A HUNGER SO WIDE AND SO DEEP: THE RIGHT TO FEEL

The role of trauma in the development of eating problems illustrates why healing depends on a woman's learning that she has a right to feel. For some of the women I interviewed this meant learning they bad feelings, which was a prerequisite to understanding how feelings affected their actions, including eating patterns. Many had long since stopped feeling on a conscious level. Barraged by incidents far too outrageous and cruel to make sense of at the time they occurred, they turned off their feelings. Frequently, these incidents had flooded them with such unfamiliar and confusing feelings that blocking feelings or shutting down entirely was a protection against madness. As Joselyn explains, "I didn't have any feeling about how I felt when I ate. I didn't know that there were feelings there, because for years they were stripped away from me." This made the process of opening up to new feelings and acknowledging old ones extremely scary. Identifying how painful emotions fueled their eating problems often began when the women started to notice what they were feeling when they most wanted to binge or to deny themselves food. Then they tried to understand that emotion rather than eat. Many of them had gotten into the habit of eating compulsively even before they had a chance to feel emotions and, as a consequence, did not know what triggered their desire to eat. For many of them, initial attempts to identify feelings were disorienting and threatening. They had trouble differentiating between feelings —between sadness and anger, for example —or their feelings seemed to be free-floating. Healing required them to tether these emotions, to trace the feelings back to their sources. This meant learning to identify whether the feelings were related to a recent incident or if an emotion from the past was triggered by a recent event. Carolyn, for example, often came home after work and binged, although she always promised herself she would not. After she stopped eating compulsively, she began to understand the factors that triggered a binge: when her boss had treated her in a racist and sexist way, she binged, never acknowledging her anger and frustration to herself or her boss. When she ate, her anxiety diminished as the food calmed her. Over time, however, she began to realize that by eating she was also punishing herself. Bingeing made her feel lethargic and uncomfortable, and she was no closer to knowing what feelings preceded the binge. By not anesthetizing herself with food, she began to acknowledge her anger and frustration, which made her better able to deal with racist incidents. For Carolyn and many other women, the essence of healing was not denying themselves food but rather making distinctions between physical hunger and the hunger that signals uncomfortable emotions and learning to respond to these two types of hunger in different ways.

One of the hardest tasks for many of the women has been to treat uncomfortable feelings—including their negative feelings about their bodies — as signposts for further recovery. Often these feelings came in waves that coincide with memories of abuse. Although Antonia had not eaten compulsively for years, around the time she began to get "emotional memories of the incest," she began to binge again. While she acknowledged bingeing as a form of nurturing, it pained her that she was coping that way again. She has been especially distraught by her weight gain but has had a hard time admitting this openly. She has been a feminist for all of her adult years, an antiracist activist who has worked in a shelter for battered women—experiences that she believes have facilitated her ability to resist cultural expectations about thinness. Yet according to her current understanding of healing, she must admit to herself that her weight (about two hundred pounds) is completely unacceptable to her. Ironically, she considers this declaration an act of self-love, because she is no longer pretending to like what she so much wants to change. Given Antonia's history, her present deep attachment to the idea of a thinner body makes perfect sense. Since she has only recently uncovered the memories of the incest she endured, she has just begun to understand how and why it caused her to dissociate from her body. Fat was the alien, the physical manifestation of her grandfather's abuse. Understanding this helps explain why being fat has made her feel such disdain about herself of late —for a long time, fat was the marker of sexual violation and invasion of her bodily integrity—and why no amount of consciousness of the misogyny underlying the culture of thinness could make her ease up on herself about gaining weight. Gaining weight again felt like being abused again. Further healing rests in part on redirecting her anger away from her body and toward those who hurt her. While she may or may not lose weight in the process, being able to live comfortably in her body depends on being free of the feeling that her body will forever carry the physical sign of abuse.

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