My conversation with PTC on BabblingCats raises more thoughts about what can trigger abandonment feelings in an woman during eating disorder recovery treatment. Making a referral can bring up abandonment issues yet a referral is more like a bridge to take you across an impasse.

Touching story of felt abandonment on Babbling Cats2.

"I feel like I'm being abandoned by [my therapist].  This is what I don't get.  She obviously thinks I'm not doing well at all and need more help, or something.  So why, when someone is "not well"  (her words, not mine) would you, a T, stop working with the person?  If you're in the field to help people, why would you abandon them when they apparently need you the most?  This is what I don't get.  It's like, "You're doing badly so I can't work with you anymore."  She didn't say that, but that's what it's like.  Does that make sense?  Also, if she knows that things we'll just get worse without her, why would she fire me?  These people are supposed to be helping people, not letting them go when things go a little south."

As a psychotherapist working with people with eating disorders, here is how I answer her question.

In the midst of your efforts to heal from your eating disorder I ask you to take a few moments and answer this question:  What is happiness to you?

Years ago I worked with a woman in my practice, 38 years old, struggling with binge eating and purging, married to an emotionally abusive man, mother of two small children.  After a year of being in psychotherapy with me she said, since she had stopped purging she intended to stop her therapy.  She wasn't in pain anymore.

I asked her, "Is absence of pain enough?"