ACCEPTING OURSELVES....
BODY, MIND AND SOUL
I feel called to write this article to speak to the pain of those suffering with an eating disorder, as well as their families and friends. I recently read "The Secret Language of Eating Disorders," an informative book filled with love and compassion by Peggy Claude-Pierre. As a therapist who works with eating disorders, I want to do more to reach out to those suffering with any form of the disorder and to our society at large. In fact, I was beginning to take on the same ennui and denial that I felt all around me.
There is no way to know how difficult it is for a person with an eating disorder to come forward for help. They are profoundly ashamed and do not feel worthy of help. If they do come forward, they are usually misunderstood and blamed, as are many times their families. There is no way a soul, already tormented by not feeling worthy or accepted by society's standards, can withstand more shame and blame. People with eating disorders are sensitive, responsible, caring , creative and perfectionists. They feel reponsible for their families, friends and societies. They feel responsible for pleasing all. If they cannot measure up to this super-human task, they uconsciously judge themselves as unworthy. They also lose all innate knowledge of who they are, for they are disconnected from the wisdom of their bodies where our instincts, emotions and true hungers are found. All faculties are intuiting what is needed to please others. They feel unworthy of pleasing themselves.
In our schools, families, offices and society, it is far easier to believe the problem of eating disorders is not present. As a society we are losing many of our most talented caring persons to an insidious lifetime of hiding and shame. Their choice lies between a slow or outright suicide, because living with the inner pain, hopelessness and shame is too much. However, those with an eating disorder are also among the most courageous and hopeful in choosing to face each day of struggle. They are survivors and can live beautiful productive lives when their wholeness is recognized, nurtured and allowed to bloom. Our society cannot afford to lose the potential of these individuals.
Eating disorders mirror a disease attacking the soul of our society which has taught us to seek our worth outside of ourselves in a media ordained ideal which says thinnest is best, and equates thinness with goodness, intelligence, beauty, power. Society has also taught us that our own feelings aren't vey important and that it is easy to numb them with an addiction, be it food, TV, alcohol or drugs.
From 1973 to the present, commercials for diet food, reducing aids and diet programs have increased, and eating disorders have correspondingly increased. By age 15, if you've dieted you are 8 times as likely to suffer an eating disorder. By age 10, 80% of girls have dieted. In all forms of eating disorders: compulsive overeating, bulimia and anorexia, we look to food or being able to abstain from food to temporarily dull our hunger for the nurturance we feel unworthy of receiving. The disorder keeps us from looking any further to know the true needs of our hunger. It also gives us reason to hate and mistrust ourselves still more.
Our culture also treats our bodies as machines or commodities in the workplace. We are obsessed with physical fitness, not to feel alive and invigorated when we move, but in order to drive our bodies to this year's perfect specification. We immediately seek pain killers or mood altering drugs before consulting our body's wisdom on what it may need. We've been taught to dull the need so we can go busily about our doing , our head work, with little value placed on our being and our soul work. In our health systems, managed care requires an approved protocol, time allotment and expenditure for a diagnosis, not a human being.
What can we do: As a society we must begin by accepting ourselves and our bodies just as we are. This allows us the freedom to listen to our body's wisdom. If each of us would strive to bring forth all that we authentically are, consciously honoring our individual worth, and seeing, respecting and encouraging the worthiness of every other living person, we could go far in eliminating the insidious condition of eating disorders.
The key to turning around an eating disorder is in turning around the inner belief of inadequacy that has been there since childhood, to a certain extent, even before birth, and replacing this belief with acceptance of ourselves, body, mind, and soul as we are in this moment as being good enough and having all the potential to grow into our own uniqueness.
Accepting ourselves is what we are most afraid to do, we might lose all control. Eating, binging, or starving has been a way to run away from this fear. When we choose to look this fear right in the face, we start relying on our intuition. This gets us into our bodies and allows us to be creative artists, listening to our own inner wisdom to deal with the fear. We then find that what we thought would be out of control is really the seed of our own potential, our instincts at last being honored and allowed to be heard.
Even though the events leading up to eating disorders may have stemmed from childhood and from age old cultural beliefs in our society, we need to start from now, the present; who we authentically are, not who others would have us be. If we can make a change in this belief, honoring and growing into who we are, body, mind and soul, we may allow someone else to make a change and gradually our culture and society will change also.
This article was written by me for The Higher Source, February 1998 issue. It feels as true today as it was then.