The absence of a good and reliable connection with the mother in the first years of life can lead to serious disturbances in the mental development of the child. Including eating disorders, bulimia and anorexia.
“… I just don’t feel like eating, I don’t have an appetite. I do not like lies, pretense, I do not like when something is avoided. I would so like to talk to my parents, tell them about myself and hear about them, what kind of childhood they had, how they look at the world today. They never talked about it. They constantly tried to instill good manners in me and avoided anything personal. I am tired of this”.
“Mom is worried, as always. She invests all her activity only in worries about me, and this infuriates me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to eat again if she continues like this because the way she talks to me kills my appetite.
If I want to meet Monica, she says that a friend communicates with drug addicts. If I talk on the phone with Klaus, she says that he only has girls on his mind and he makes her suspicious. If I talk to Aunt Anna, I see that she is jealous of my sister, because I visit her much more often.
I feel like I have to adjust and cut my life in such a way that my mother doesn’t break loose, that she’s all right and that there’s nothing left of me. So emaciate in soul that there will be nothing left of you, so that your mother is calm and not afraid.
These are lines from the hospital diary of 16-year-old Anita, who has lost weight to life-threatening levels. Her story is told in her book The Body Doesn’t Lie by Alice Miller.
Deadly disease
Anorexia is considered a very complex mental illness, sometimes leading to death. Anorexia has many causes, but the background is most often the same: disturbed parent-child relationships. To understand this disease, writes Alice Miller, we must understand what needs of the child were not met, what emotional deficit he experienced in the first years of life.
According to Miller, the whole point is parental cruelty, which does not always take the form of beatings. It also expresses itself in the lack of kind care, in ignoring the needs of the child and his emotional pain, in senseless punishment, in sexual abuse, in the exploitation of the unconditional love of the child, in emotional blackmail, in the destruction of dignity, and in countless forms of power.
Worst of all, the child accepts all this as normal behavior, because he does not know another. He loves his parents unconditionally, no matter what they do to him. But is it love? Miller believes that this is not love, but a painful destructive attachment, consisting of fear and a sense of duty.
The child must suppress the memory of this abuse and deny the pain in order to survive; otherwise he would have been killed by pain. If the child was fed lies, if the words and gestures concealed the child’s real rejection, hatred, disgust, antipathy, then he may refuse to develop on such “nutrition”. And in the future, he risks suffering from anorexia, not understanding what kind of “food” he needs.
From Anita’s diary: “Conversations with Nina (hospital cleaning lady – ed.) awakened my appetite, I started to eat and then I realized that there is something in life for me – true communication, something that I yearned for always.
I used to be forced to eat food I didn’t want because it wasn’t food but my mother’s coldness, stupidity and fear. My anorexia was an escape from this fake, poisoned food. Nina saved my life, helped me get the necessary warmth, understanding, communication and exchange of feelings.”
“How glad I am that there is Susan (psychotherapist – ed.). Not only because she listens and encourages me to express myself, but also because she is on my side and I don’t have to change to please her. She likes me the way I am. It’s amazing, I don’t have to strain at all to be understood. It’s a wonderful feeling to be understood.
Every child tries to get through to their mother in one way or another. But if he does not receive an answer, he loses hope. In the refusal of the mother, perhaps, lies the root of hopelessness in principle. I no longer suffer from anorexia, I have an appetite for life and food.”
Food to taste
The hero of Kafka’s story “The Hungry Man” says at the end of his life that he was starving because he could not find food that would suit his taste. So is Anita. Only after her recovery did she find out what she had been looking for since childhood: real emotional communication, without feigned “care”, without guilt, without reproaches, without threats, without fear-mongering, without projections. Communication that occurs in an ideal situation between a mother and her desired child in the first phase of life.
Analyzing Anita’s case, Alice Miller explains that recovery became possible when Anita learned from her own experience that there are people who are willing and able to understand her. Who take her seriously, demanding nothing and not blaming anything. And with a therapist who could hear and feel her, the girl learned about her own emotions and dared to live and express them.
Understand can’t judge
Alice Miller does not encourage the reader to choose the role of the victim and condemn the “evil” parents. After all, adults often refuse to communicate with a child not out of evil intentions, but because this form of care was not familiar to them in childhood and they are not at all aware that this is possible.
They can learn to communicate meaningfully with the child, but only when they stop being afraid of the past, when they deal with children’s emotions in relation to their own parental figures. This can be done with the support of a therapist who himself has freed himself from the power of the fifth commandment (“honor thy father and thy mother”). It is this rule that closes access to the child’s repressed emotions in relation to his parents.
It is necessary that the therapist be completely on the side of the child and be able to explain the meaning of bonding communication between the adult and the child. If the client manages to get to his childhood experiences and recognize them as a justified reaction to the attitude of the parents, then, as a rule, the bodily symptoms disappear, including eating disorders.
Read more about this in Alice Miller’s book The Body Doesn’t Lie (published this fall by Bombora).
About the Expert: Alice Miller is a Swiss psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and author of many books on parent-child relationship disorders. The most famous of which is “The Drama of a Gifted Child and the Search for Self”.