Why She Feels Fat by Johanna Marie McShane

Today is Halloween, which signals, as far as most of my clients are concerned, the beginning of the holiday season- a period that pretty much ends with New Year's Day.

I was thinking more about labels and how quickly and easily we label people.

Ok, it's pet peeve time here for a moment. A mother came in to see me today for a consultation about her daughter.

A client of mine just bought herself a "friend." He's adorable- about 9 inches tall, colorful, fuzzy, with big eyes and funny ears (he's stuffed, by the way).

Sometimes there's a theme throughout my day at work, and today was one of those days. I see a diverse group of people every day in my office- each as unique as anyone and everyone who suffers from an eating disorder. 

For some reason, over half my clients today came in talking about some version of this conflict: very much wanting to be in life vs. being terrified of being in life.

Ari, it may not be that you don't know how to take care of "one's self," but more that you don't know how to apply those ideas to yourself. There's a big difference, and knowing which camp you fall into tells you how to proceed to change things.

Here's how you can see where you fit: think about someone you know- a friend, a niece, a child... anyone, really, although I find this more useful when people envision someone they care about. Now, once you've got this person's image in mind, ask yourself what that person needs in order to feel/be taken care of. You can think of it in two ways- what he/she needs on a daily basis and/or what she needs right this second to be taken care of.

As a client was talking earlier this week about feeling she has "problems with boys" and should stay away from them, I suddenly had the image of a puzzle come into my mind.

My client described how, when she's at a party where there are men, or if she's out socially with a guy, she becomes overly concerned with what they/he "thinks of me, and I so want to make sure I'm important to him and that I don't disappoint him."

My image was of a puzzle shaped generally like my client, with maybe 50 or so "pieces" that comprised it. The puzzle was made up of an assortment of pieces that had the names of all the guys she hangs out with, as well as other friends and her family. There were also some pieces that clearly had her name on them, but they only comprised about 50% of the total puzzle.

This client is used to me having images, so I asked her what she made of this one. As we discussed the image, she began to see that her puzzle wasn't 100% comprised of "her" pieces. She could see how easily she "gives up" her own puzzle pieces and "replaces them" with pieces that are "someone else's, whoever I'm around at the moment." 

"losing" or "abandoning" her own puzzle pieces and inserting ones of others felt precarious, agitating and "chaotic" to this client. Of course that would be true, right? Because the way we feel stable is to have our puzzle always be made up of 100% us. 

It is great to be in relationship with others- relationship of all kinds, everything from casual to intimate. But doing that's a different thing than giving up our puzzle pieces and replace them with those from others.

My client and I practiced becoming aware of the differences between "being my own puzzle, in relationship with others" and "having someone else be my puzzle." She could describe how each of these felt emotionally. When she's "being my own puzzle" she's "calm, peaceful, enthusiastic, present, and like I'm being true to myself." When she's lost some puzzle pieces and is either trying to fill those holes with other people's pieces, or she's already replaced some of her pieces with those of others, she feels "out of control, like I'm seasick, and like I've disappeared somehow." 

She was surprised by the irony- the more she fills herself with other people's puzzle pieces the more lost, alone and disconnected she feels. The more lost she feels, the "harder I try to get more pieces from someone else, because the more desperate I feel. And of course, that only makes the situation worse." It's keeping all her own pieces that leads to her feeling whole. 

So, in some ways her first thought was correct- she does have a problem around men. But it wasn't exactly the problem she thought it was initially. She thought she randomly "lost my mind" around guys. This wasn't the case at all. It's a problem of not being yet able to always hold onto her own puzzle. She was relieved to have a concrete plan to work on- going out into the world and practicing noticing what state her puzzle is in.

Thanks, Wendy, for an eloquent illustration of how the disorder creeps in, slowly, over time.
Part of what you allude to is how each time a new rule is put into place you can never go back.

In the "Why She Feels Fat..." book and with clients, I use a story people say is helpful in understanding why the eating disorder becomes such a part of someone's life and why someone becomes so deeply "attached" to it.

I like the Not Everything You Think Is True bumper sticker. But I think there should be another one that goes along with it that reads something like: "but that doesn't mean that everything you think is wrong"