TRAUMA & DISSOCIATION SCHOOL
Meet Lara, My Anorexic Part
Anorexia as a way to fight trauma
Picture: Me, not 17 outwardly (maybe 25), but very anorexic. This is taken some months after one of my severest Ketonuria episodes. But I have been hospitalised for being severely underweight and malnourished a couple of times, and been anorexic for many years, bordering on collapse and death, as a way to stay alive… Picture taken by my sister, borrowing my precious camera.
Lara is 17 and severely “anorexic.” She is a part of me that has used food to regulate herself, to control herself, and to control (but also show) her anger. Anger over years and years of abuse. In long periods of my life, Lara has been the one who has both threatened our (my) existence, and saved us (me) from other kinds of harm or “just” saved us (me) from overwhelm and post traumatic stress. Anorexia is scary to the onlooker, because it is seemingly so destructive, and yet it is often a way to fight for one’s life. As long as there is any form of anger in a person, they are fighting to survive, no matter how that anger comes out, even if it comes out in self-destructive ways. And for survivors of sexual abuse, that anger often, at least partly, comes out as what is called “anorexia,” as well as other kinds of “eating disorders.”
Let me introduce Lara
Lara is angry. Her goal in life is to look like an exclamation mark. So she can poke people in their eyes with her pokey, bony appearance, punishing them for being so blind. Almost turning herself into a piece of performance art. And because other parts of her do not really want to see anything, they (seemingly) want to be poked in their eyes as well. Better to be blind and thin — than fat and annoying everyone with truths? (Or better to focus on what you can impact and ignore the rest — there are as many reasons to stay thin…as there are parts of us).
She does not have to starve herself anymore -now she can verbalise — very plainly. She used to verbalise before as well — in poetry. She still writes poems.
Like this one she started to write a couple of weeks ago, which remains unfinished.
It is called “The Lightness of Lies” and starts off with:
Living on Lettuce
To un-Large, Un-Lard
Yourself.
In an act of Un-Love
For Yourself.
In an Attempt to Assassinate
The Attacker.
The Tres-Passer who
Planted himself in
You.
Simultaneously Slaying
Your Self(-Worth).
How can there be Any Room
For You?
With Him Attaching
In You?
How can you Annihilate
The Seeds He Planted
In You
Without Succumbing
Yourself?
To the Death-Sentence
Of Starving Him
Out of You?
My body the battlefield
But she can also just say, “F*ck you for stealing my childhood” — for f*cking up my relationship to food so severely I almost died, over and over again. F*ck you for making my body the battlefield. F*ck you for teaching me to stay small. For teaching me that small equals lovable. (Or at least f*ckable).
You hear? She is angry…
(And not only with him — that is just the beginning of her anger).
I still love her. Very much. Anger and all.
And don’t let yourself be fooled by her fragile looks— She might be fragile at times — but she is also extremely Fierce. F*ckingly Fierce.
Just some months before this picture of her was taken, she was admitted to hospital. Having severe Ketonuria* — as she was so tired of being “in her,” she had decided that not eating was not doing it, so she had also stopped drinking (self-harm can take on gigantic proportions).
This was not the first time she had stopped drinking as well as eating (but it might have been the last time she took her protests and self-harm to such extremes). She would stop eating several times more. Or “restricting” as it is called.
This is what unprocessed emotions can look like. Often relating to trauma. But what is trauma? When someone hurts you? When society hurts you? When you feel “wrong,” excluded? When you are not taught how to love yourself (by being loved)? When you lack the tools to live with, because you never learned any life skills?
I dare to say — there is no such thing as “anorexia”. It is not an illness. People starve themselves for all kinds of reasons. But there are always reasons, to them. And if you want to help — you need to understand those reasons. And if you are the one starving yourself, accept the offer to find out how to express yourself and how to communicate about what has hurt you. And get to know what “moves in you” (literally and figuratively) so that starving yourself no longer needs to be your only language.
One good question to start with, is to ask yourself — what am I angry about? (Because take it from Lara — you are f*cking angry if you are starving yourself ). And your own fear of your own anger — is part of your problem.
Dissociation
In its extremes, anorexia is a trauma response. A perfectly natural response to events that should not have taken place. Often people who are severely traumatised early in life, dissociate to protect themselves and “create” different parts of themselves, to survive. I put “create” in quotation marks, because it is not done consciously, even if there may be some awareness of the process. They simply create more of themselves – different parts of themselves. For many reasons, but partly to spread out the burden of the traumas they need to live through, and partly because they lack support and are very alone. I was such a person. And Lara was a part of me who preferred to use starving as her life-strategy. And when she took care of the anger, I did not have to feel it. And it made it easier for me, as anger was very scary for me to feel.
I no longer dissociate in this way. I still think of Lara with fondness. These days I can feel my anger myself, and do not have to split it off. And therefore, starving myself is no longer necessary. Though I know how hard it is to break lifelong “habits” and strategies, so I do not promise myself to never do it again. Lara is still here, in some sense, but is also “just” a part of me. She is my anger (not all of it, but a big chunk of it).
*Ketonuria: Having too many ketones in urine and blood can prove to be toxic. The molecules carry a more acidic pH, and a buildup of these fatty acids can dangerously alter the pH of the blood.
A version of this text was originally published in my book “Here & Gone… Fragments — from a Life Partially Unlived.” The book gives you a great understanding of what it is like to survive early childhood trauma with the help of dissociation, but also how one can find a way out of that dissociative mist.
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.