readers and so she began to write her own anorexia blog on Psychology Today.

Then the Daily Mail (a down-market British tabloid) picked this up and printed a story about it (not totally false but with inaccuracies and a "tough love" theme which was certainly not how I saw it). Then ABC and other sites took it from there and finally I wrote up my own brief version for the Guardian's CommentisFree. This has gone up today and is open for comments for 3 days only.

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Oddly enough they (like the Mail) invented a headline that was way off the point. They wrote "The greatest challenge for the parent of a child with an eating disorder is holding onto the person in the grip of the disease". Holding on? I would have thought it was fairly obvious that I was never trying to hold on and indeed that I thought this would be counter-productive. You cannot hang on. Anorexia takes them away.

I was also practicing Zen throughout all these ten years. I have no idea whether it helped, but it certainly encouraged me to accept what was happening and to "let go" rather than to "hang on".