The experiential approach to anthropological study can be very useful in understanding illnesses. This approach uses narratives, the stories people tell about their illness, and experience, the way people feel, perceive, and live with illness, and meaning, the ways people make sense of their illness, to understand how illness affects an individual. Amber is a woman who suffers from bulimia and alcoholism. After experiencing a traumatic event in her childhood, she began to overeat and was overweight for most of her childhood. When she got to high school, other students would refer to her as the “fat” sister of her older sister and call her unattractive, which led Amber to start purging to lose weight. She would purge after almost every meal, hiding it from her family sometimes by even vomiting outside her window as to not arouse suspicion. When she realized how much weight she could lose by purging and when she began to get attention from other students in her high school after losing weight, her bulimia only got worse. After getting married and having a child, she recovered from the bulimia for a while until she began to feel unhappy in her life. At this point, she turned to alcohol. Her alcoholism became so severe that her husband divorced her and will not let Amber visit her daughter if she has been drinking. Because of how severe her alcoholism is, however, she has not been able to see her daughter on even a weekly basis. During this time she has been abusing alcohol, she has also been purging as well. In one part of the video below, Amber reveals that she has always felt inferior to her sister, which may have also contributed to her bulimia and need to control her weight and body image. Amber’s family stages an intervention to try to convince her to go to treatment to combat her alcoholism and bulimia and although Amber initially declines, she agrees to go to treatment if her family also agrees to receive therapy from the Betty Ford treatment center. After the intervention and while Amber is in treatment, she does relapse by purging a few times, but she also appears dedicated to treating her alcoholism and bulimia in order to be reunited with her daughter. Unfortunately, her family does not uphold their end of the agreement and none of her family members attend the Betty Ford center treatment.