Ball State

» eating disorder treatment

By China at 8:26 AM

My mother has had so many problems throughout her life, it is amazing that she has come as far as she has. She started out being raised primarily by and alcoholic mother who used to hit her and take her to bars when she was just a little girl. She struggled growing up with her mother until when she was about 14 her mother was sent to a rehab for women, which was court ordered by the state and then she was put into foster care as her father was no where to be found. By this point, I really think that she was already damaged beyond repair and within a few short years, she was living with a nice family but she was always in and out of trouble. She hung out with a rough crowd and with a lot of really bad people. She had always been slightly overweight but really had not worried about it until a guy she was dating said that she was fat, and this seems to have triggered a response in her that was over the top. She began starving herself. Anorexia nervosa is what they call this disorder. She began to loose weight and honestly I have seen some pictures of my mother during this time in her life, and she looks more like a skeleton than a human being. She got her weight down to 97 lbs and then she had to be hospitalized for eating disorder treatment. During her stay in the hospital, apparently she learned how to purge because she was forced to eat and didn't want to gain any weight. Only later did she really learn about her disorder and actually found out that being a child of an alcoholic made her more predisposed to this illness than other people. Since anorexia was more about control than actually about weight, she learned that not eating was actually her way of taking some sort of control in her life. For the first time, she actually felt empowered, and although it was a long road to recovery she made it. She got herself up to a healthy weight and has continued her counseling for all these years. After she got out of treatment, she went back and got her GED and went to college, where she met my father. My mother has always been very open about her anorexia and knows that she needs to be really careful for the rest of her life.

Thank goodness, she got the help she needed. The foster family that she lived with still keeps in touch with her. If it had not been for them getting her the help she needed, I know she would not be here today, and for that fact neither would I.