If you have never parented a child with an eating disorder you may be surprised to learn that many parents tell me that they feel like running away from home, they are out of ideas, they are desperate, they are terrified, and nothing works. In addition to that they often say that no matter what they say their child is angry with them.
Far too often still, parents are not given the skills, tools, support, words and actions that they can utilize to help provide effective support. And the net effect is that they feel all those defeated and unhelpful feelings and are not able to be effective, calm, compassionate and definitely not confident.
So what is the answer when we have an extremely broken health care system that dangles at the ends of the puppet strings of the greedy and broken insurance system in the USA? Yeah, I’m not mincing words, just stating the facts. Check out this piece from Harvard Medical School from this past summer about our broken health care system.
No need to reinvent the wheel, the tools to help parents provide; trust, empowerment, care and inspiration to their loved ones with eating disorders exists. You’re probably thinking, but who is going to pay for providing this support to parents? Giving family caregivers the full amount of support they need and deserve to be effective caregivers will happen when we change the Standard Of Care (SOC) to include supporting the caregivers.
Until that happens, family caregivers of those with eating disorders can get a large
chunk of that education and support from our Recovery Roadmaps webinar series, “Going from Panic to Plan” and the HUG Kits which can be made available by your treatment program via our Affiliate Partner programs. We give 20% of purchases back to the Affiliate Partner to help grow their family caregiver support programs.
We just need to get creative to support folks until this broken system is fixed.
Being trained in Dr. Adele LaFrance’s Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) 
model has been such a gift as I’ve been able to help family caregivers to learn to use this validation tool so that their loved ones feel; seen, heard, trust, empowered, cared for and inspired to recover. It’s great to see this research showing up in “The Journal of Eating Disorders” as a research article, “The power of feeling seen: perspectives of individuals with eating disorders on receiving validation” authored by; Josie Geller1,2* , A. Fernandes1 , S. Srikameswaran1,2, R. Pullmer1 and S. Marshall3 You can read this open access article here: file:///Users/administrator/Downloads/s40337-021-00500-x.pdf
We are finally giving family caregivers the tools that they need to help support loved ones in recovery during the times of day that they’re not in treatment. Better late than never right?
