My daughter's road to recovery with eating disorder, and more
My daughter's road to recovery with eating disorder, and more
Saying we need help is Step One (and doesn't matter how that needs to happen)
Hey (a little) Crazies and friends!
I’m out on the road this week with two in-person event stops.
—For anyone in the Jackson, MS area, I’ll be at Lemuria Books on Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 5 p.m. to sign books and give a short talk. Come see me, and tell others :)
—For anyone in the Los Angeles area, I’ll be at Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica at 1113 Montana Avenue (yes, I’m heading west!) on Thursday Sept. 26 at 6 p.m., along with dear friend, singer-songwriter Claire Holley. Anyone in LA please, come, or tell any friends and family there to come! It’s free and you can register here.
Finding Recovery from Eating Disorder, Bullying, and Managing Social Media
My daughter, Mary Halley, is in her early 30s with three young children now, but she'll always be the little girl I want to protect and keep safe.
That's why today, despite the healing and forgiveness, I still feel pain for the crucial period of her life, when she was a senior in high school, struggling with an eating disorder and trying to survive amid bullying, when we barely spoke due to the struggle that cost me a personal and professional crisis. I always will because a father cannot forget.
She didn't fully understand what I faced then, nor did I know what she faced then. In the years since, we have healed and grown together with amends, honest conversations, and better communication, and it has made all the difference.
I'm passionate about sharing stories of family hope and healing. It can and always will get better if we do the work of communication, forgiveness, and learning more about ourselves and those closest to us, as it did for us.
Now, we have the relationship I dreamed about, and more importantly, she's found and crafted tools for navigating mental health challenges, including eating disorders, and others, including parents, three small children, and social media in a comparison world.
That's all part of the story shared on this week's new A Little Crazy podcast episode featuring my daughter, Mary Halley (Magee) Carlson. I believe that almost everyone can relate and learn from her discussion, in one way or another, about how the struggle for family and communication amid trauma is real but how there is a way out. She also discusses tools for managing her eating disorder.
Tip number one, she said, involves speaking out and acknowledging what she faced. As a high school senior, she didn't have the confidence to tell her mother, and most certainly not me, at that time, so she initially reached out to a counselor at her high school, who bridged the conversation safely with her and her mother.
The point is that it doesn't matter how that initial conversation gets shared. Those close to us will get over it since that first step allows healing to begin.
But the first step is only that.
In this episode, Mary Halley explains she was struggling a year later as a freshman in college despite initial counseling. She tells how the next step for her came a year later when a friend on her college campus invited her to a peer discussion about eating disorders and body image. Mary Halley says she arrived at the iconic Grove on the University of Mississippi campus where she was a freshman, and a young alum named
was there with scales and a sledgehammer.
"You want to smash a scale?"
She wasn't sure, thinking she wasn't much of a scale-smashing type.
But once invited to engage and tell her story, she took the hammer, smashed, and smashed. Hours later, she called me and her mother, explaining how she needed more intensive therapy and help regarding her eating disorder battle. We helped craft a plan and, years later, celebrate her journey in recovery, which has allowed her to have a family.
It starts with communicating what we face. That's the most challenging part, the vital first step, and it doesn't matter how that happens, from telling someone else or smashing a scale.