Eating Disorders Quotes

“Patients with eating disorders contend with an emotional landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. Help with these struggles will never be found in a pill or a set of therapeutic exercises, in spite of the potential usefulness of both. It is only through a meaningful emotional connection that we can help patients begin to "bear the unbearable and to say the unsayable".”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Kernberg (1995) observes that patients with anorexia tend toward sexual inhibition, whereas those with bulimia are more likely to enact sadomasochistic sexual interactions, especially when eating disturbances temporarily recede.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“In her article, Williams (1997) describes a class of "psychically porous” patients who suffer from eating disorders, most frequently bulimia nervosa, and suggests that they had parents who themselves suffered extensive traumas and as a result were either frightening or frightened or both in relation to the child.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Numerous patients with eating disorders refuse to eat with their families and friends, even insisting on eating only in private. Many of the practices that are seen as essential for creating and sustaining relatedness - the sharing of food, living together, sexual relationships, and even reproduction - are consistently negated by anorexic and other eating disordered practices.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Mourning is the vehicle of transformation through which traumatic themes can be acknowledged, disillusioned wishes for an ideal object relinquished and painful early relationships transformed into aspects of the subject’s character that are carried forward in constructive ways.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“We all need to feel safe, that the world is predicable, that obstacles can be overcome, and conflicts resolved -in short, to maintain narcissistic equilibrium. When such conditions are met, infants can pleasurably engage with their environments. When faced with overwhelming experience, internal or external, they must find a way to restore their fragile self-esteem. Some infants, especially when faced with overwhelm that cannot be overcome, turn away from reality and toward omnipotent solution. This learned response feels dependable and, over time, takes on an addictive quality, restricting her access to other solutions and pathways to further growth.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Patients with eating disorders typically report little power to stop their eating disordered behaviors (i.e., reversibility), are often unaware of the thoughts and feelings they have when engaging in them (i.e., self-observation), and, by definition, their behaviors are self-defeating and fail to forward their development in constructive ways (i.e., appropriateness).”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“One of our central tasks with patients with eating disorders is facilitating the capacity to postpone action in favor of reflection. We inevitably find especially early on, that this is challenging: the pull to binge, or purge, or restrict is difficult, often impossible, to resist. To understand this fact, in this chapter we begin with a discussion of Freud’s (1914) notion of the compulsion to repeat and then formulate the eating disordered patient's symptoms as repetitions against traumatic themes from childhood, never-ending (because never fully successful) attempts to magically undo the pain of the past.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“The anorexic is strongly defended against her object hunger whereas the bulimic’s defenses against that hunger break down, leading to her over-consume and, in an effort to undo the eruption of that need, to vomit.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Each internal representation of the mother has its corresponding self-representation - the first as bad, empty, and guilty and the second as passive, compliant, and good. Working together, these internal objects undermine patient’s journeys toward adulthood, which is compatible with the symptoms and behaviors of the disorder.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Object relations theory is concerned with how the patient's early relational experiences have been intemalized as a psychological structure that continues to organize and give meaning to her experiences in the present. Are her objects "whole," reflecting both the good and bad aspects of important early relationships, or are they ''parts," representing of "all good" or "all bad" experiences of intense gratification, longing, or deprivation? The objects that populate her psyche shape the anxieties with which she struggles, the longings she feels, and the defenses she erects to manage the intensities of both. From this point of view, it is the underlying psychological structure -not just the eating disorder symptoms that manifest because of it – that are a focus of treatment. The eating disorder, in other words, is a result of dynamics that are woven through the patient’s personality.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Some patients may struggle to describe and elaborate on their experience, for instance, of need, desire, or hunger. While they can speak to their feelings, often quite articulately in other realms, in these particular areas this capacity is conspicuously absent.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“If there is one commonality between patients with eating disorders, perhaps it is that there is disharmony in the link between body and mind. This can manifest in various ways such as, for example, the “false bodies" described in a later chapter.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“The capacity to think about, to reflect upon, difficult feelings is what allows us to forego expressing them in more problematic ways, such as, for patients with eating disorders, through a binge, or a purge, or food restriction.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“When eating disordered symptoms arise in men, Schoen (ibid.) writes, they may signal difficulty integrating dependency needs into a masculine identification. Sands (2003) notes that men are more likely to express disavowed needs and wants through projections onto others - witness the preponderance of compulsive sexual behaviors in men - whereas women are more likely to use their own bodies to contain disavowed desires.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“In families of eating-disordered patients, the narcissistic use of the daughter by the mother is often immediately striking. Throughout the literature the degree of enmeshment or symbiosis between mother and daughter is remarked upon. Daughters are torn between the urgings of their own developmental strivings and their need to meet their mothers' narcissistic needs.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Although self-starvation as manifest in anorexia nervosa is a deadly form of self-destruction, it is also a healthy expression of the desire to be autonomous.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Eating disordered patients often grow up in families that place an inordinate amount of importance upon bodily appearance, including weight, and focus upon particular parts of the body: protruding tummies, thunder thighs, and tree-trunk legs. We see these same pathogenic qualities in much of the advertising that is directed toward women and girls.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction