When your daughter’s anorexia gives you every excuse to act like an emotional child, it can be difficult to be the kind of parent that your child needs while she is recovering.
If you are spending most of your time in negative feelings, and you feel justified because your daughter has anorexia, you may be acting like an emotional child. If every anorexic behavior that your daughter exhibits leads to an immediate emotional reaction, you may need some practice going from emotional childhood to emotional adulthood. The benefit of emotional adulthood is that you will no longer be handing control of your life over to an eating disorder, or to the behavior that the eating disorder causes in your daughter.
Here are some questions to help you determine whether you are showing up for your daughter as an emotional child or as an emotional adult:
1. Do you believe that your daughter’s anorexic behavior is responsible for your negative feelings?
2. How does your daughter’s anorexic behavior make you feel?
3. Why do you think that her anorexic behavior has the power to create your feelings?
4. What is the thought that you are thinking that is really causing these feelings?
5. Moving forward, how could you take responsibility for your feelings?
Being an emotional adult takes a lot more work than existing in an emotionally childlike reactive state does. But emotional adulthood is key to being able to parent your anorexic child effectively. Learning to manage your mind and yourself so that you aren’t dependent on someone else’s behavior for how you think, feel, and act, or for the results you get or don’t get in your life, is a valuable skill worth learning. You can start by answering the following questions:
1. How can you take more responsibility for your emotional actions and reactions?
2. How can you stop blaming your daughter’s behavior (anorexia) for your emotions and actions?
3. If you stopped blaming her behavior, how would that change the results you are getting?
4. Is it useful to you (or to your daughter) for you to react like an emotional child when anorexia affects her behavior?
It is worth learning to become an emotional adult so that you will not only feel better, you will take back control of your life. Best of all, your emotional adulthood will enable you to be the parent you need to be to help your daughter take back control of her life.
Anorexia is going to behave like anorexia. The work is deciding how you are going to behave. Will you be an emotional adult?
