A HUNGER SO WIDE AND SO DEEP: TOWARD THE LIGHT

A holistic healing process — involving the mind, body, and spirit — draws on innovative and creative strategies. The healing methods developed by the women I interviewed reflect tenacity and a willingness to recreate what was injured or destroyed by trauma. Healing mirrored—was the reverse of—the trauma, a discovery of aspects of themselves long lost or hidden from view. Only a few sought medical or therapeutic help; many of their strategies are not considered in medical and psychological scholarship on eating problems. Their insights have important implications for future treatment and prevention.

The diversity of backgrounds and the range of eating problems of the women I talked with makes way for an expansive understanding of healing. While some of them have just begun to heal, others are far along in the process. Those in the early stages typically consider healing to be contingent on attaining a certain weight. For those farther along, the definition of healing became much more expansive as they examined the meaning of their eating problems, why they developed, how they progressed, and what function they had served; many have come to respect how their eating strategies began as methods of survival. For them, healing means being able to enjoy eating, believing they have the right to eat, and learning to stop eating when they are full. It has been a dynamic long-term process rooted in racial, sexual, and religious identity and dependent on access to time, money, and support.

Years of going around in circles often preceded stumbling on or being directed to a successful approach. Many of the women tried diets and weight loss clinics, which typically brought a temporary loss of pounds they eventually regained. Descriptions of failed diets provided comic relief in our conversations: the hot dog and banana diet, the grapefruit diet, the all-protein or no-protein diet, the diet that required drinking virtual swimming pools of water. Poking fun at the weekly weigh-in process at Weight Watchers, Laura said:

Everybody would take everything dignified off before getting on the scale to get weighed. Bracelets came off. Everything. Change in the pockets came out. Socks if they were on the heavy side would come off.

Underneath the laughter was deep frustration about how others — and sometimes they themselves —interpreted their worries about eating superficially, as attempts to "look good" and count calories. Meanwhile, the underlying traumas were seldom addressed. Losing weight drew praise, even if they dropped far below a healthy weight at a pace that jeopardized their physical and mental well-being. Being "overweight" continued to garner negative attention, but none of the women was ever approached by family or friends worried about deleterious effects of significant weight fluctuations or weight loss. In no case did a family member or friend ask about anorexia or bulimia.

Everyone missed the signs of eating problems —out of negligence or sheer ignorance. Some of the women sought medical help for physical symptoms partially related to eating problems, but their doctors did not recognize the symptoms or did not know how to ask about the psychological dimensions of their ailments. Formal diagnosis of eating problems took years, and, in fact, most of those who were anorexic or bulimic have yet to be diagnosed by a medical professional. While there is some benefit in avoiding the stigma of diagnosis and the unnecessary medical restrictions associated with some treatments, there were also negative consequences. In particular, when eating problems became liabilities, the women did not have a term that might have helped them seek support.

A combination of persistence, stubbornness, and luck led to some effective approaches. When Rosalee was constantly bingeing—and depressed —she began to have heart palpitations and thought she was going to have a heart attack. She checked herself into the hospital for tests; she was given sleeping pills and blood pressure medication and released. The palpitations continued, as did the depression. She was hospitalized again, but received contradictory diagnoses because the doctors considered her panic attacks, fluctuating blood pressure, and heart problems to be purely physical symptoms. They continued to treat her eating problem as an issue of self-control and recommended that she diet. Next she sought help from a psychiatrist, who diagnosed dysthymia disorder and prescribed more sleeping pills. When Rosalee looked this diagnosis up and learned that it meant suffering from a sense of hopelessness, she was frustrated by how obvious it was

It is easier for them to eventually prescribe a pill for why you can't sleep than to talk about the nightmares waking you up. ... I began to lose faith in both the medical profession and the psychological field altogether, which left me with my back against the wall.

She felt as if she "was running in the dark and had nothing to go on."

A major life crisis—either positive or negative —motivated several of the women to seek help. Crises have a way of bringing to the fore, and sometimes exaggerating, problems long in existence but difficult to see. Life crises somehow peeled away denial and encouraged the women to be honest about their pain and struggles. Dawn links her father's illness and death from cancer to her decision to seek help. Martha credits the birth of her daughter with her decision to deal with her compulsive eating; she didn't want her daughter to know her as someone "disconnected from the world" and sought to understand how compulsive eating perpetuates disconnection.

A series of failed relationships was another catalyst for seeking help. At the point in Joselyn's life when her bingeing was at its worst-shortly after she dropped out of a graduate program at Harvard in order to start her own business —she was eating compulsively with the man with whom she was living. They would eat "baskets and baskets of food" together: "I mean we ATE ... I had so much sugar. I remember thinking if I cried it would just come out like saccharine, just tons of sugar." Although he didn't gain weight, she did—quickly. One evening when they were in bed together, her partner told her he hated her body. Although this was not the first time a man had humiliated her, his insult sent her reeling as she realized how familiar insults had become and how deeply she had internalized them. Finally, Joselyn says, "I started pulling myself together. I got my hair cut, got makeup on, and sought an Overeaters Anonymous meeting."

Deteriorating abilities they considered to be at the core of their personhood motivated some of the women to take action. For Rosalee, the courage to stop bingeing came in part from her determination to recover psychic abilities damaged by sexual abuse. As a child, Rosalee had remarkable psychic abilities including gifts of clairaudience, clairvoyance, and precognitive dreams. Sexual abuse diminished Rosalee's trust in her own instincts and inner abilities and her faith in God. She says she lost "the ability to be in touch with that essence" because "it had been twisted and destroyed." As an adult, she began to recover her clairaudient and clairvoyant talents and served as a medium, which she defines as being able to "tune into the spirit that goes on beyond life." Through workshops, seminars, and church conferences, she taught others how to use their psychic abilities. After a few years of working as a medium, she began to see violent images that she could not understand; she could not tell whether they were from her own life or someone else's. Since she had repressed memories of being sexually abused, she could not know that these images were flashbacks related to incest. The flashbacks interfered with her abilities as a medium, hindering her ability to be "the clearest instrument I could be." As the flashbacks continued, her food habit became increasingly worse. The flashbacks plus her dissatisfaction with medical professionals encouraged her to seek alternate approaches.

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