My daughter has started dieting at the age I did

Dear Delyara, My daughter is twelve and has begun refusing breakfast. She says she is not hungry, but I recognise every trick because I invented them for myself at the same age: cutting food into tiny pieces, drinking water before meals, pretending to have eaten at a friend’s house. I spent twenty years recovering from an eating disorder and believed I had hidden it from her. I never criticised her body. I never kept scales in the house. Still, she watched me avoid photographs, pinch fabric at my waist, call certain foods “bad,” and praise weight loss in other women without thinking. Last night, I found calorie-counting searches on her tablet. I asked whether she was worried about her body. She said, “You are.” I had no answer. The wound I thought I kept private has apparently been speaking through ordinary gestures all her life. I am arranging professional help, but I am terrified she learned the first lesson from me and will hear every attempt to help as hypocrisy.