“Just tell him to eat or make him eat”
“Stop him from exercising”
Really on one side of things these statements are hilarious. They are coming from Sophie about her brother. She is glaring at me like I am neglectful parent and not doing my job. Clearly I have failed in doing the most basic thing like disciplining my son and getting him to eat.
She forgets totally (apparently) that we went through the same process with her and that you CANNOT make someone eat just because you want them to.
I try to explain that she was the same. That nothing can make a person eat or stop doing something if they are not willing to. That no matter what we did, she would not eat.
Sophie then gets annoyed with me. I am not allowed to talk about how she was whilst sick with anorexia and what she refused/was unable to do. She gets cross and defensive, brushes me aside and changes the subject. Kind of a conversation stopper really.
So back to square one. If she can’t emphathise nor understand why I cannot get Will to do anything, then she feels she can blame me and make me responsible. At least someone then is responsible if things go pear shaped.
However, on the other hand, Sophie does talk to her brother about some of the helpful tools she has learned to cope with the down times. But she does it more at the objective level, than the subjective level. She tells how it should be, not from her own real experience. She also expects Will to start using these tools straight away – again she forgets it took months to years for her to be able to do this.
It gives me a window into how much she has learned and been able to apply, and where she is still detaching from herself so she doesn’t have to use the appropriate tools.
