own trauma. It wasn’t something to silence, suppress, avoid, negate. It
was a well I could draw on, a deep source of understanding and
intuition about my patients, their pain, and the path to healing. My
ĕrst years of private practice helped me to reframe my wound as
something necessary and useful, and to shape and develop my most
enduring therapeutic principles. Oen the patients I worked with
mirrored my own discoveries about the journey to freedom. Equally
oen they taught me that my search for freedom wasn’t complete—
and they pointed me in the direction of further healing.
* * *Although Emma was the identiĕed patient, I met her parents ĕrst.
ey had never spoken to anyone, least of all a stranger, about the
secret in their family: Emma, their oldest child, was starving herself to
death. ey were private, reserved people, a conservative German
American family, their faces creased with worry, eyes filled with fear.
“We’re looking for practical solutions,” Emma’s father told me that
first visit. “We have to get her to start eating again.”
“We heard that you’re a survivor,” Emma’s mother added. “We
thought Emma could learn something from you, that you might
inspire her.”
It was heartbreaking to see their panic for Emma’s life, to see their
shock. Nothing in life had prepared them for a child with an eating
disorder; they had never considered that something like this could
happen to their daughter and their family, and none of their existing
parenting tools was having a positive effect on Emma’s health. I
wanted to reassure them. I wanted to ease their distress. But I also
wanted them to begin to see a truth that might be even more painful
for them to acknowledge than Emma’s illness—that they had a part in
it. When a child is grappling with anorexia, the identiĕed patient is the
child, but the real patient is the family.