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    How My Daughter's Name Helped Me Understand Her Eating Disorder

    By | Parenting – Fri, Aug 31, 2012 3:10 PM EDT

    Often times, there's a larger issue underneathIt was winter break and my daughter came home for the holidays. She was working on her masters program and instead of student-teaching as the college had promised, she had three of her own, three high school classes to teach, despite a complete lack of prior experience.

    I was appalled; I had been a master teacher myself for four student teachers. She kept insisting everything was all right.

    To further compound the pressure, she was living off whatever money I was sending to her. With small, 400 square-foot apartments renting for more than my house payment, giving her much beyond what she needed for rent, tuition and food was extremely difficult. We were both stressed.

    Her dad - my husband - had treated her to a plane ticket and some time at home. Being a typical parent, I was overjoyed to see my daughter. However, she was extremely gaunt ... so thin that I thought hugging her would somehow break her bones. Her dad, on the other hand, thought she looked terrific.

    While our culture dictates that thinner is better, yet as parents, we know when something is drastically wrong.

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    One week into her holiday at home, I decided to purchase a ticket for me to fly up and see her one week after she returned home. We went to the grocery store together, as there was no food in her apartment. I refused to put any food in the basket, stating that I wanted to be sure that whatever we got she'd be willing to eat.

    We walked the aisles of that grocery store like people window shop in malls. For three hours, nothing went into the basket. That didn't stop us from touring up and down the aisles, over and over and over again, until I thought I could stock the shelves myself, since I knew where everything belonged.

    I reminded my daughter that this was a 24-hour store and we weren't going home until the basket was full. What a painful experience to see your own child, so distraught and so willing to starve herself, that she can't even put food into the grocery basket.

    As parents, we ask ourselves what we have done or could have done to cause this problem. And what do we need to do now to fix it? For me, it was going to start with food. We were not leaving until that basket was full. The fact that I would now be going into debt didn't matter ... my child was going to get what she needed.

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    Ours was a typical anorexic story. My child could not control the outrageous, tedious and irrelevant abundance of homework she was being given in her teaching program. Nor could she control the fact that the district threw her into a classroom with no supervision, no help and no preparation, as if she had already completed her student teaching.

    Mine was a good child and she wanted to do her best, but between teaching three classes and taking a full load of classes herself, it was nearly impossible to control anything in her life.

    I did not know anything about the discomfort or cause of being anorexic, but I had started dissecting names. My daughter has a 'CO' combination in her name, which indicates people who tend to be control queens. They need to be in charge, as that is how they master their fears.

    Knowing how to dissect her name is what gave me the know-how of what to do next and how to help my daughter. I graded papers, I cooked and cleaned; I took as much stress away from her as I could while letting her tell me what to do.

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    If she felt out of control at work and school, she could be in control at home by dictating to me what she wanted done. She now had someone to control, instead of feeling the only thing she could control was her food intake. By my becoming totally submissive, she began to open up and talk. This allowed us to discuss other viable alternatives that she could control other than food. Once that was firmly established, I returned home.

    We put safeguards in place. One of my best friends from high school, who lived in the area, dropped in on her occasionally and gave me progress reports. Fortunately, this is the only time that my child went in this direction.

    Instead of being saved by the bell, we were saved by her name. How do you think knowing what a name means can help you to help your child?

    Written By Sharon Lynn Wyeth for YourTango.com.

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