Your Child Isn't Being Difficult at the Table. They're Having a Hard Time.

There’s a week I couldn’t pick out from all the others now, because so many of them ran together. Cookbooks open on the counter. Menu plans from a dietitian who specialized in eating disorders. Hours online searching for anything close to what my son used to love before all of this, hoping I could find something that would make eating feel a little easier.

By then, he needed to eat six times a day, three meals and three snacks. It felt like we were always thinking about food. And almost none of what I tried seemed to work.

He pushed back. He refused. He got sneaky in ways that broke something in me every time I discovered them. Food scraped into the trash when I wasn’t looking, or dumped out the second I turned my back. I was exhausted in a way that had very little to do with sleep.

That was the week his therapist mentioned a video about something called emotion coaching. I watched it that night. And I tried it the next day.

A Different Way of Responding

At the time, I didn’t know the research behind emotion coaching. I just knew I couldn’t keep doing what I’d been doing.

Emotion coaching comes from the work of psychologist Dr. John Gottman, and Dr. Adele Lafrance later adapted it for families facing eating disorders through Emotion-Focused Family Therapy. At its heart, it’s pretty simple:

Before we try to change the behavior, we slow down enough to understand what our child may be feeling underneath it.

We notice the emotion. We get curious instead of immediately correcting. We listen and help our child put words to what they’re experiencing. Then, when needed, we hold the boundary or work through the problem.

That last part matters. Emotion coaching doesn’t mean letting the emotion make the decision. It means recognizing that the emotion is real before we decide what needs to happen next.

For me, though, the first change wasn’t dramatic. My shoulders came down a little. There was less tension in my own body and more room to actually look at my son instead of only looking at the plate. I found myself becoming less angry at the eating disorder and less focused on what he needed to do. Instead, I started wondering:

What must this feel like for him?

He was a little less resistant. Not dramatically, and certainly not every time. It was still really hard. But sometimes a small shift is enough to give a mother hope. Maybe it meant one or two more bites than the night before. At that point, those one or two bites mattered. And I think we both felt a little relief.

Our Faith Had Been Teaching Me This All Along

I didn’t understand it this way at the time, but I eventually realized there was something deeply Catholic about what I was learning.

St. John Paul II taught so beautifully about the dignity of the human person. Each of us is unique and unrepeatable, made in the image of God, with an interior life that matters. A person isn’t an object to manage. And our children aren’t problems to solve.

That sounds obvious until you’re sitting across the table from a child who desperately needs to eat and is telling you they can’t. Because in those moments, it’s incredibly easy to see only the behavior. He needs to eat. She cannot go exercise. We have to finish this meal.

Those things may all be true. But there’s still a person underneath the behavior. Emotion coaching helped me begin to see him again. Not just the eating disorder. Not just the meal.

My son.

What This Looked Like at Our Table

I eventually started creating little scripts for myself. Not because there were magic words that suddenly made him eat, but because I needed something to help me remember what was happening when everything in me wanted to panic, argue, or push harder. One sounded something like this:

A script from our table

“I understand why you don’t want to eat this right now. You’ve already eaten five times today, and this is your sixth time eating. You’re probably full. You’re worried about the acid reflux that’s been such a problem for you. And there’s a lot of anxiety coming up too.

“Even though it feels like too much food, there may be a part of you that’s really scared right now. I understand that.

“And we still need to eat this meal. I’m going to sit here with you for as long as you need, and we’ll get through it together.”

Later, I learned this has a name. In Emotion-Focused Family Therapy, it’s called validating with three reasons. Instead of simply naming the feeling, we try to name a few real reasons it makes sense that our child is feeling it.

I said versions of that over and over, sometimes to myself before I ever said them to him. And slowly, something shifted in me. This wasn’t him being difficult. He was genuinely struggling.

Something I learned later in my training helped me understand this even more. What can look like a lack of motivation may actually be a child carrying a tremendous amount of fear or shame, and very little confidence that they can do the hard thing being asked of them.

Eating felt scary and uncomfortable. His anxiety was telling him something terrible would happen if he kept going. He didn’t need a better argument from me.

He needed me to understand how hard it felt, and then stay with him while he did the hard thing.

Understanding the Fear Doesn’t Mean the Fear Gets to Decide

This is an important distinction, especially for parents who are new to emotion coaching. Validating a feeling is not the same thing as agreeing with the eating disorder. I can say:

“I know this feels terrifying.”

“I believe you when you say you’re full.”

“I can see how much anxiety is coming up right now.”

And still say: “And we need to finish the meal.”

Both can be true. We can take our child’s fear seriously without letting the eating disorder make the decision.

That’s one of the things I love about the Catholic understanding of freedom. Freedom doesn’t simply mean doing whatever we feel like doing in a particular moment. Real freedom allows us to move toward what is true and good, even when our feelings are pulling us somewhere else.

Sometimes love looks like sitting beside a child who is overwhelmed by what their body needs them to do. For some kids, that fear comes out in tears or anger. Others shut down, argue, or barely show it at all. My son rarely showed me what he was feeling. He held so much inside. He could be incredibly stoic. But sometimes I could see it in his eyes.

We don’t have to argue the fear away. We don’t have to pretend it isn’t there. And we don’t have to let it lead. We can simply say, in a hundred different ways:

I see how hard this is. And I’m staying with you.

Staying With Them in the Suffering

There’s another teaching from my own formation that helped me understand this differently:

Love may involve suffering, but suffering itself is not love.

I think about Mary standing at the foot of the Cross. She didn’t rescue Jesus from what was happening. She didn’t flee from it either. She stayed.

For me, there’s something important there for parents walking through an eating disorder. We desperately want to take the suffering away. I would have taken my son’s fear, anxiety, discomfort, all of it, if I could have. But I couldn’t. What I could do was stay with him inside of it.

Sometimes the meal still ended with frustration or resistance. Sometimes he shut down. Sometimes it took forever. And it didn’t mean there was less love in the room. Sometimes love looked like presence, for as long as it took.

Why This Matters So Much in Eating Disorder Recovery

An eating disorder can slowly change the way our child relates to their own body. The body can become something to control. Something to measure. Something to discipline, perfect, shrink, or manage.

Our Catholic faith offers such a different understanding. St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body reminds us that body and soul belong together. Our bodies aren’t simply problems to master. They’re part of who we are and how we live, love, relate, and experience the world.

Recovery, then, is about so much more than getting through a meal. It’s also the slow work of helping a person come home to themselves again. At the table, we’re communicating:

Your fear matters. Your experience matters. You matter. And because you matter, we’re still going to do what your body needs.

We can hold both compassion and boundaries. We can be gentle without giving the eating disorder control.

Where My Faith Actually Held Me

Most of this happened during COVID, when the churches were closed. I couldn’t receive the Eucharist. I couldn’t go to Mass. So I prayed the Rosary. I listened to podcasts. Some days I sat in front of the Blessed Sacrament through an online Adoration stream because that was all I had. Later, when things opened again, I began going to daily Mass and Adoration.

But there were days when I couldn’t even actively pray for help. I was too emotionally exhausted to form the words. I would just show up. Sit there. Sometimes completely numb. And let God do the work within me.

I don’t think that’s a small thing or somehow a lesser kind of faith because I didn’t have the words. I needed somewhere to receive before I could keep giving.

You cannot give what you have not received.

Whatever steadiness I was eventually able to bring into our home didn’t originate entirely with me. I had to receive it too.

The Work Happens in the Hours No One Sees

This is one of the things I don’t think we talk about enough in eating disorder recovery. A therapist may get fifty minutes. Parents get the fifth meal of the day. The argument about the workout that isn’t happening tonight. The food that disappeared. The silence when you know something is going on, but your child isn’t telling you what it is. The car ride home from the doctor’s appointment.

Those hours matter. Emotion coaching gave me a way to enter those moments differently. Not perfectly, but differently. And that matters too.

Because a well-coached moment can still end in frustration, resistance, or silence. A meal may still not get finished. Your child may still be angry with you. Or they may say almost nothing at all.

Validation won’t necessarily make the feeling disappear. That’s not really the goal. But it can lower the distress and sometimes open the door, even just a crack.

The goal isn’t a perfectly calm child or a perfectly calm mother. It’s helping our children slowly experience something different:

Big feelings can be here, and our relationship can still be safe.

Fear can be here. Anger can be here. Tears can be here. Silence can be here. And I can still stay. Over time, those small moments become part of healing.

For me, the posture underneath emotion coaching eventually became something like this:

The posture underneath

Regulate before you react.

Get curious before you correct.

Pray before you try to control.

Choose presence over being perfect.

Entrust to God what was never yours to carry alone.

If Another Mother Called Me Tonight

I’d want to listen first. Just let her talk. Because there’s so much. And every family’s story is different.

We tend to put eating disorders, disordered eating, over-exercise, and RED-S into one box as though the path through it looks the same for everyone. It doesn’t. Our children are unique. Our families are unique. So I’d let her tell me about hers.

And then I’d probably tell her that this may be one of the hardest things she will ever walk through. I’d tell her that if it feels incredibly hard, that’s because it is incredibly hard. And I’d tell her there is hope.

Then I’d tell her something I wish someone had told me much earlier: My own fear came into that kitchen with me. My anxiety came too. My history. My tendency to push through and keep going. The parts of me that didn’t sit very easily with uncertainty.

None of those things caused my son’s eating disorder. But they shaped how I experienced what was happening and, sometimes, how I responded to him.

For a long time, I didn’t recognize that my anxiety was sitting at that table right alongside his. I pushed it down and kept going because that’s what I thought I needed to do.

Looking back, I wish I had gotten support for myself sooner. Not because I was the problem. And not because healing myself would somehow magically heal him. But because I was walking through something too. Getting support for myself wasn’t a detour from helping my son. It would have helped me be more present to him, and it would have helped our whole family.

You cannot give what you have not received.

That’s not guilt. It’s an invitation to remember that while you are taking care of your child, you are still a person in this story too. And you deserve somewhere to bring your fear, your questions, your exhaustion, and all the things you’re carrying in the hours no one else sees.

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Want six real scripts for moments like these?

I’ve put together six practical mealtime scripts for some of the moments parents tell me are the hardest: the plate gets pushed away, your child says they’re not hungry, they become overwhelmed or shut down, someone makes a comment at the table, or you lose your own steadiness and need to repair.

Download the free mealtime guide →

And if you’re realizing that you need somewhere to bring what you’re carrying too:

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For informational and supportive purposes only. Not a replacement for medical, nutritional, or mental health care.