Advice for Parents by Doris Smeltzer

Perfection: “The most grand and painful of all mirages”

Yesterday I read an article excerpted from Courtney Martin’s soon to be published book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.  It is a five page, extremely well-written commentary on her generation's obsession with food and fitness and our (women’s) drive for perfection.  Martin talks about how so often the place where this drive gets played out is our bodies. She says:

The cruel irony is that although we become totally obsessed with the daily measures of how "good" or "bad" we are (refused dessert = good; didn't have time to go to the gym = bad), there is no finish line. This weight preoccupation will never lead us anywhere. It is a maniacal maze that always spits you out at the same point it sucked you up: wanting. We keep chasing after perfection as if it is an achievable goal, when really it is the most grand and painful of all mirages.1

“The most grand and painful of all mirages.”  Even knowing this it is sometimes difficult to release the desire for perfection.  This desire helped kill my daughter, for heaven’s sake, and yet there are still days where I find myself accepting nothing less than “perfect” in certain tasks. 

A month ago I worked relentlessly on creating a 5-minute video that would tell the story of not only our daughter’s life but of our foundation’s work and its goals.  This video was to open a presentation that would lead to eventually the writing of a grant requesting funds for a project our foundation has envisioned.  It needed to be right. 

When my dear friend and I finally came to a stopping place at 2 AM the night before we were to present, we hugged goodnight.  She held me away from herself and with a firm voice said, “You have to promise me you will not go home and continue to tweak this thing, Doris.  It’s good enough.”  She had read my mind.  As I’d hit the shutdown button on my laptop I’d thought, “I’ll just fix a few frames when I get home.”  I had to laugh when I made my promise.  I never told her how clairvoyant she was.

Martin says,

The body is the perfect battleground for perfect-girl tendencies because it is tangible, measurable, obvious. It takes four long years to see "summa cum laude" etched across our college diplomas, but stepping on a scale can instantly tell us whether we have succeeded or failed.

I do not ever step on a scale, but I can still be sucked into that “perfect-girl tendency.”  Our big presentation could not have gone better.  It was a success maybe because of a 5-minute video that was not perfect.

Blessings until next time,

Doris

1 “The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body” posted on April 18, 2007 at alternet.org excerpted from Courtney E. Martin, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (to be published in spring 2007 by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.) For the entire article please go to:  http://www.alternet.org/story/50661/

There are no magic bullets

I frequently get emails from moms (and occasionally dads) whose children have just been diagnosed with an eating disorder.   Their question to me is a variation of the following: “I want to do everything I can to help my child…beyond reading all that I can get my hands on, what should I do?”

When this question is proffered, I am always impressed with the courage it takes to ask it, especially if the individual has begun the very difficult process of looking inward at how they relate to the world around body image, eating and dieting.  These were things that took years for me to be able to do after our daughter’s death.

In my response, I often point out that family therapy is an important aspect of the healing process, especially if the child still lives at home (with a different therapist than the child’s, although that therapist may be able to recommend someone).  It seems to me that an eating disorder is a family illness--so often we focus all our efforts on "fixing" our child, thereby forgetting where the real juicy "fixing" can be found:  within the family dynamics.  It is not because we've been a "bad" family--on the contrary, it may be our efforts to be such a "good" family that has, in essence walked us into a corner where the only way out is through change.  Change in how we relate to one another, how we communicate with each other, how we see each other and in our expectations of each other.

I iterate that parents rarely cause a child’s eating disorder.  Even the contributions we may have unwittingly made toward its development are most likely a direct result of living in a culture that speaks anorexic and reveres thinness.  Parents are not to blame, any more than their child is to blame.  For the most part, we do the best we can with what we know at the time.  The biggest gift we can give our child is to forgive ourselves and then focus on how the family system can be shifted so that it becomes a place where healing is supported and nourished.  The second best gift we can give our child is to find a support group for us.  While we unburden ourselves of our worries and frustrations, the very act of going to a group models for our child how someone can take good care of themselves even when faced with overwhelming circumstances.

I encourage families to read the third edition of Carolyn Costin’s excellent book, The Eating Disorder Sourcebook, as it provides tremendous information, insights and guidance (http://www.gurze.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=EDS)

Often the family has a copy of my book but is too frightened to read it.  I encourage them to have their child read it first—that way the child can share the passages that speak to them.  I've heard again and again that the book has opened up needed dialogue between sufferers and their families.  It, like everything else out there, is no magic bullet, but a shared experience between a parent and a child can be a helpful stepping off place toward meaningful dialogue.

This is a journey that has the potential to strengthen us as women and men, enlighten us as mothers and fathers and instill in us awe and even more love for our child.

Blessings until next time,

Doris

What we say is not as important as what we do

Tom and I took our spring break to travel to the East coast and present Andrea’s Voice where we were invited.  We spoke to packed rooms, evidence of the desire for more information on eating disorders.  After speaking at a university in New York, I received an email from an audience member.  She thanked us for our informative and moving talk and then went on to speak to the body obsessions so common among college-aged women. 

This young writer admitted that although she was of normal size and weight, she “definitely want[ed] to be smaller.”  She explained that she and her roommate have a wall in their dorm room dedicated to photos cut out of magazines of bodies they see as “perfect.”  Our talk made her consider taking them down.  Yet she felt ashamed to admit that she hadn’t yet removed these ‘bodies to aspire to’ because she still “want[s] to look like those girls.”  I shared with her:

Your struggle with taking down the posters in your room is understandable...we do not change overnight.  I can tell you that there is a lot of research that shows the detrimental affects of the images in magazines:  after a mere 20 minutes of looking at these photos, our self-esteem drops and we begin to feel badly about our own bodies.1  I can also tell you, with complete confidence, that the girls in those photos do not even look like that. Check out http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/ Click on "Watch the Film" in the box on the bottom titled "Revolution Film.”

I went on to suggest that she may want to explore, with a skilled therapist, the question: What is going on in my life that causes me to be unable or unwilling to look at what's making me want to change my body?

With honesty and guidance, you may discover that it is not your body or what you are eating that is the problem but instead "what's eating you."2  You may think nothing is bothering you, but what I have discovered personally is that when I think I must change something on the outside it's ALWAYS because there's something bothering me on the inside--I just haven't wanted to admit it or face it. Focusing on my body takes up a LOT of time, therefore, I do not have time to feel or experience the uncomfortable fears, self-doubts (or whatever) that are nagging at me.  That's my experience.

It takes more than one impassioned presentation to convince our children that their walls of “perfect” bodies need to come down.  Again and again we need to model how this is done. 

Blessings until next time,

Doris

1 Field AE, Cheung L, Wolf AM, Herzog DB, Gortmaker SL, Colditz GA. Exposure to the mass media and weight concerns among girls. Pediatrics, 1999, vol. 103, no. 3, p. e36
2 Portion of a quote from Amy Baker Dennis, eating disorder expert.