Living With Food: The Science Supporting Eating Disorder Treatment

This letter was written by the mother of a former client who was in our adolescent program. It is published with their permission in hopes that it will be a helpful resource for other families considering treatment. Identifying information has been removed to protect the privacy of our client.

Dear Dr. Wisniewski & Dr. LeGrange,

I would like to take a moment to personally thank you for all you have done to help the development of the Maudsley Approach. At this present time my daughter is weight restored, back in school, and resuming the normal life of a teenage girl (given that there is a normal). It has been * since we discovered my daughter was assaulted and used starvation and bulimia as a coping mechanism to deal with her trauma. After 4 or 5 months of “traditional” treatment and heartache we learned of a program about * hours from our home that specialized in family based therapy. Our family was struggling, but through the Maudsley approach and CCED, not only was my daughter recovering, but we also were able to reestablish family communication, and coming together to fight this battle. We understood that the more aggressive we were in fighting this the better her chances were (are) for a long term recovery. My daughter and I went to The Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders and stayed there during the week, to take back control of her life. Once my daughter realized we were on her side and were willing to go to such drastic measures, such as to leave home, work, and school, she slowly came to realize she did not want to live her life that way any longer (once weight restored) and saw the need to pick up the fight.

The transition back to * was scary, but our therapist was familiar with the Maudsley method and began working with us again to continue recovery. My daughter is doing well at stage III, we still are in the process of following up and monitoring her weight, but we have been tapering off on sessions and she has been holding pretty steady. She knows when she needs to add extra supplements to her diet and we communicate our concerns to one another. The hardest part was probably phase II for me. After centering everything around her eating and being in Cleveland, just the two of us, I had to hold back on tendencies to want to mother or hover too much. I am so thankful that the support was available to help parents with this aspect of the treatment. I am so thankful for a program that allowed parents to be involved and part of the recovery and not isolated or considered the blame. We already had way too much guilt, and I am happy that she has the tools now to deal with difficulties in her life.

I appreciate your time in reading, I am sure, one of the millions of letters that you receive. I am a student, and while working on a project for my psychology class on eating disorders, and correcting my professor when she went down the road of parents being responsible, I realized there still is not a lot of information and resources regarding anorexia and family based therapy. So, while doing my research for my paper, I reflected on how lucky we were to have come across this program and; and this is what prompted my letter to you. I hope that other families are able to benefit as well.

Sincerely,

*