Jessica Goering has been through one of a parent’s worst nightmares and lived to tell the tale. Fortunately, her son also survived, but there were moments during her journey through anorexia that made future possibilities so terrifying that as she read about them, they gave me the creeps.
Most children who experience anorexia are girls, so her thirteen-year-old suddenly deciding that he was fat and refusing to eat was the last thing Jessica expected. Almost as bad as her anorexia started while she was away for the summer visiting her father. When Jessica found out about her eating disorder, she flew out 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 could not limit her attention to just the outer mess she saw, but that she needed to focus on reversing the situation and finding ways to make her child eat and change her inner way of thinking. think about her body.
I won’t go into all the details of how Jessica spent a year turning this around. However, if it is true that it takes a village to raise a child, it is even more true when it comes to helping a child reverse an eating disorder. Jessica listed help from 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 were actually not helping, especially when it came to the medical professions. She also had to make tough decisions about who she told about the condition and who she kept from her. For example, when her son was invited to another boy’s party, which of course would include food he did not want to eat, should she tell the other boy’s parents in advance about her son’s anorexia? These difficult trials became an important part of Jessica’s life.
Even 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 his body size 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 a tree, scaring other children 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 she was regressing in intelligence and understanding of him. Jessica began to seriously fear that she would retard his long-term development.
Fortunately, through all her efforts, Jessica was able to help her get back to living a normal life, and today he is a happy and healthy teenager. She 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 a loved one with an eating disorder. She offers a lot of advice, a lot of hope, and some insightful explanations on how to deal with these difficult situations, as well as how to understand and predict what will trigger such behaviors.
Each chapter of the book ends with helpful advice. For example, many parents may be obsessed with weighing their child to ensure 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 weigh-ins are important. Avoid the scale and tape measure unless used by a healthcare professional and keep the information out of a child’s reach. Don’t let a child fixate on 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 about their usual child whom they know and love, but about a child whose brain has been taken over by 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 was holding 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 themselves, 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, they will also find hope and compassion for a disorder that we must all fight together.