Devil’s Food
Biting the Hand that Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia
by Richard Maisel, David Epston, and Ali Borden
W. W. Norton & Co., 2004
(314 pages, $35.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Nun Katherine (Weston)
We all ‘have’ anorexia to some extent,” says the father of an afflicted teen. “So I think of the person ‘with’ anorexia as just ‘having’ more of it than the rest of us.” The siren voice of anorexia lures vulnerable people through shared cultural ideals, using every possible medium.
Freedom from it comes from learning and embracing the truth, and how much easier this will be when thinness is not deified by society at large or universally recognized as a hallmark of success. For many with anorexia, which predominantly afflicts women and girls, it is the only attainable mark of success. Therein may lie its seductive appeal.
Using narrative therapy, the three authors of Biting the Hand That Starves You have developed an insightful approach to dealing with life-threatening anorexia/bulimia (a/b). The authors, not interested in diagnostic categories so much as an experiential description of a/b, use the terms interchangeably. Their therapy presents a unified approach to a continuum of conditions.
A Traitor
Narrative therapy helps clients look critically at their thought processes by creating distance between the person and the thoughts, “the person and the problem.” This is done metaphorically by externalizing the voice of a/b. Sufferers dialogue with it, discovering it to be a traitor rather than best friend.
Typically, sufferers come to the authors’ practices completely identified with a/b’s agenda for them, saying that they themselves want to get thinner, they themselves want to burn off calories with hours of daily exercises. By using “externalizing conversations,” the authors have been able to “flush the presence and operations of a/b into the open” and to “reverse the vocabulary of self-blame . . . that a/b employs to represent people, thereby constructing a/b linguistically and conceptually, as a force or influence separate from the person.”
Only in this way do sufferers come to recognize the right to reject a/b and thus the possibility for taking personal responsibility. Their therapy is also advanced by deconstructing the societal definitions of success and beauty, the a/b in all of us, balanced by the reconstructing of their sense of meaning and fulfillment.
In the authors’ practices there are no “anorexic clients”; instead there are “insiders.” Downplaying the therapist-client relationship, they style themselves and the insiders as “co-researchers” into a/b. This position helps lift the stigma of mental illness and helps sufferers discover their personal resourses for engaging in an arduous but winnable fight for their lives.
A/b entails much more than just weight loss from not eating. It proposes to rescue its victims from engulfing feelings of worthlessness, grief, and guilt that prod them to strive for impossible perfections as a source of “moral worth.” This “moral worth” comes from a distortion of the Christian virtues of temperance, self-control, and self-discipline.
Nun Katherine Weston of the St. Xenia Monastic Community (Serbian Orthodox Church) is a Pastoral Care and Counseling student at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
18.3—April 2005
on Being a Free Narnian & the Joy of Subordination by Donald T. Williams
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
