Healing Your Hungry Heart. Joanna Poppink
women who need or want to be thin for public display.
Yet another addition to these scenarios is believing you feel anxious and bad about yourself because your body is fat, ugly, and disgusting, irrespective of your actual appearance. You use the words “fat” and “ugly” interchangeably. You believe you would feel better, even wonderful, if you were beautiful. Again, you try to use your physicality to tend to your emotional needs, usually at the price of a healthy body.
I've worked with celebrities whose beauty is acclaimed by thousands, even millions, yet who still say they feel fat and ugly. Such a woman knows that her appearance wields power in her world. She may use her beauty as a negotiating tool or as a way of influencing or manipulating. She may consider people influenced by her appearance to be fools because they don't see the frightened, helpless, ugly, fat, and unlovable person she believes herself to be. She's in a complex and painful state. She's won because her true self is invisible. She's lost because she's alone with her ever-present, self-punishing inner voice.
A woman who suffers from binge eating or bulimia can also believe she has the power to make herself invisible.
A woman who suffers from binge eating or bulimia can also believe she has the power to make herself invisible. The need to isolate is part of all eating disorders to some degree.
When Kimberly, twenty-nine and suffering from bulimia, needed her binge foods, she put on her “invisible clothes,” usually innocuous sweatpants and sweatshirt and a blank look on her face, and got herself to a grocery store or take-out restaurant. She didn't look anyone in the eye. She avoided personal connection and felt that she was a shadow figure who couldn't be seen. If she saw someone she knew, she made it clear with body language that she didn't see or recognize them. If the person didn't respond to her, it reinforced her belief that she was invisible.
When Kimberly got home she rushed through putting away the perishables, leaving out the boxes and bags of salty, crunchy, and sweet. She gathered up her binge foods and felt relief that she could give up the strain of being invisible and get on with eating, secure in her sense of being alone in her private and unseen world.
Janet, forty-five, achieved her invisibility by using what she considered sleight of hand. In public she ate small and seemingly inconsequential tidbits she was certain no one would notice. While other people filled their plates or nibbled on appetizers, Janet was stealing. She took candy decorations from food trays when she believed no one was looking and quickly popped them in her mouth. She also filled her pockets and her purse with sweets to eat on the way home.
A very large woman knows about yet another kind of invisibility. She can be still and disappear into the background. I remember attending a crowded Overeaters Anonymous meeting of about 200 people. Men and women of all ages and sizes sat in rows of chairs. Those who couldn't find a seat sat on the floor or stood along the walls.
I sat in a chair near a thick pole for at least twenty minutes before I realized a woman was standing in front of that pole. She seemed to gradually appear. She must have weighed close to 350 pounds. She wore a loose-fitting garment in shades of brown and stood immobile and expressionless.
After I noticed her, I looked around the room again. I saw four more women, large, immobile, expressionless, in bland neutral colors, whom I hadn't seen before. I wondered how many women I had never noticed; how much I played into the invisibility mechanism by accepting their unspoken communication: “Don't see me.”
Recovery involves becoming visible, ending isolation, and coming out from behind a barrier that protects you from exposure, criticism, reality, friends, opportunities, love, and hope—a barrier that blocks you from life itself.
Another warning sign of an eating disorder is striving for perfection. I'm not referring to the perfection a scientist seeks in conducting valid and reliable research. I mean the kind of perfection where you need to have the perfect body and are miserable and self-critical if you fall short; where you need to create the perfect environment or be the perfect person at your job, at school, or in your family and feel an inner disaster if you fall short. If you can't focus on a relationship, a conversation, or an activity because your mind is busy figuring out ways to make something in your life perfect, you are experiencing warning signs of an eating disorder.
Recovery involves becoming visible, ending isolation, and coming out from behind a barrier that blocks you from life itself.
Why? What is it about perfection? Why is a bulimic woman merciless in her self-criticism? Why is an anorexic woman so driven to be perfect she is willing to face death? Why do women who binge or eat compulsively feel so removed from acceptability and standards of perfection that they numb themselves to emotional pain and function tangentially in the world as they attempt to be unseen?
Perfection is the ultimate safety. When anything is perfect, it is beyond criticism, beyond judgment. But perfection, for us mortals, is impossible to achieve. In Greek mythology, whenever a mortal attempted to achieve the status of a god or even one quality of a god, the mortal was cursed and went mad or died. The lesson: Humans aren't designed to be perfect. Perfection is for the gods.
Recovery begins as you venture toward being kind and honest with your genuine, mortal self. You may be ready to be in a room with other people who are working toward recovery, or you may need to be more private as you begin your healing efforts. Respect your feelings. You can begin to move on your healing path through the suggestions in this book—doing affirmations, breathing exercises, and writing in a Recovery Journal. See more specific exercises and activities related to this chapter in Appendix B.
My goal is to help you build a solid recovery, layer by layer. Beginning this journey requires courage. You are changing direction. You are opening your mind and heart to what you don't know yet. Courage and trust are a vital part of recovery work because you don't yet have a backlog of successes on which to build your confidence. You're going on faith, hope, and courage now. Honor and nurture those qualities. Go gently into the unknown, building as you go.
I've described many forms an eating disorder can take, but not all. Yet enough is here to help you see how much of your life and your behaviors are determined by eating or not eating. Please congratulate yourself for staying with this reconnaissance and getting a more thorough sense of where you are and what needs to be addressed to get well. This is a tender time.
Daily Exercises
1 Follow your breath for five minutes at least three times a day.
2 Read or recite your three affirmations twenty times each at least three times a day. See Appendix A, “Affirmations.”
3 Write about one or more of the warning signs discussed in this chapter or a personal experience where you recognized eating disorder signals.
CHAPTER 4
How Do I Begin Recovery?
“What will open the door is daily awareness and attention.”
—Krishnamurti
You've already begun your recovery by picking up this book. Perhaps you are reading it thoroughly, going through each chapter, doing the suggested exercises, and have now come to chapter four. You are on your way.
Perhaps you are standing in a bookstore thumbing through pages and stopped at this chapter. You are reading what I'm writing right now. I'm thinking about you and imagining you as you stand in the aisle or sit in one of those hard-to-find cushy chairs against the wall. You want recovery. Maybe you are holding this book carefully so no one can see the title. Recovery seems secretive, magical, out of reach, mysterious, and impossible because you've tried many times and failed.
Wherever you are right now, if you can see these words, you are looking for your beginning place. The good news is that you can begin any time, at any stage in your life, and in any situation