The Quest

This is extremely long, sort of academic, and probably rather boring. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't read it.


Part of me still thinks that the whole quest for weight loss is, essentially, stupid. It is superficial and shallow and hollow, and at its core it really doesn't mean anything. People look at your skinny body, wrapped in its popular clothing, the hair styled and the makeup done, nails polished and skin smooth and clean, and based on the choice you've made to be skinny, to conform to the popular styles, you are allowing them to judge you as a certain kind of person. You are allowing those who wish to have power to sedate you, to make you another compliant clone. If I was to become skinny, to follow the cultural trends, I think, it would be the same thing as allowing them to take my own power away from myself. Because they are saying: You are only worthy as a woman if you are small and fashionable and more like the masses. We have indicated that your most essential worth comes from your appearance, and if you do not follow this, we will mock you. We will berate you, and chastise you, until you once again become silent and do what we want. In other words, we have all the power in this situation, and you have none.

These kind of thoughts make me feel like the whole world is acting out a patriarchal and mysogynistic play, one where, even though we never voice it, men still want to have power over women. The group that has been dominant for a long time in a certain society wants to continue to remain dominant, to never have its supremacy questioned by the other groups. And when men feel that women hold all, or some of, the cards in areas where they have never before held cards, it is a challenge to their power and authority, and it rocks them at their very cores, and they become afraid that, because women now have some things, they might someday have the potential to take their own power away from them. They do not realize that most women do not necessarily have that agenda. They assume that because their own unconscious agenda is to keep power, women must have the agenda, as the less dominant ones, to snatch that power away. Why? Because that is what aggressors do -- attempt to seize power. So maybe every bid for real equality will be met with a strong and negative reaction, because of this fear of a usurping of control.

Maybe the heightening equality of women in the work force and in other places is being countered, not at the source of that specific issue, but in another way. In women's sublimation via the mass media. In telling a woman she is no good, in the work world or otherwise, unless she is skinny and beautiful and wears this makeup and buys clothing from these fashion labels. There are still so many factors at work to try and keep women down, even if advertisers' specific intents are not to keep women down. We don't have to state it out loud, because it's already there, screaming at us through the things we see and hear on a daily basis. We don't have to teach our children gender differences and roles, because they learn them through interaction with people who already have it ingrained within themselves and their behavior. If you don't believe me, let me ask you: Would a little boy voluntarily wear pink? Why not? What's wrong with pink? Why is it a "girls' color"?

Anyway, the real point here is that, when threatened with the possibility that a less powerful group might overtake them, it seems that the group already in power tries to strike back, only in a different way, through methods that started years or, in this case, decades ago. Methods that have now become so complex that it's harder to get to the root of the issue and deal with it. Fairly similar to how, the longer an adult has had a certain mental disorder, the more constructs they have built around it, and the harder it is to work through all the layers of disorganization and distortion to get to the real truth that started the whole castle building.

So if I am thinking all these things, and I can see them with my own two eyes, why do I still think weight loss is this great thing, and that if I managed to lose these damn 15 pounds that haunt me, I would somehow be a better person, a more perfect woman? Because factual analysis isn't enough, perhaps. The ideas that I've gotten in my head, through media and through my interactions with others, are so ingrained that even knowing the facts often isn't enough to make me do anything about it. And why? Because these intellectual facts do not seem relevant to my personal situation, perhaps. If everyone you know face-to-face is telling you a certain thing, and you grow up believing it, isn't it hard to just "shake it off" as if you never learned it, even if something you learn in your higher education calls into serious question the validity of the thing you learned? And it's even harder when you still feel that that mindset serves you well at least some of the time, and that you're truly accomplishing something through what you've learned. Which is how, I'm sure, a lot of us feel about weight loss. It really feels like you're doing something good and concrete for yourself, often, even without all the other issues that will go along with it if you have an ED -- control, deep insecurity, whatever.

The reason eating disorders are so damned hard to get rid of are that even once the distortions, the issues, that come along with the "disorder" part are gone, we still have to contend with all the social messages that everyone, everywhere, is telling us. Messages that a lot of people grew up believing were true. And it all serves to make an eating disorder look almost socially acceptable, especially in the early stages. There's an awful fucking lot of validation that goes on in eating disorder communities, particularly in pro-ana communities, about why an eating disorder is actually a good thing, a constructive thing, healthier than what the person was doing before. We know that a lot of it is just the warped thinking that the eating disorder needs to go on living, because the person, at a deeper level, doesn't think they can survive without it. But part of it also comes because we are taught by society that weight loss IS a good thing, a constructive thing, something that makes you healthier. And we're taught that skinnier IS better. And, of course, nobody in the mass media comments on how any of these celebrities actually got skinny, or whether it's really truly healthy. They just show you pictures of skinny celebs on the red carpet, on the runway, in performances, in movies, and you are left to glean the message for yourself. Intuitively. The way that humans learn so many of their social constructs.

There is a reason that socialization is so important when we consider the modern increases in diagnosed eating disorders. It's not because socialization causes eating disorders. That's an extremely stupid line of reasoning which, once used, gets you the utter disrespect and suddenly mute ears of people who actually have a clue what they're talking about. But it's hard to deny that socialization is a definite factor in eating disorders. It helps to provide that fertile soil for people who have had certain kinds of lives, who have certain personality types or traits, to dig themselves deeply into once they discover what it is. Professionals don't even come close to understanding yet how the pieces have fit together when an individual decides that first time to restrict, or throw up a meal, or whatever. They also don't understand why certain people diet and don't stick with it, and other people start a diet and go on to develop a serious eating disorder, anorexia or otherwise. But I really think you absolutely can't understand any of it without understanding causal factors... the way your brain is wired to create your basic personality (I don't think many would argue that different babies seem to be born with different personalities), how your environment interacts with your particular personality to create discord or harmony, how secondary socialization enters the picture both during and after primary socialization by caregivers (makes you wonder how secondary "secondary socialization" is, when a baby is surrounded by relatives and friends and videos and television and music from infancy), how it can all come together years and years down the road in a desire for eating disordered behavior. Mass media messages, messages from peers -- those are two things that would count under the label of secondary socialization. Can you, personally, deny that what other people do doesn't have an affect on you? If not, you cannot truly deny the impact of socialization.

None of this would even be a problem if everyone was the same. But of course no one is. So person A hears everywhere that she should lose weight, diets, and later on other factors intermingle to cause a restrictive eating disorder -- but social messages were clearly a primary trigger of her disorder. Person B hears those same messages and thinks they're utter bullshit, but years down the road she absolutely cannot cope with her life, and she needs something to obliterate her emotions, so she starts to restrict. Later, in her perusals of eating disorder communities, she discovers that there is an entire paradigm in mass media that validates her in her self-destructive intents, and so she seizes on it, makes it a part of her disorder, and then a part of herself. In the end, both girls' cases could look very much the same... but they certainly didn't come from the same place in the beginning. How the hell would a treatment provider know, from a clinical diagnosis or even one interview, which one of us was which? How would a provider go about figuring out what the primary etiology was in each of our distinctive cases, especially if we were both talking about wanting to be skinny and saying, "Look how many other people are skinny, and think that trying to be skinny is so great! How can you tell us we are wrong??" Or would a primary treatment provider even make that distinction, or care? I often think that a lot of them really don't care at all. After all, a therapy like CBT doesn't depend on knowing the etiology of a disease, does it? It says that if you change the though distortions or behaviors, you will change the person's life for the better. To a provider of CBT, the intuitive differences between person A and person B would not matter, because both clients would have to change the thought disortions that skinnier is always better, even when skinnier means really underweight and unhealthy, and change the behaviors, which would involve getting the underweight person to a normal weight.

For person A, this might actually help them a lot (though maybe not fully), because the primary cause of their disorder would have been addressed. But for person B, for whom this is a secondary, although eventually significant, effect... would CBT have a lasting impact on them? Would changing their eating disordered behavior and thought disortions actually ensure that such problems wouldn't come back in the future, as these therapists would claim? After behavioral modification, the person who used the eating disorder primarily to cope with unwanted emotions could easily still have all the unwanted emotions -- in short, the primary cause of their eating disorder would still be there. How long would such a person be able to go on using the behavioral modifications before the primary cause reared its ugly head, became too much to cope with yet again? Wouldn't such a person do better in another treatment, one that addresses the TRUE primary cause of the disorder... no matter how hard that primary cause, or those many primary causes, might be to discover?

But CBT therapists never see this. They think that the symptoms a person presents with MUST be the symptoms that need treatment, and they don't think it so necessary to look much further. They don't do dynamic work, and so they don't get any idea of what really caused the disorders of persons A and B. They don't deal with any underlying or more deep-seated issues -- maybe because they're uncomfortable with it, or because they are truly ignorant and do not think there is anything to see beyond the person as he or she is right now, or maybe for some other reason. As such, they are doing patient B an extremely huge disservice, because in patient B they are treating extremely superficial issues and so cannot possibly hope to cure the real disease. The metaphor I like to use is that CBT is akin to putting a Band-Aid on the wound, while completely ignoring the infection underneath; it looks fixed, but it most certainly is not fixed! And yet CBT therapists go on in blissful ignorance of how their work was wasted, and someone like patient B is left semi-fixed and semi-damaged, trying to search out therapist after therapist in hopes of finally finding another one that will address the true etiology. While, in the meantime, they are unhappy and discontent and also completely in limbo... and it is just as easy for them to go back to their disordered behaviors as it is for them to recover, if not easier. Logically speaking, why wouldn't such an individual go back to disordered behavior? Not only is it more immediately appealing and effective, but now they've been through the system and discovered exactly how much it does not help them, and how superficial and stupid the whole thing is.

If you haven't already guessed, I will now tell you: Patient B is me. And reasons like this are why I take such complete fucking offense to CBT. Honestly, I would estimate that far more people get EDs for reasons that are not primarily culturally-based than who get them because they really just wanted to look skinny and beautiful and somehow they lost control of it. CBT is the most common treatment of our day, and it's totally fucked up, because the sickest people are often the people who need therapy the most, but are often the ones who benefit from CBT the least... because their problems are simply too deep and complex for a course of shallow, idiotic CBT to handle.


I think I should probably end my rant now. Kudos to you if you actually read all that.