Diary of the Pain of a Father

 Today, somehow I feel a bit better. Not 'good' by any means but not as bad as yesterday... Why? I suspect it was being able to 'speak' the words I hadn't said out loud in yesterdays blog post. For some reason, on Tuesday, because I was a bit optimistic, I didn't discuss the depths of where my despair had been over the previous week. I think that was an mistake I shouldn't make again. On Monday my wife and I talked and she share that my daughter had at least talked about being depressed and some of the reasons for that, that had then led to the anorexia coming back. For her that was actually progress, as she was basically non-verbal the last time she was deep in her anorexia... But I should have told my therapist how much I was spinning out of control the days before Monday. we talked about how it was very soon to be retraumatised after I had only really just unpacked all of the last time, but I didn't have any idea how overwhelming it would be. A small ...

 So my eldest daughter has anorexia. It started when she was 12 She's now 16 and has started to relapse for the third time I don't think I can make it The pain, anxiety and fear are unbearable The mental health system, everywhere, is overwhelmed. Her life literally needs to hang in the balance to get admitted to the clinic Getting heart scans to determine to what extent your daughter is at risk of a heart attack, because she has starved her body of food to 'control' her stress is a level of anguish I can't describe Watching her eat less and less, watching the skin slowly stretch over her bones, skin recede into visible eyesockets, teeth poke out from a malnourished face all this is pain on an unimaginable scale for a parent...I do this every day, three times a day at meals, where I can think of nothing else... I am 'preparing' myself for this process for the third time in 4 years... By preparing myself, what I really mean is trying - and mostly failing - not...