Jessica Goering has gone through one of a parent’s worst nightmares and lived to tell about it. Fortunately, her son survived as well, but there were moments during her journey through anorexia that made the future possibilities so terrifying that as she read about them, I shuddered.
Most children who experience anorexia are girls, so her thirteen-year-old son suddenly deciding he was fat and refusing to eat was the last thing Jessica expected. Almost as bad, her anorexia began while she was away for the summer visiting her father. When Jessica found out about her eating disorder, she flew to find him and was overwhelmed to see how severely malnourished she had become in just a couple of months. Although she was horrified, she knew that she couldn’t limit her attention to just the outer mess she saw, but that she needed to focus on turning the situation around and finding ways to get her son to eat and change her internal way of eating. think about her body.
I won’t go into all the details of how Jessica spent a year turning this situation around. However, if it’s true that it takes a village to raise a child, it’s even truer when it comes to helping a child reverse an eating disorder. Jessica listed the help of her youngest son, friends, teachers and school counselors, psychiatrists, nutritionists and doctors. In some cases, she found that the people she thought were trying to help weren’t really helping, especially when it came to the medical professions. She also had to make difficult decisions about who she told about the condition and who she kept it from. For example, when her child was invited to another child’s party, which of course would include food he did not want to eat, should she inform the other child’s parents ahead of time about her child’s anorexia? These difficult trials became an important part of Jessica’s life.
What’s more, she was stuck trying to understand and predict her son’s behavior. Her son continually claimed that he was too fat and disgusting. He had delusions about the size of his body and was afraid of hurting people and animals because of how big he supposedly was, when in reality he was an emaciated thirteen-year-old boy. The scariest thing of all was when she interacted with other children and suddenly her behavior became irrational. While he was only violent with himself, at one point he started howling and climbed up a tree, scaring other kids she was with. Her body and his brain were not receiving the necessary nutrition to sustain them, so his growth was stunted and it was almost as if he was regressing in intelligence and understanding. Jessica began to seriously fear that she would delay his development in the long run.
Fortunately, through all his efforts, Jessica was able to help him get back to living a normal life, and today he is a happy and healthy teenager. He has written this book not only to document what happened and share the story, but also to give hope to other parents and people who have loved someone with an eating disorder. She offers lots of advice, lots of hope, and some insightful explanations on coping with these difficult situations, as well as understanding and predicting what will trigger such behaviors.
Each chapter of the book ends with a helpful piece of advice. For example, many parents may be obsessed with weighing their child to make sure that he is gaining weight, but such a practice is detrimental to the child who would be horrified by the weight gain, believing that he is already too fat. Jessica’s advice is: “Blind weighing is important. Avoid scales and tape measures unless used by a health professional, and keep the information out of a child’s reach. Do not allow a child to look at a number or other means of comparison. Avoid this as much as possible.”
Jessica also makes it clear how vital it is for parents to understand that when it comes to an eating disorder, it’s not their usual child who they know and love, but a child whose brain has taken over with the disorder. To make this clear, throughout the book Jessica refers to anorexia as Joey the terrorist. From what she describes, he really felt like a terrorist had taken over his house and held his entire family hostage. No rational thought can be expected from the child as a result of this terrorist takeover, be it in terms of eating, weighing himself or countless other behaviors.
Fortunately, Jessica was able to save her son. And fortunately for all of us, she has written this book to help others do the same for her loved ones. In these pages, people will not only receive a better understanding of anorexia and eating disorders, but they will also find hope and compassion for a disorder that we must all fight together.