Eating Disorders - fieldi

142 Individual Psychotherapy
expected from Laura. When Laura was a child, her mother frequently
hit her for such infractions as spilling milk, getting dirty, or messing
up the house. Her mother also often yelled and made cruel statements
about how Laura couldn’t do anything right and caused too
much trouble. She would also yell at Laura’s father and brother, and
Laura recalled bitter altercations between her brother and mother
when her brother was an adolescent. In contrast to Laura, her
brother rebelled and fought back. Father would both physically and
emotionally detach and lose himself in his work or projects at home.
Laura remembered that she felt confused about why she was unable
to please her mother. An early memory is of wanting to walk to
school alone on her first day. In our work, she understood this as
an example of how she dealt with separation, anxiety, and neediness
by isolating herself. As she grew older, Laura wished her
mother could simply tell her she was having a bad day and couldn’t
control herself. In a dream Laura reported early in our work, her
mother took her to have her wrist cut off. An electric saw went zip
and cut off her wrist. It was very painful. She was crying and thinking
about her mother making the doctor cut off her wrist. By association,
she thought of going to the dentist for painful treatment and
being punished for her bulimia. In response, I said that I wondered
if she felt this treatment would be worse than the illness. Over the
course of our work, as both Laura and her parents changed, her
anger and largely negative view of them shifted to a more balanced
realistic perspective.
Although Laura was able to talk openly and in detail about her
family, her losses, and her feelings, she was embarrassed and circumspect
in talking about sex, alcohol and eating. She was particularly
embarrassed to talk about her body, referring to her breasts as
her chest, and was unable to utter the words for sexual organs. Her
first period occurred on the family boat when she was about ten or
eleven. She was mortified, tried to hide the stained underwear, and
believed that God was punishing her. Her severe repression and anxiety
bespoke of possible childhood traumatic sexual experience
and/or extreme guilt about sexual exploration and masturbation.
Annie Fursland (1987) links women’s eating and sexual desire as
sources of shame and torment. Laura has not been able to recover
any memories of sexual abuse.