Eating Disorders - fieldi

102 Jodie’s Story
of twenty-four. She came dressed in a sweat suit, with no makeup
and very short hair. She apparently took no pains with her appearance.
I was reminded that sometimes a demonstration of plainness
exhibits innocence (Oliner 1988). I was the third therapist she had
interviewed in as many weeks. She rejected the first for her condescending
attitude; the second was fat. Her gaze made me feel
uncomfortable. She was certainly examining the goods. I wondered
if she had chosen me. She had. She continued to watch me closely.
Some weeks later she complained angrily, “You said something last
week that upset me. You said, ‘I thought there were only three
women in your group.’ You looked angry, and I guess it’s because I
dramatize things that aren’t important.”
“I’m glad you brought this to my attention,” I responded. “I wasn’t
aware of feeling angry and, in fact, I think you talk about important
things in a way that minimizes their importance.”
Jodie felt her vigilance had been rewarded. She had caught what
she felt was an expression of anger on my face before I had had a
chance to insult her verbally.
Thus an anal register of relationship—humiliation—had developed,
and an effort to overcome it had been expressed by her burst
of assertiveness.
After a year in treatment, Jodie was ten minutes late for a session.
That was unusual. I went out to the waiting room and discovered that
she was stuck in the elevator. She was screaming and crying. I called
the fire department, and it took them twenty minutes to free her. I
wanted to embrace her as a survivor of a horrible tragedy. It was a clear
moment of affection that I felt for her, and that made me feel there was
hope. I had become important to her and she to me. We went into my
office for the few minutes remaining, and she asked me what I thought
about her screaming and crying. I said it must have been awful. She
said it was. Subsequently she told everyone the elevator story, including
her mother, who responded, “What were you crying about? You
knew the firemen would get you out.” This experience had finally
given Jodie the language to describe what had happened between
them. She had grown to feel ashamed of her feelings.
Thus bulimia can collapse the world into anality. The world
becomes an arena of shame and “shame becomes the agent that fragments
the self” (Hamburg 1989).