A THOUSAND HUNGERS: WHY FOOD?

The connection between trauma and eating problems raises a key question: Why food? Why do women turn to food rather than some other way of coping? A common thread running through the stories of the women I interviewed is the power of food to buffer pain. Women across race, class, and sexuality began to diet or to binge to help them numb difficult emotions — rage, anger, loneliness, anxiety, fear. Like liquor, bingeing sedates, lessens anxiety, and induces sleep. Describing the effects of bingeing, the women said it "put me back to sleep after a nightmare," "made me numb out," "helped me stuff back emotions." Eating "was a break from the stress," a way to "deny all my feelings." Bingeing gave them a high, a feeling of contentment that countered the crying spells, nightmares, and depression that plagued many of them as children and young adults. Bingeing cut them off from uncomfortable and upsetting emotions. The fact that many of the women first began to remember trauma-related dreams after they stopped bingeing suggests that eating large quantities of food, like abusing alcohol, can reduce one's dream state. (Alcohol abuse interrupts dream patterns, reducing the amount of rapid eye movement sleep.)

Although bingeing was the most common way these women numbed emotions, paradoxically, dieting served a similar function, helping them avoid painful feelings by giving them a goal—not eating —to focus on. This concentration, like the focus runners need before a race, distracted them from pain, anger, and confusion. Many initially binged, then learned to use dieting in a similar way as they grew older. They were ostracized or punished for bingeing, were told that an ample appetite is not socially acceptable for females, and were erroneously led to believe that weight gain is a direct function of eating. Had they been taught that a person's weight is influenced by a number of factors — including genetics, types of food eaten, and metabolism—not simply governed by self-control and counting calories, they might have been able to avoid the cycles of weight gain and loss associated with dieting. Instead, they began to diet as a means of focusing their attention on something they could control—a socially acceptable focus beyond their pain.

The anesthetic power of bingeing and dieting makes sense, but why did the women choose food rather than alcohol or other drugs? One reason is that food is available to young girls who don't have the money or mobility to get other drugs. They were searching for a narcotic long before they had access to liquor, prescription drugs, or street drugs: the ages of these women when they were sexually abused ranged from four to twelve; the average age was seven. Other forms of trauma also hit early. A few of the women's earliest memories were of their fathers beating their mothers. Several were victimized emotionally before they were five. Food was the most accessible and socially acceptable drug available. When they began to binge as young girls, they could simply go to the kitchen for food. Those who did not have direct access to food stole money from their mothers' purses, took their classmates' lunches, and hid food for when they needed it. The availability, accessibility, and affordability of food made it their drug of choice.

Eating that began as a simple solution to pain then became a generalized response to stress. While a few of the women began to use other drugs as they grew older, most continued to turn to food. Trepidation about alcohol and illegal drugs kept some focused on food. Those who grew up with an alcoholic parent—or two—learned early the dangers of excessive drinking. Food seemed significantly less dangerous than alcohol, for them and for their children. Bingeing can also be less expensive than drinking.

Some of the women were able to grieve losses and disempowerment when they happened, but for others the grieving was postponed, leaving them overwhelmed and burdened by unfinished business. Financial or emotional demands robbed some of the women of the time and energy they needed to heal. Prolonged drug abuse and the numbed state that accompanies bingeing slowed the grieving process for others. Many of them experienced one trauma right on top of another, giving them little chance to make sense of events or to recover from them. Layering of losses, one right after another, can make someone silent and numb, "too badly stung by memories thick as wasps." Explaining the cumulative effect of successive losses, the journalist Bridgett Davis writes:

Loss is painful no matter what. But when the loss comes so fast and furious, and in succession as it has in my life, the pain reaches a piercing height, has a menacing spin to it. So little time exists for growing a protective crust over the open wounds caused by one death before another one happened. A deep survival instinct led me, I think, to grow numb after a while.

In times of grief and sadness, food is an immediate companion. When as girls the women began to look for food in the middle of the night, they were searching for something they could count on to keep them company and help them get back to sleep. Metaphorically, their attempts can also be seen as a search for lost innocence. Some hunted all over their houses for sweets their mothers had hidden, searching for love and affection as well as for food. They wrestled with anger, confusion, and betrayal as pain rained down on them with such intensity that bingeing or dieting seemed their only comfort.

Food became a drug of choice for some as a consequence of the amnesia that characteristically follows many types of trauma, both physical and psychic. Most of the survivors of sexual abuse "forgot" the abuse and have only recently begun to retrieve memories of it. Those who endured the pain of heterosexist exclusion sometimes did not remember the details until adulthood. Those who were physically abused or saw others being hurt often did not begin to regain memories until many years later. These gaps in memory left them unable to explain or understand their feelings of shame, fear, depression, and loss. When the feelings or fragments of the memories resurfaced in dreams or when something reminded them of previous events, they could not attach their distress to its cause. This left them feeling out of control and confused. Some recall waking up with nightmares and searching for food; at the time they had no idea what caused the dreams or made them want to eat. Those who described feeling disconnected from the world or out of place at school had little idea at the time why they binged after school each day or purged in order to be able to binge without gaining weight.

Individual amnesia is fueled by what Adrienne Rich calls "historical amnesia," an erasure, glossing over, or distortion of history that occurs when an official version of history—which reflects those in power—is substituted for the actual stories of people's struggles against inequality. Two of the most obvious examples of historical amnesia are romanticized versions of Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean and nostalgic stories of the "taming of the West" —that is, the genocide of Native American people. Historical amnesia robs us of accounts of oppressed peoples' struggles against social injustice and their triumphs, and at the same time romanticizes the oppressors. Historical amnesia tells us that each injustice is an isolated incident rather than part of a larger historical frame. There are myriad repercussions of historical amnesia on individual lives. Among the women I spoke with, the young lesbians knew they were lonely and wished for more friends without knowing how to put a name to the source of their alienation. Historical amnesia has erased the history of lesbians who, despite isolation and loneliness, have survived and even thrived. As a consequence, they didn't understand the politics of their emotions; they did not have the language, memories, or political consciousness to understand what was causing their isolation.

The Latina and African-American girls who attended predominantly white schools knew they felt left out, but it was hard for them to articulate the social injustice behind their pain or to realize that they were not alone, crazy, or too sensitive. Instead, they were left to struggle alone against the historical amnesia evident in the myth that desegregation solved the problems of exclusion and discrimination in education. Situating individual struggle in a larger social reality is even more difficult for those who do not learn survival strategies from their families. Bingeing, dieting, and purging become understandable ways of numbing out amid this confusion.

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