A HUNGER SO WIDE AND SO DEEP: METHODS AND DYNAMICS OF HEALING

Self-help programs were the most common method of healing among the women. The most common self-help group was Overeaters Anonymous (OA), which is modeled after the twelve-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. In OA meetings, people are encouraged to listen to others and talk about their own stories of recovery — how food came to control them, how "abstaining" from addictive eating patterns changed their lives, what is needed to maintain the change. Overeaters Anonymous taught the women to treat themselves and their ways of eating more gently by lessening their self-blame. Relief from self-castigation—which for many began when they were young children — was a prerequisite to changing their eating patterns. In Overeaters Anonymous, Antonia heard, for the first time in my life, . . . people say that, first of all, it wasn't my fault. . . . Secondly, I heard that the reason why I was fat didn't really matter. It was a waste of time and energy to try to figure that out because you couldn't.

Instead, the focus is on learning how to avoid food that is addictive. The logic behind Overeaters Anonymous is that while it may be useful to, for example, examine emotions and painful incidents in the past, the first task is to "put down the food." The understanding will follow.

This philosophy—that freedom from eating problems is not contingent on articulating their origins—helped the women who desperately wanted to stop dieting and bingeing before they had recovered memories of the trauma underlying their behavior. Years later she began to piece together how her compulsive eating had begun. For Rosalee, changing her eating habits was essential for recovering complete memories of sexual abuse. She had been plagued by nightmares all her life, but until she stopped bingeing she could not remember her dreams. Compulsive eating had protected her from dream information that would have been difficult to accept, but at the same time it obscured the reasons for the long spells of crying, depression, anxiety, and deep sadness that gnawed at her. Coming to terms with the trauma was dependent on learning not to anesthetize herself with food. Her therapist and the women she met at Overeaters Anonymous gave her the support she needed to understand that she had developed an eating problem as a way to care for herself. As she stopped bingeing, she began to understand that her ability to nurture her psychic abilities depended on both examining her eating patterns and coming to terms with sexual abuse. At this point her heart palpitations and other physical symptoms began to go away, having been the physical manifestations of memories that were beginning to surface.

Overeaters Anonymous proposes an alternative to the popular philosophy that learning to love oneself puts an end to self-destructive eating. Some of the women accepted this perspective at one time in their lives, only to realize that when they continued to binge, they then blamed themselves for not being sufficiently self-loving. Overeaters Anonymous offers a way out of this tangle. The spiritual focus of the program—which emphasizes willingness, motivation, and inspiration rather than self-discipline — concentrates on the present and grounds relief from unwanted food within a larger spiritual frame. Antonia explains:

The piece of the program that I do really still believe is that I cannot stop it—the allergy or disease—myself. I have to become willing to have it relieved. That has always been my experience whenever I have lost my abstinence and regained it again. It was not about me deciding I was not going to do any more. It was about me saying, hey, I can't do anything about this. If this is going to stop, something outside of me has got to help. Even if my sense of my higher power is an internalized one, it is still something outside of me, who I am at that moment, that will have to relieve it because I don't think I can.

This self-help program enabled the women to speak about haunting secrets they had long since buried. Anonymity is a core aspect of the program. Most of the women had never told anyone about the depth of their eating problems, the sometimes "crazy" things they did with food —eating whole steaks in the middle of the night, cooking and consuming entire boxes of pasta, refusing to eat for days at a time. Their secrets, along with memories of abuse, were burdens that fueled shame and loneliness. Hearing others' stories often encouraged the women to speak themselves. It was in these meetings that many of them first identified themselves as people who had eating problems along with other, even more private, shame-based issues. As philosophers and other theorists have said in various ways, naming something, especially for the first time, inevitably changes it. Rosalee explains:

OA helped me to understand how to do the deep work. By breaking isolation OA got me to a place in my head where I can stop feeling as if I have to do everything alone.

While half of the women I interviewed considered Overeaters Anonymous integral to their healing, both those who are still attending and those who have left offered insightful critiques of the program. Overeaters Anonymous helped Vera dramatically—people in OA "deal with the real thing, the pain behind the eating by learning not to use food as a drug to keep emotions down" —but she eventually stopped going to meetings because she was increasingly frustrated by the emphasis on giving up food to which people are emotionally attached. As a Latina, Vera considered attachment to "emotionally charged" food such as rice and beans healthy, not debilitating; she believes it is possible to eat culturally significant foods without overeating. Vera now attends another twelve-step self-help program because it gives her "confidence" and "sanity" and has joined Weight Watchers, which she considers to be, like other diet programs, "semi-crazy" and "semi-sane." This approach helps her eat reasonable portions, a skill she did not learn when she was growing up, while allowing all types of food.

Overeaters Anonymous's reputation as a program primarily attended by white people created problems for some of the women of color I interviewed. Joselyn was constantly on guard during meetings, aware that no matter what she said, the white women might think she was speaking for all black women, and this made it hard for her to relax. Rosalee said that it would comfort her if more black women were aware of and attended Overeaters Anonymous, that it hurt me and intrigued me at the same time that my becoming aware of OA came from people outside of my race. The support group that I go to is predominantly white. My therapist is a white woman. The people I related to most with this issue are not black people.

Although she has "related well" to one black woman in the program, "having a black face doesn't always mean that people identify with black issues. Even among my own people I have to choose who is for real and who isn't."

Political and historical events beginning with slavery underscore why black women may avoid seeking help for eating problems. As Rosalee says, "admitting to sickness means admitting just one more thing wrong with this black person"—which is made worse when white people are doing the labeling. Breaking through denial on an individual level means confronting the constant assaults on black women's self-esteem —by the media, through sexual violence, and in demeaning depictions of black mothers. Rosalee says the "real issues" underlying eating problems aren't examined when someone as visible and widely respected as Oprah Winfrey —"who has her head together about so much" —diets, but

dieting is one of those last-ditch efforts to make everything all right in your life when that is not the cause of the problems to begin with. It is another coping device that keeps us in denial, that keeps us from getting to the core issues.

The predominantly white makeup of Overeaters Anonymous makes teasing out the complexities of these issues difficult for black women.

Some women find the decidedly Christian philosophical foundations of Overeaters Anonymous limiting. Turning one's life over to God as one understands "Him"—one of the twelve steps —and the emphasis on confession are fundamentally Christian concepts. Many OA meetings are held in churches —neither inviting nor familiar to many Jewish people. Three Jewish women initiated and participated in a confidential self-help group at their college for students concerned about eating issues. This group helped them break isolation and examine cultural messages about body size and weight without compromising their religious beliefs. One Jewish lesbian was not troubled by OA's Christian focus, but was disturbed by women who seemed to consider their lesbian identities a problem along with their eating difficulties. Discouraged by this, she left the program; when she attended again several years later, she no longer saw evidence of this internalized homophobia.

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