How do I [30F] tell my sister [29F] that her eating disorder is becoming too difficult to be around? Or am I viewing this all wrong?

My sister and I are very close, always have been, we get along great but we don't talk about emotional things very much. It's just how we were raised (probably honestly a little repressed). She's struggled with an eating disorder for several years now, I don't know if she fully accepts that she has one and was very much in denial about it before but has more recently admitted that she knows her lack of eating is u healthy. She also recognizes she has body dysmorphia and has lamented to me about fat that just.. doesn't exist. She's very underweight in reality but doesn't see it and has said she "knows doctors tell her she's not fat" but feels she is anyway. This is the extent of what we've talked about though.

We regularly get together and have dinner as a tradition to catch up but lately dinners have been getting more and more tense and stressful. She becomes irritable and angry around food that she finds unhealthy and spends a long time guilting and agonizing over wether she deserves to eat or not. Everything is a cheat meal regardless if it's pizza or a salad. It's like eating at all is cheating. I am not exaggerating when I say that she can easily spend 30+ minutes going back and forth with me over wether or not she can eat dinner- there have been times where I cook and then finish my own by the time she's even decided if she is "allowed" some spaghetti.

It's extremely difficult to see, and I've tried talking with her about it but she tends to shut down and not want to discuss it, or goes back and forth and decides it's not unhealthy and I'M just unhealthy and don't understand. It's true I don't eat well, and I know there's no malice in what she says, but I recognize she's not gonna take anything I say seriously because she just views me as a junk food eater that has no idea what I'm talking about.

I don't want to continue having these dinners because they're really starting to wear me down. I feel for her but I also feel like it's making me dread our get togethers. I've tried talking to her about some other kind of hang out instead but she's totally unwilling-she's also very big on routine (this could be due to mental health issues or just her personality because even when we were little she this way) and won't budge on changing plans. Her proposed solution is that we hang out for dinner but she simply will not eat in my presence anymore so therefore the problem is solved. This feels... unhealthy to me? But I'm not sure if it is.

I guess there's also this part of me that worries if I call things off and stop seeing her for dinner, then I won't see her at all, and I won't see if she gets any worse because she's very reclusive and works from home so nobody really checks in on her. Maybe on some level that's irrational or selfish though because I don't know if me seeing her this way is helping at all right now anyway. But I'm just very scared for her sometimes.

I don't want to upset her, and I don't want to put distance between us or scare her off because I love her and want her in my life. But is there some solution to this I'm not seeing? Has anyone else dealt with anything similar and can tell me what you did and what happened? I'm at a total loss. I don't know if telling her that her disorder is affecting ME is needlessly cruel, or if it's selfish of me.. but I don't know what to do.

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tl;dr: My sister has a disordered relationship with food, her agitation around it upsets me, but I don't know how to talk to her about it or what to do.

Submitted November 02, 2020 at 04:04PM by cilt https://ift.tt/382j23v