Anorexia And Bulimia: The Price Of Emotional Intransigence
Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are a big challenge for our society.
Even if their rate is higher in adolescent girls, it should be noted that these diseases also affect boys and more mature women.
The term “good girl” is associated with secrecy, care, warmth, emotional control and an endless number of demands which put up barriers to the spontaneous and natural development of any human being.
The stereotype, behind which lie a large number of needs, precisely condemns the adolescent girls who advertise it.
To control her weight, body and image, many girls engage in sacrificial eating practices.
Voluntary renouncements which, in most cases, are not based on documentation, are poorly managed and cause a great deal of frustration.
This connection with food is, at its core, their tragic way of dealing with and turning away from their own suffering.
Anorexia and bulimia
Anorexia is often associated with food restriction and bulimia with purges, vomiting or compensatory behaviors after meals.
They are not typical and rigid models because the application of these disorders can vary from person to person.
In reality, there are two subtypes of anorexia: restrictive and purgative (purging oneself is any compensatory behavior to eliminate the ingested food).
Anorexia of the non-purgative type is associated with perfectionism, rigidity, hyper-responsibility and feelings of inferiority.
Purgative-type anorexia (in addition to total food restriction) is linked to a family history of obesity, pre-morbid overweight, impulsivity, emotional lability, and addictive behavior.
In bulimia nervosa, purges or compensatory behaviors are usual.
In this prototypical bulimia nervosa, with purges, there is greater distortion of body image, more abnormal eating patterns, and more associated psychological issues.
Non-purgative bulimia (there is a great force-feeding but no compensatory behaviors), can be confused with a simple disorder of force-feeding but it is not because the idea of weight and figure prevails over the rest.
This subtype is linked to other problems like suicidal ideation, addictive behavior and impulse control disorder.
What do they have in common?
The basis of these disorders is emotional. Patients find themselves unable to regulate their emotions.
Emotions which, sometimes, could not be expressed satisfactorily in a not very stimulating, restrictive family environment, with great demands or in an entourage which did not know how to respond in a way adapted to their intellectuality and their desire for tenderness.
When the disease is clearly established, that other biological disorders such as diabetes mellitus, neoplasia, pituitary catechism, or psychological, such as OCD or psychosis, have been ruled out, we can say that we are facing to an eating disorder.
Eating disorders tend to appear between the ages of 10 and 30, and in 95% of cases they affect women.
They have in common the obsession with thinness. They share an extreme concern for weight and figure, cognitive distortions, symptoms of depression and anxiety, in addition to poor social functioning.
Why do they appear at this age?
We know that most of the victims are teenagers: one of the frequent causes is that the young girl does not know how to manage her passage to adulthood.
Her “little girl” communication system is still deficient, she feels pressure and finds herself in a context of inhibited emotionality. At this age, girls are more aware of what the feminine gender “apparently” imposes on them: thinness, beauty, candor and submission.
If it were just an image problem, people with anorexia would regain balance in calorie intake as soon as they saw that they were thin enough.
It’s the need for perfection, the fear of relapse, and the perceptual distortion that keeps their behavioral patterns going. Behavioral models that only receive rewards in repetition.
Myths about anorexia and bulimia
The personalities of women who suffer from these disorders have been associated with disorganized life models, frailty and lack of intelligence. But these are not the characteristics that we find in these patients.
Nor are they delusional people unable to discern reality from imagination. In anorexia, patients are not delusional or hysterical.
According to some studies, it is not a question either of an alteration of perception, but of the comparison with more and more demanding models which materializes in restrictive behaviors.
It is their way of creating a link with the world, of burying what they have never been able to express: not eating is the best way to control what happens to them.
This is why when they do not succeed, they punish themselves mercilessly.
They are not hysterical, they feel lonely
On the other hand, the fact of being focused on one objective distracts them from other types of problems, which will always be secondary and postponed, until the day when they really solve the basic problem.
Most of them are not aware that they are in a destructive process but once started they have created a system of reinforcements and punishments so powerful that it becomes very difficult to escape.
They have programmed their brains so that their inertia is really powerful.
Many of the girls and boys who suffer from these disorders manage to return to normalcy in their lives.
Doing so is hard, costly work that requires patience and often involves relapses.
However, to overcome this problem, it is necessary to have the support of the people you love. Their support, their faith and their relentlessness to get out of the tunnel are fundamental.
Indeed, the disorder directly attacks the self-esteem of the person who suffers from it, makes him inferior because he systematically compares himself to models that he believes to be superior, more perfect, more desirable.
So, what is characteristic is the belief to be inferior and the constant aspiration to be thinner.
In addition, it is common for people who have suffered from a type of eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia, exhibit patterns of overdependence, fear of abandonment, hypersensitivity to criticism, etc.
One way or another, these type of disorders are transcended but not cured and involve a constant challenge to keep the person in shape throughout their life.
