Ascending the Fourteener of Recovery: A Mother and Daughter's Climb Toward Eating Disorder Freedom

Mother and daughter, KC and Bryn detail their two-year battle with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Ascending the Fourteener of Recovery was written to offer hope and inspiration to others embarking on their own arduous, ever-changing path to healing. As the mother-daughter duo lead others through their descent into the hellacious trenches of a mental disorder with the highest mortality rates, KC reveals how she stopped at nothing to find help and save her daughter’s life. Bryn discloses how the power of her mind first guided her into the darkness of an unhealthy relationship with food, and then led her out into the light of recovery thanks, in part, to FBT (Family Based Treatment).

When KC Tillman gave birth in 2000, she never imagined that her precious bundle of joy would become embroiled in a fight for her life just sixteen years later. She shares the difficulties of parenting a teen with a stigmatized mental illness. Bryn Tillman grew up setting impossibly high expectations for herself that produced feelings of inadequacy, imperfection, and failure. She mistakenly believed that everyone else also hated their reflection in the mirror and constantly strived to be a better physical being like she did. Little did Bryn know how wrong she was.

Ascending the Fourteener of Recovery is the moving story of a teenager’s battle with anorexia and her mother’s tenacity in beating it while holding on tightly to hope.