Anger and fear

I'm often impressed how parents know by intuition and experience what research later confirms: Emotional perception in eating disorders.

So many families, ours included, learned to diffuse the escalation of fear/anger/fear between ourselves and our kids by adopting (faking, if necessary) an impassive and unruffled face to ED.

I doubt any parent gets through the experience of supporting a loved one through eating disorder recovery without getting mad. What we're really angry about is how the illness steals our child's intellect and abuses his/her emotions and isolates them in a maze of self-destruction. We're angry at our inability to reach them, and often at the difficulty of finding clinical support. It is more about fear than anything.

Ideally, we learn early on about "externalizing" the illness so we see the thoughts and behaviors as "ED" and not as our child - this diffuses our anger and lets us hate the illness while still loving our child. But anger slips through, driven by fear, and we raise our voice or get sullen or stomp away. We make threats we're terrified to make good on. We strike out at our spouses for being more or less angry at ED than we are.

What eventually becomes clear to many families, and certainly to my husband and I, was that our daughter perceived any negative emotion on our part as anger, and it frightened her. Her fear drove our fear. I've often heard people during their illness speak of feeling hated or looked down on by seemingly benign and caring gestures by families - even the phrase "I'm worried about you" is taken in as a criticism and as anger.

ED puts patients in a perfect box: it blinds the person to declining health, re-frames the concern of others as hostility, and in a perfect coup transforms the patient's own fears into expressions of anger toward those trying to help.

Mothers and fathers are the perfect people to end this cycle, to stand in the stream of terror and anger and return nothing but Buddha-like calm. It works, and often we are more amazed than anyone!


  1. Laura, I couldn't agree more as the turning point and key to our d's recovery is when I could Face my Greatest Fear, "ED". When I could separate the illness from my d, Stand Up to ED,Show No Fear,remain firm and consistent yet very,calm and "off the Wave", we began to see a shift in our d's recovery process..

  2. I'd only change one thing in this post "Mothers and fathers CAN BE the perfect people to end this cycle, to stand in the stream of terror and anger and return nothing but Buddha-like calm" - they can be the worst people at it, especially when they have little help advice and support in doing it - and then of course they can inadvertently feed the ED. As Janet Treasure's team state, parents don't cause eating disorders, but they can perpetuate them if their fear leads them to become screaming banshees or shivering amoeba.

  3. hi Laura, I was just wondering how in the world you find all of these amazing articles?
    I'm living on student wages so I'm pretty much slumming it right now but I dolled out the bucks for this one.

  4. Janet Treasure describes this as "Emotional Intelligence", following our innate intuitive parenting instincts.

    If we allow fear and anger to dominate our emotions then the ED abounds. Treasures (and Zucker) work has helped parents identify emotional reactions which can perpetuate the illness. I believe some therapist may struggle with this as well leaving patients searching for a therapist they trust.

    "To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom" Bertrand Russell

  5. LTA - I subscribe to a number of automatic alerts for new research (PubMed, for example). Then if I want to read the whole paper, my library allows me access a lot of full text papers - and then I do end up spending money to get others. I envy my friends who are affiliated with universities.... free full text!

  6. LTA,

    Laura's right- your local public library might have subscriptions to some of these journals. The best thing to do is just ask if they subscribe to academic research journals, and if they can give you a listing. I have limited subscription access through work, and then just beg friends who are still in school for the rest. :)

  7. My children don't have eating disorders, but I do have opportunities frequently to try to keep calm while they're upset. It helps in a variety of ways, I think: They learn that they can express distress without bringing me down; they learn that I can withstand their emotions, and so maybe they can, too; I think more clearly when I'm calm; and I feel better when I"m calm and don't get sucked in.

  8. oh wow, that would be a great idea, checking if my school had something like that,
    thanks so much

  9. I can't get at the whole article (although I am working on it) but reading the abstract made me wonder - if those suffering from restrictive AN were MORE alarmed by anger, and those with BN were LESS, what would be the reaction of those with binge-purge AN or similar variations of EDNOS? If it was, as I predict, highly changeable, then might that complicate things further? Or am I just looking for excuses for myself?

  10. M, I think you've probably nailed it. All the impulsivity and rapid shifting has GOT to complicate how we react and how clinicians frame the issues and diagnosis, right?


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