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A HUNGRY AND HURTING: EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE (MARTHA’S STORY)
MARTHA: "I didn't have a clue about how to connect with people."
Martha, a thirty-seven-year-old Jewish lesbian mother, links the onset of her compulsive eating to emotional abuse she suffered as a child, abuse that made her feel "disconnected from the world." She never learned the basic lesson of "connecting with other people" that she believes comes from allowing children to be themselves and trust others and nurturing them emotionally and physically. Martha describes herself in terms characteristic of abused children, portraying herself as a lost soul who lacked direction, roots, and a sense of belonging to anyone, including herself.4 She was almost always alone when she was a child. She has almost no memories of the time before she was eleven.
Martha grew up in a home in which she was deprived of basic physical and emotional care. There was no touching; she sometimes pretended to be asleep so her father would pick her up and carry her to bed, providing at least a moment of physical contact. Her father was rarely home because he worked nights. One of Martha's sisters treated her as if she were the family's maid. Another was emotionally cruel to her, keeping Martha from her friends and simultaneously telling Martha that any friends she had were a result of her sister's popularity.
Nor did Martha know how to reach out for attention or friends at school. When she made her first friend, in eighth grade, and told her mother about it, her mother said, "Don't get too excited because as high as you will be is as far as you will fall. These people will hurt you." It was a slap in the face, a punch in the chest. Martha cried as she told me the story: "I opened my heart a little and she pulled it down. A lot of emotional abuse and neglect.
The family labeled Martha overly sensitive and teased her incessantly. She cannot remember ever eating a meal with her family when she did not break down and cry because of the teasing. She watched between ten and twelve hours of television each day, even on school days. She knows she was a bright child because she was able to do well in school even though she never studied. There were no books in the house, and she didn't know how to seek them out. She was mildly dyslexic but no one realized it when she was growing up. She was repeatedly told by the members of her family that she was fat and ugly and had no personality. She had no sense of her body size or whether or not she was attractive.
Her mother controlled what Martha and her sisters ate. Even though her sisters were fat and her mother was obese and a compulsive eater, Martha was the one considered to have the biggest problem with food. She was always served last and castigated for eating. Her mother took her to a diet doctor when Martha was eleven and continued to limit her food. Yet her mother also participated in Martha's bingeing. Martha remembers being told by her mother that she could have three cookies each day when she got home from school. Martha would eat three cookies, want more, think about it, and then have more. Then she would struggle to decide whether' to get more and usually did, typically stopping after finishing a dozen cookies. Her mother would come home and ask her how many she ate. Martha would lie and say three. Her mother never questioned this openly, although she was the one who filled the cookie jar every day. Although Martha was obviously compulsively eating and lying, no one said anything.
Eating compulsively was how Martha comforted herself from the pain of not feeling connected to any person or to the rest of the world. Bingeing calmed her, leaving her feeling drugged and dazed. When I asked her if she thinks she ate compulsively out of fear of her feelings, she said it wasn't as if she had feelings and then ate to get rid of them. That would assume she had feelings to begin with. That would assume some connection. She ate from disconnection. No specific feelings triggered eating. Simply being triggered her desire to eat. She ate, felt numb, and watched television. And no one seemed to care.
