The Looking Glass Lies - The Addiction to Starvation

By Kimball C. Pier, Ph.D., LMFT

For me, anorexia has been and continues to be more powerful than alcohol. It feels like addiction, but it’s much more than that. Addiction implies that one has control over stopping with the right treatment and support; anorexia is a mental illness that has a dissociative element, almost like a whole different self that occupies the original self. I have tried to understand the immense power it has over me by referencing the obvious, which were the experiences I had as a young adolescent with my mother, Penelope, and her criticism of my body and stern warnings not to allow myself to look anything like the women in my father’s family. Three months after she died, my father, Gardiner, grabbed the flesh around my middle and told me I’d better start doing sit-ups. Certainly, those were experiences that added to the shame I already felt, but the shame reaches much further back than that. The shame over being alive, of taking up space, and my experience of myself as “the intruder,” may be more at the root of the vicious voice that tells me I don’t deserve to be nourished. Starvation is the experience commonly paired with the archetype of “The Orphan.” Deprived of nurturing, and the unremitting hunger for the food of love and being held, the orphaned or neglected infant resigns itself to being hungry for everything all of the time, and becomes accustomed to starvation. Hunger as the result of neglect or outright rejection is just the way it is. My experience of myself has always been the unwelcome intruder, an invader who shows up at someone else’s family reunion and tries to ingratiate herself to those who might recognize her as one of their own. As a child, I attempted to get my need for belonging met by being obnoxiously demanding or seeking attention in whatever way I could. It was chronic starvation that I sought to sate in whatever way I could, mostly through addictive behaviors or substances.

            Penelope seemed to love her bones, even thought it was a deadly sickness that ate her flesh and muscle. As a twelve-year old, I became very conscious of what she thought of me and my body. I tried to behave myself and not eat food I loved, and most of the time, she was too consumed with where she could get her next prescription filled to notice what I ate. I indulged in Campbell's Bean with Bacon soup right out of the can ignoring the instructions to mix it with water and heat it up. Why bother when it tasted perfectly fine right out of the can? And then there were Fudgsicles and my favorite; giant Hershey's chocolate bars with almonds.

            After Penelope died, everything changed and I began to explore eating food that normal sixteen-year-old kids ate. I discovered that I liked food a lot more when I wasn't in a state of constant anxiety, and I ate massive amounts, unaware of when I was full, and not caring how much I ate. It seemed I was trying to fill myself up, or create a self where there was none now that Penelope was dead and I had no reason to exist. I'd be miserable and not eat again for a couple of days. When Gardiner grabbed the flesh and suggested situ-ups, the shame made me eat more. I'd eat all his Triscuits and peanut butter until I couldn't hold anymore. 

"Didn't I have a box of Triscuits and some peanut butter in my car?" he would ask. I would just shrug, burp, and pretend I knew nothing.

I had some new belly fat, and I couldn't fit into my pants anymore. After Gardiner's crude suggestion, food became my enemy, my body became my enemy, and I turned on both with rage I couldn't contain. How did I go from being the skinny child, teased for being thin, to a woman fighting an endless battle with her body image?

Intentional starvation seemed like an outward expression of my psychic state of being. The obsession with starving was heady and powerful. I finally had control over some part of my life, which thus far had been like a trip through a dark forest without any predictable path or a glimpse of light. I discovered I did have mastery over my body and could develop it into the image of what I wanted it to be. I wanted to be lean, muscular, and capable of moving quickly, disappearing when I needed to. I was proud of my strength and my ability to push harder when I needed to as an athlete. Once in its grip, starvation became an addiction, and I heard the voices of my mother and my father and my boyfriend and the asshole I happened to pass by at the supermarket one day who said,

“You’d be really cute if your tits stuck out farther than your belly.”  The messages that stuck like nails in a cross were that I was too fat, acceptable and lovable only if I was thin enough. And thin enough was a moving target that only knew one direction.

The same voice that told me to cut still more off my tiny portion of cantaloupe, to count every single calorie, or eat my one cup of popcorn unbuttered was the same voice that told me I didn't deserve to be anywhere or to belong with anyone. To starve was a way of becoming smaller and ultimately invisible, always in obedience to my tormentor. 

           I carved and chipped away, scrutinizing my body, yet being unable to see what was really there. My reflection in the mirror appeared to be someone else, and I couldn’t recognize a reflection that I could identify as mine. My perception was always of a fat girl, never thin enough, never good enough. I had resolve and endurance, but maintaining that has required exhausting, maniacal vigilance, and feeling devoured by worry over losing the battle with my hunger.

I have since done enough study and work in my field to understand bulimia as another variation on the physical expression of psychic suffering. An eating addiction, whether it takes the form of starvation or overeating or both, manifests in an angry relationship with food and our bodies. We eat in a state of dissociation, rage, or despair, not allowing the fork to touch our tongues, swallowing before chewing, not taking a breath between bites. We swallow other people's ideas of who and what we should be, and we are stuffed with thoughts and opinions that do not belong to us. Sometimes its sexual abuse and other strains of abuse, that make us want to leave our bodies; sometimes it's an overbearing or rigid family, sometimes it's a combination of events or trauma that takes root in our psyches and bodies and we cannot give language to the suffering.

The confusing messages in the culture around what women should be, what we should do and say often silence us and cause us to dissociate from our intuitive ability to protect ourselves from predatory or harmful behaviors.

Like any addiction, our only way of working with it is to soften and surrender into the sea and to cease fighting the tides and waves. In the stillness, we can find the space to begin the painstaking process of being beginners again, at unweaving and re-weaving a story about ourselves where we are truly our own best mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers. 

For me, hunger was, and still is, a state of being that represents the longing that is my earliest memory. Hunger is the edge where the primal part of me connects with Nature and the preciousness of food. Hunger can make food feel like a gift or for a person with an eating disorder, a cursed necessity. Eating and noticing how good the nourishment feels can make mealtime a sacred ritual, a time to appreciate the miracle of what is available. When I try to grasp this gift, it is immediately stolen from me when the voice of anorexia come from behind, and attack, breaking my delicate skin, and grabbing whatever flesh rests on the crests of my bones. I often reach for my bones as an infant might find its thumb, and am reassured when I can feel them; evidence that I’m barely here and all is well.

We who struggle with disordered eating in all its monstrous and predatory expressions; binge eating, bulimia, anorexia, and body dysmorphia need loving, compassionate care, from ourselves and others. Through reading and therapy, my way of living with anorexia has been to cultivate a loving, compassionate inner Wise Mother who comforts me and soothes me. She tells me I need to eat, that food is medicine, and I deserve to nourish myself. The Wise Mother has been buried under other people’s words, mostly people whom I depended on to encourage me, care for me, and be attuned to my needs as a baby and through my childhood, such as my parents and caregivers. Though they may have thought they were meeting my needs, they were acting out of whatever genetic and environmental factors influenced and shaped them, and that was their reality. The screams of the eating disorder’s voice overpowered my access to a part of me that could in effect “re-mother” me. The baby steps I took in waking that part of me up was a first step towards freedom. The practice of awareness, and then making a choice to listen to the Wise Mother is a life-long practice, sometimes hundreds of times a day, moment by moment.