Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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      A persistent problem with eating may disguise a post-trauma response to sexual assault in adolescent girls and women, and as such, can be a gender-specific symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).⁷ PTSD is a relatively recent term first defined in Diagnostic Statistical Manual-Ill (or DSM-III) (APA, 1980) and redefined in DSM-III-R (APA, 1987) as follows:

      1. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone;

      2. the traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in at least one of the following ways: intrusive recollections of the traumatic experience; recurrent distressing dreams of the event; sudden action or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (flashbacks); intense psychological distress at exposure to symbolic aspect of traumatic event;

      3. persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma or numbing of general responsiveness;

      4. persistent symptoms of increased arousal (i.e., sleep disturbance, hypervigilance, easily startled); and

      5. duration of the disturbance at least one month.⁸

      More women than men have eating disorders for physiological and socio-emotional reasons. Women are socialized to find value through appearing culturally attractive (“model thin”), a cultural ideal that increasingly demands technological assistance.⁹ Two-thirds of adult women report in response to surveys that one of their greatest worries is that they will get fat. Two-thirds have an inaccurate and injurious body image (nearly 95 percent overestimate their body size); 75 percent of adult women within the “ideal” range of weight for their heights still think they need to be thinner.¹⁰ Disorders of eating are so common among women that they could be considered norms rather than disorders.

      Cross-culturally, from birth, girls have 10-15 percent more body fat than boys. At puberty, male fat-to-muscle ratio decreases as the female ratio increases. The increased fat ratio in adolescent girls is the medium for sexual maturation and fertility. The average healthy twenty-year-old female has 28.7 percent body fat. By middle age, women cross-culturally have 38 percent body fat.¹¹ Efforts to be thin are so stubbornly resisted by a healthy body that one who desires cultural value/beauty must police her appetite assiduously.

      Social judgment regarding a woman’s psychological well-being and essential “goodness” is largely determined by how she looks. Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak maintains, “Becoming a woman involves learning a part, complete with costumes, makeup, and lines.”¹² We learn our gender roles through imitation and validation.¹³ A female’s “beauty” and body size are her cultural currency. Learning to behave like a woman involves learning to sit, stand, and talk in the appropriate (non-demanding) ways that do not take up too much space. Paradoxically she must act her part in a way that appears natural.¹⁴ The ability to diet successfully, as marked by achieving thinness, has been held as a gender-specific key to power, acceptance, and control—a triad that is shattered by sexual assault.¹⁵

      One symptom of sexual abuse is low self-esteem, which often facilitates a personality that seeks to please, for survival’s sake. In combination with female socialization, sexual abuse increases the chance that a woman will attempt to resolve a physical boundary violation by attempting to control her body. Some psychologists specializing in eating disorders believe that the psychological and physiological stress created by overvaluation of norms of thinness (which are not consistent with biological disposition) creates a context for restrictive dieting, fasting, compulsive exercise, and even purging. These behaviors that produce caloric deficits inevitably lead to binge eating and/or compulsive eating; purging sometimes develops as a desperate attempt to reverse the error of the binge eating and the fear of further loss of control over the self, and symbolically the environment.¹⁶

      Too often helping professionals and the woman with an eating disorder are distracted by the symptom—the behaviors of the eating disorder—and consequently miss the historical roots of incest that set the symptoms in motion. If counselors and the survivor herself remain distracted by the symptoms the behaviors will intensify. Because this posttraumatic response is cloaked in “normal” female behavior (that is, dieting and/or binging), it is often difficult for both survivor and helping professional to see clearly the connections between her history of abuse and her eating disorder.¹⁷ This connection is vital and must be made if the survivor is to be helped, for a survivor will have a very difficult time giving up any of these behaviors without finding alternative and functional ways of addressing the intrusions and expressing the pain that is the result of her haunting memories. Moreover, she must find tangible ways to feel power in order to let go of her dieting methods—her only physical symbol of power.

      Shared Traumatic Themes Manifested in Eating Disorders

       Shame

      Shame is a common experience of all victimization. It consists in a sense of being brought low, being made unworthy or unfit in the eyes of another.¹⁸ There is a profound sense of self-loathing that is a direct result of being sexually violated. A survivor’s attempt to shrink her own body may signal a sense of deeply imbedded shame. At times one is so overwhelmed with the shame feelings that one becomes passive, unable to take action on one’s own behalf to put an end to the real sense of shame.

      For the survivor of incest, her body is the site of that first shameful experience of abuse. As a child, she may not understand what is happening to her while she is seduced and invaded by a perpetrator. But as she grows up she tries to comprehend the abuse by believing something must be wrong with her body if it was selected to be violated. Something must be wrong with her if she responded to the perpetrator’s touch, or that something must be wrong with her if she could not defend herself against the offender’s intrusions. A woman may manifest this shame by feeling overconcerned with the size of her body or believing that if she looks a certain way—culturally acceptable—others will not see her core shame. Note Haddock’s belief that if she is thin then she is invulnerable to disapproval and rejection—further shame. In her words, “I come to OA [Overeaters Anonymous] because I need a reality check. I need to weigh myself and know that I’m like somewhere around 125 [she’s 5’8”]. That way I know that’s it. The world has to deal with me as I am and if they run away from me in terror, so be it. It won’t be because I am not normal. It won’t be because I’m fat.”

       Guilt

      Guilt may be distinguished from shame in terms of its focus. Guilt, according to moral philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is “the subjective awareness of having violated a moral system through having committed a fault or engaged in a wrongful act, and carries with it the anticipation of chastisement.”¹⁹ There are two basic ways of acquiring guilt. In the first, guilt is earned through wrongful behavior. In the second, guilt is imposed from an external source.²⁰ Guilt is imposed on the victim of a sexual crime by the perpetrator and is “taken in” at the level of the perpetrator’s offense.²¹ The victim then attempts to resolve the guilt by resorting to expiation demanded of her within the internalized moral system.

      A survivor’s ritual behavior with food may signal how much she has internalized the perpetrator’s guilt. His shame of incest becomes her shame. She now holds herself accountable, it is her fault—a result of her sinful nature. As one survivor claimed, “When I break my diet with a binge I feel like I’m shoving food into a garbage disposal.”

       Self-Blame

      Self-blame involves post hoc explanations of how choices that were made led to the victimization СКАЧАТЬ