Eating in the Light of the Moon

Storytellers speak in the language of myth and metaphor. They tell us a truth that is not literal but symbolic. If we hear the stories with only our outer ear, they can seem absurd and untrue, but when listened to with our inner ear, they convey an inner truth that can be understood on a very personal level and absorbed. In this way, they help us connect with our inner world, our own mythic reality.

When we hear the wisdom in stories, we are listening to a language of symbols that speaks to inner truths. This language of symbol and metaphor helps us recognize the existence of deeper meanings and truths. We can begin to see that our own inner truth is often obfuscated by our surface realities and that our deeper longings are often tucked behind our more visible compulsions. We can see how food is a metaphor for emotional and spiritual nourishment, how eating is an attempt to respond to inner hungers for attention, acknowledgment, affection, or appreciation.

Because the story of our life becomes our life, it is important for a woman recovering from disordered eating to review her life’s story and to reframe it with a new understanding of her self and her behavior. In the telling of her story, she can begin to hear her inner truths as they emerge from behind the surface details. She can glimpse the symbolism of her obsession with thinness, her hunger for chocolate, her need to stuff herself. She can speak of struggles with conflict, identity, and desire, not in the hard light of reason, but in the light of the moon, which can softly and gently illuminate her truth.

Here are three tales told by women whose disordered eating behavior is now behind them. They are tales of damaged families and caring families, tales of great misfortune and wondrous gifts. Listen with your inner ear for the truth as it resonates with your own story.

A woman, now a therapist in her early thirties, tells a story about her long struggle for approval and acceptance. Unlike the ugly duckling, the “differentness” she felt as a child was no great mystery. No secret had been made of the fact that she had been adopted. Although she was told how “special” she was to have been “chosen” to be a member of her family, she learned at a young age that this coveted specialness could be maintained in her mother’s eyes only through great achievement. By doing, not by being.

She became a competitive swimmer. State champion, no less. At the pool, she learned to throw up to remove butterflies from her stomach, to eliminate any feelings that might interfere with winning and to distract herself from feelings about her mother’s recently diagnosed breast cancer, from feelings of never being good enough, special enough to please her.

“Ever since I was fourteen, my mother was supposed to die, which got in the way of my expressing any anger toward her. I couldn’t! It was always, your poor, sick mother. You can’t tell her the truth about how you’re really thinking and feeling because she could be dead tomorrow.’ I had to live with that all my life.”

When she left for college on a swimming scholarship, her occasional binge-purge episodes developed into a full-scale eating disorder. At first I felt so free, like now I can be whoever I want, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to be me.”

Not knowing where to look in her search for her true self, she focused on her outer appearance and obsessed about her weight. Although I weighed only a hunded and fifteen pounds I felt like I had to work frenetically, at a feverish pitch, to keep the weight off. It felt like there was something I had to keep at bay. If I just let things be, something bad was going to overtake me.”

In her reflections, she recognized that the vague “something” she didn’t understand at the time was the emergence of her female sexuality. Food deprivation was the only way she knew to control the strong instincts that threatened to overwhelm her.

“I had such strong urges. I wanted to have sex with just about every good-looking man I saw. But I was more interested in the feeling of power than anything else. I think things got distorted somehow, like I had this image that I could ‘get’ someone with my sexuality. I tried to be like a guy—to use my sexuality to get power, to win someone over. I really went for the shock value, flirting and talking about sex, like this is no ‘biggie’ to me. It was a way to try to disarm guys and also feel like I was bonding with them, like I was just one of the guys.’ And the eating disorder became even more crazy as I started acting out sexually.

“I became the first woman to rush a fraternity instead of a sorority. I rejected my feminine nature because I saw that the power was with the masculine, and I wanted to go where the power was. And I hurt myself terribly because I rejected myself”

She plunged into the darkness of depression. She had ventured out in search of her individual self and had lost her way. Without the light of the moon to guide her, without a way of honoring her feminine nature, it had become buried beneath an emphasis on masculine qualities of doing, accomplishing, competing, succeeding. “Power over others” was the only power she could recognize.

In desperation, she sought help from a therapist and began her journey into the labyrinth. She started to see that her struggle with food was related to “my enmeshed relationship with my mother and that my acting out was an attempt to separate from the feminine that I hated. I had so much rage toward my mom at that time that I saw her as someone I never wanted to be. She was so controlling and mean to me, and it was so awful having a relationship with her at that time. She would put out love, and as soon as I would respond, she would take it away, so I always felt like if I attempted to get close to her, I would get my ass kicked. So I worked really hard to figure out how to be good enough to please her, but it was never enough. Never, never, never. I never felt she had any confidence in me. Never felt she respected me. I think that is why I acted out so strongly against the feminine.”

I began working on my incest. When I was nine, ten, eleven, my brother was in high school. He was going into puberty at that age and he had no friends, so he acted out on me sexually. I had a lot of rage at my brother all those years and he finally stopped just as I was turning twelve, when I burst out with my rage. It’s interesting that a year later my eating disorder started I’d always known about the incest with my brother. It was something in the back of my mind that had never gone away. But I didn’t tell my folks until I got into therapy and my brother admitted everything and helped pay for my therapy.”

“I began to see that my eating disorder was there to tell me something, that every time I puked there was something that needed to be said, but I wasn’t able to find the words. That was so valuable for me. I remember standing there, pacing around my house going, ‘Okay, what is it?!’I would have to talk out loud and pace the house and I would pace and pace and pace and pace.

^«I noticed that what I binged on was always sweet always ice cream, cake, cookies—sweet, creamy things—a symbol for the sweet, nurturing mother that I wanted but didn’t feel like I could really have.”

“I learned how to be conscious when I eat, to just ask my body what’s going on. How to slow down and be aware. I used to rush around all the time. I started doing meditation. I could not believe what it was like to have a quiet mind! Because my mind had never been quiet. I was always berating myself, ‘I can’t believe you just went to the store and bought ice cream. I thought you said you weren’t going to do that!’ When I started learning to meditate it was like a little slice of heaven. And that slice of heaven was so much more fulfilling than a slice of pie or cake.

“I got turned on to the idea of the Goddess, that there is strength in the feminine, in the quiet stillness of just being and feeling. Before, I always had to be doing. I had to race. I had to be competitive.”

As she gained greater acceptance of her intuitive and emotionally sensitive nature, she was able to address the conflicts with her mother who was much more emotionally reserved and approached life in a more practical, methodical, linear manner.

“Of course, resolving my relationship with my mother was hard work. I had to be assertive and to continually confront her when I felt her rejecting me or trying to control me. I had to do the ‘broken record’ over and over. Three months before she died, after struggling with cancer for seventeen years, she said finally, ‘I don’t worry about you anymore.’That was the greatest gift she could have given me. I realized that that’s where all her anger was coming from. She didn’t have any confidence in me because I approached things so differently from her. She felt like she had to protect me and would get so angry when I would do things my way.”

On her journey toward recovery from disordered eating, this woman learned to honor and embrace her feminine nature, accept her sexuality, listen to her body, resolve her issues with her brother and mother, and find her true self.

“I know my recovery is complete because when my mom died recently, I didn’t go back to using food to cope with or block my feelings. I used food consciously. I ate chocolate chip cookies because they reminded me of her, baking cookies and stuff, but I didn’t go to that place of being desperate or crazy with my relationship with food. I felt overwhelmed and out of control with the loss of my mom, but that was where I was supposed to be. Before, when really stressful things had happened, I would find myself in that unconscious place with food instead of dealing with what I was supposed to be dealing with. For me it was very triumphant to work with my feelings directly and not use food as a vehicle to try to deny them.”

^«In my family, we all had our own separate lives. When I was at home, I was by myself. I was in my room or watching TV I can’t really remember much interaction with my parents. I can’t picture them with me at home, asking me questions or anything. I felt really lonely I guess. But I was used to it. The only one I felt close to was my brother, who was a year older. We always talked about everything.”

“I taught myself to play piano on my neighbor’s piano. I played whenever I could, like when people I babysat for had a piano. Sometimes I would go down to the church at night where I would put on headphones and listen to a song I liked, playing it over and over until I got every note perfectly.

“One day I came home from school with a flute I had been given in band class. It was an awesome flute. I remember thinking it must have cost a hundred dollars! And as I practiced in my room I got better and better and would play louder and louder, wanting someone to hear the beautiful music, until my mother yelled, ‘Shut the door!’ ”

Like the child in the story about the emperor’s new clothes, she was a very perceptive and sensitive child. But her perceptions were never acknowledged or validated. And so she thought something was wrong with her—something was wrong with the way she thought and felt.

“I always thought I was weird, like I just didn’t fit in, like I was this strange person. My parents were nice people and they seemed happy. They never talked about anything being wrong, but I always had this feeling that things weren’t right in my family. My father could be quiet and moody, but there’s no specific thing that ever happened I can think of or point to that caused my disordered eating. My parents always said they never did anything and they’re right, they didn’t do anything. I think that’s the point.

“Things just didn’t seem right, ever. I found out a couple of years ago that my younger sister was being molested by a teenage boy back then. I don’t know if my parents knew, but being so sensitive, I probably sensed something.

^«At school I just felt like I was different from everybody, and everything that happened to me felt catastrophic. I was easily overwhelmed with just normal things like getting lost in the hallway on the first day of school. I had a panic attack. I just knew I wasn’t normal. I was very shy and I think I had some kind of learning disorder.

^«In junior high it seemed like I lived in my own private little world. I have all these memories of thinking that ‘I’m just weird.’ I wasn’t popular because I was too shy, and I didn’t put myself at risk by hanging out with others. I was always really nice to people who were mean to me.”

^«At this time my brother and I stopped being close. I remember when we were around thirteen, Dad had to go buy him a jock strap and Mom had to get me a bra, and we would compare and check them out and laugh and giggle. We would stay up late watching videos together, talking, and eating cereal because Mom and Dad just didn’t care. We could stay up as late as we wanted to.

“Right around there is when I started my eating disorder. Knowing me, I probably heard about it from TV. I remember watching Fame and this girl on it had an eating disorder and she got all of this attention. I started out by just not eating all the time. I was naturally skinny already, but I wanted to be as skinny as I could be. I wanted people to know I was sick.”

^«I spent about two years starving myself. I didn’t get any attention for it, though, until one day I walked home from school and passed out on my bed. My mom went up into my room to talk to me because that day two of my friends from school had called my mom and told her I was sick ’cause I wasn’t eating. She asked me if I was okay and when I didn’t answer she put her hand under my nose and saw I wasn’t breathing. She panicked and called an ambulance. My heart had stopped and my dad had to give me CPR.

“I stayed in the hospital for a while and then got transferred to the psychiatric unit. My parents were there a lot and I felt really good like ‘I’ve got the attention now.’ The staff asked a lot of questions but it really didn’t do much good because I was trying to be sick, but trying not to act like I wanted to be sick. I wouldn’t give them honest answers to the questions they asked me because I wanted to stay sick. I remember a couple of times my whole family came for these sessions but nothing ever came of it. That was it. They pumped me up in weight and then I was shipped out.”

“I met Davis, a boy two years older than me, shortly after getting out of the hospital. In our relationship, Davis was always the boss and I just did what he wanted, but that’s what I needed then. He gave me a lot of attention, all the time.”

“I gave up on being anorexic and became bulimic. I developed a habit of throwing up, that was just how I lived my life. I didn’t know any other way to deal with feelings that came up. I didn’t know how to eat when I was hungry or stop when I was full. With Davis, I had sex for the first time, and even though he was the only guy I wanted, I was uncomfortable about being sexual. I think my eating disorder at that time was about blocking out everything that made me uncomfortable and sex was one of those things.”

When Davis joined the military, she dropped out of school to marry him and they moved out of their small town. It was at this time she received the news that her brother had been killed in a car accident. “I just lost it, crying and screaming, I couldn’t believe it.” But when she went home for the funeral she acted as though she was “just fine” and didn’t cry. She had learned to distrust her own sensitivity and to deny her feelings. She knew how to harden herself to her own suffering. She stopped talking about her brother and refused ever to mention his name again.

“I would stay up and clean the house and wash the dishes, and vacuum and then I couldn’t fall asleep. I was just wiped out. And there wasn’t anyone to help me. I thought I would go berserk. I thought I would die from tiredness, and I couldn’t tell my family because they wouldn’t believe me—they would just think I was trying to get attention or something.”

“To feel some relief, I began eating just so I could throw up, not like before when I would eat and throw up if I felt full. And Davis never knew about the bulimia. Never. Even though we had been married six years, I kept it hidden.”

“One morning, Davis and I were going to go for a walk and something took over, like it wasn’t even me talking, I could hear my voice, but it didn’t seem like it was me. And I just said, ‘I think I need to go get some help. ’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Cause I’m still kinda sick. ’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’And I said, ‘With eating, I’m still sick.’ He said, ‘What do you do? Aren’t you eating?’ And I said, ‘I’m eating too much and I kinda throw it up.’ I couldn’t believe I said it! As we walked, he asked all these questions and I told him everything, like I was on autopilot. I knew if I told him, I would have to get help.”

“I told my therapist every single reason I thought I was weird, why I thought that I couldn’t be a normal person ’cause I saw things this way and I felt this way. And one by one these things were explained and I found out I wasn’t weird and unacceptable. I knew I had an eating disorder but had thought I had no reason to be this way because my family was so normal.”

“When I started talking to Davis, it was really helpful. He was so open and honest. When I struggled to tell him how I felt, he would just listen or ask questions until he could say, ‘Oh, okay, now I understand. What can I do?’ I had to learn to tell him the truth about everything that bothered me and stop trying to keep him from being hurt. I had to express my fears that my daughter was developmentally delayed because I was a neglectful mother and my anger about having to deal with more than just regular childhood issues. At times I had to stand up to him when I felt he wasn’t right.”

As she made her way on this path toward recovery, she sometimes felt overwhelmed by trying to find the feelings she had repressed, the issues she needed to resolve. But she persisted, putting one foot in front of the other.

“When I first started therapy, I was really scared. How was I ever going to figure out everything that was bothering me? It seemed like I had such a big load. I had all these different problems, and it was just overwhelming to sit and think. How am I supposed to know what’s wrong? I have so many different things bothering me. But now it’s not a burden to think about what’s wrong because I’ve taken care of all those old feelings, and I don’t have such a big pile to dig through. I don’t have to worry about getting through this one thing to get to the next thing and then there’ll be another thing. Now its just taking care of business when it comes up and not procrastinating.”

^«I learned to trust myself and my perceptions of other people. Now I don’t doubt myself, my sensations and premonitions, or any single feeling I have. I know I can trust them because I’ve been right. I don’t need to use food to distract myself from knowing what I know or to convince myself that I’m wrong. When I go through my day, I’m not unconscious. I’m awake and I’m hearing exactly what people are saying to me. My sensitivity is a strength, and I can use it to keep me safe from people who are not caring of me.

“What I’ve noticed is that when people say, ‘You’re too sensitive,’ they’re annoyed because I’m so perceptive. And it doesn’t matter if I’m oversensitive, because sometimes that’s a good thing. I don’t worry about anybody judging me for it anymore because I can respect it in myself. So it doesn’t matter if somebody says, ‘You’re too sensitive,’ because I am, and I’m proud of it because it keeps me safe and very honest.

^«I learned that all of my feelings are okay because they are mine. And I can’t control them. I just need to feel them and express them. I learned to accept who I am, to set boundaries, and to assert myself. It sounds so simple but it was a lot of work.”

^«Keeping a journal really helped make me aware of my feelings and more conscious of myself in a lot of ways. When I wrote in my journal, I really focused on what I was thinking and feeling. I realized the way I had been living was cut off from who I was. I wasn’t connected to myself. I wasn’t conscious. It’s hard to explain, but I had been conditioned, somehow, to do and think and feel and act without listening to my inner voice, my inner knowing. It was just bypassed somehow. I was acting and eating and throwing up without being aware of who I was and what I wanted.

“While writing in my journal, I could practice paying attention and practice thinking and feeling. For instance, I would write about how when I was a kid I didn’t get much love and then I would feel sad, and then I would learn that’s what sad feels like. Other times I would feel stressed out and write about feeling stressed out rather than go eat cake or pizza. Pizza was a big thing for me because I learned that when I crave pizza, I need a lot of attention.”

“I learned how to find my physical hunger by eating two bites and checking in with my body, waiting until my stomach told me to eat. That was a gigantic insight, that I could wait to eat until my stomach told me to! I remember the first time I felt it; it wasn’t quite a growl but almost like a little sensation in my stomach. Now, it’s not stressful to actually have my stomach say, ‘I’m hungry.’ I don’t have to worry about it all the time, like ‘My gosh, I’m going to have to eat pretty soon.’ I can enjoy eating now. It’s a normal experience.

“I still have certain times that I might not be hungry and I start thinking about food, and all I do right away is go, ‘Wait a minute, my stomach’s not growling, why am I thinking about food?’ And it’s not so complicated to realize something else is going on—I might be emotionally, not physically hungry.”

With her newfound confidence in her self, her body, and her feelings, she returned to school, earned her G.E.D., and joined a women’s therapy group for disordered eating. There, she confronted her fears of rejection. “When I started group, it was very, very scary because I’m not a very social person. I wasn’t used to talking to people. It took about six months to get me there. But when I started talking in group, I found out that people didn’t laugh at me. They didn’t think I was stupid because I talked a certain way. I had always just assumed that I don’t talk right, that I go on, or that I talk about stupid things. This is what I had been telling myself every day of my life. It was just so awful. From group, I started finding out that I was pretty cool.”

As she made her way toward the gateway leading out of the labyrinth, “I thought, ‘Fine, now I’m in therapy and learning how not to use food,’ but I still was throwing up once in a while. I decided, ‘I’ve got to find some kind of motivation to stop throwing up’ because I was learning other things to do in group and then sometimes going home and throwing up anyway. It was scary to let go of it because I had been doing it for so long. So I decided I was going to set a date because this is what had always worked for me when I was a teenager, except back then I used to say, ‘On this date I’m going to lose this much weight.’ But now, with all the new skills I had, I could use this approach for other purposes.

“I set the date for january 1st at 12:01 A.M. I wasn’t really throwing up much before this date, but I said to myself, ‘I’m going to get it all over with now,‘ and I threw up a candy cane at 11:59 and that was it. The ball dropped.

“And then I went and sat down and wrote in my journal I was all by myself. Nobody but me knew I was doing this. I had been living all my life for others for so long, but this belonged to me. It was like my own special ritual. I did it for myself and I didn’t have to tell anyone at all.”

“Before I started back to school, I began to notice I was eating at times I wasn’t hungry. I would be hungry for four different foods all at once and was trying to please all my cravings at the same time. I realized later that I was also in the middle of trying to figure out if I wanted to stay home and take care of my child full-time, go to college, get a job, or have another baby. Four different choices. Four different foods. My trying to decide what to eat was really my trying to decide what to do with my life. I realized then that I now have the tools to figure this out on my own!”

She exited the labyrinth and enrolled in a community college. On her journey of recovery she had found a new vision of herself, one that included respect for her innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires. And she found the attention she had been starving for her whole life.

“It’s really not about food at all. I never used to give myself time to think about what I really wanted. Like before, I would think I wanted cake, but I really didn’t. I wanted a hug. Now I can tell the difference.”

A third woman, with a growing career in public relations and communications, tells a story that is not unlike the story of the Princess and the Goddess. She lost her mother at age twelve, not to death, however, but to alcohol.

“I basically stopped growing emotionally when my mother became an alcoholic. Up to that point, I had had a wonderfully happy childhood. I was very precocious. I was very bright and knew I was bright. I couldn’t have cared less about my appearance. That was not an issue with me.

And then when my mom started drinking, she attacked me. Because she did not know how to deal with her emotions, she took all of her rage out on me. The pattern was she would drink every night and by dinnertime she was just attacking me with her obsession of the day: I said something grammatically incorrect or I wasn’t home at four o’clock. It was never about important things, it was not about the fact that I wasn’t doing my homework or anything like that, but it was nitpicky stuff about something I had said or that I didn’t smile and shake someone’s hand properly during the day. It was some obsession that she would fixate on all night long and chase me through the house, room to room, and come in with this crazed look on her face. I was a normally a very quiet person but she would hammer at me until I just flew into a rage, a screaming rage in her face every night.”

“Everything about me for her was wrong. She definitely had in mind the daughter she wanted and I didn’t fit that bill at all. If I tried really hard I could, but just being who I was wasn’t acceptable to her.”

“She never did this with my brothers. She occasionally did it with my dad, but with him she would be all moody and passive-aggressive. With me, it was very overt. Everybody would see this, that she was on me, riding me, but nobody would say, ‛Mom, cut it out’ or ‘Mary, cut it out’ and then suddenly I would explode and they would say, ‘Oh, there you go again. You’re out of control.’

“And I became very fearful of my anger because I never learned how to express it properly. People always told me how sweet I was and how quiet I was, and I would think, ‘You’ve never seen me. I am capable of hari-kari.’ ”

“I kept saying, ‘This is crazy! Mom’s drunk. She’s out of control,’ and they said, ‘This is the way it is, let’s just live with it.’ Having a very sensitive nature, I could pick up that things weren’t right and my family was so messed up and so hurting. But when I tried to voice that, everybody kept blaming me for being the one who stirred everything up, and to this day I know they look at me as though I’m not quite right.

“So I used food to tune out. Food and television were my drugs. My pattern was, I would sit down with crap—potato chips or pizza—and it was the only peace I could find. And it was always junk food. And then when I was in high school, I flew the other way and I barely ate.”

“I had a healthy weight as a child, but as a teenager I was very thin. I did not eat breakfast. I did not eat lunch. If I had lunch, it was a salad with no dressing, and then I would binge at night when I got home. When I was restricting my eating, I would obsess about my appearance and my size. I got into the game of comparison. I went to a very competitive high school where there was a high level of social pressure, and I immediately engaged in that comparison. I was never thin enough. I was athletic and I ran and was very active, but I felt just enormous.”

When she went away to college, “I did okay and maintained my weight pretty well. I think getting away from my mom did me a world of good.” But she was not able to escape from the part of herself that felt the shame of not being good enough.

“When I began building a career, my compulsive eating started almost immediately. I never felt intelligent because I didn’t study hard in college or even in high school. I felt dull. And all of my friends got such great grades and I got by with passing grades. I really questioned my intelligence. And then I had to go out into this big work-world with a 3.0 GPA that I was so ashamed of. This, I thought, was my great shame and I felt inferior from the word ‘go.’ I started eating compulsively then and it just escalated. To cope with my feelings of inadequacy, I became obsessed with food

“After I worked for a year or so, I decided to go to graduate school. I picked the top communications school in the county, determined to be perfect, to make up for past errors, and that’s when the compulsive eating really kicked in.

“I was so scared and so shy inside, but I realized if I put my exterior together and looked a certain way, that got me so far. I gave people the impression that I was confident, really on the ball. And I started to rely on my exterior appearance. I became absolutely professional at looking fine, more than fine, looking like I was a stellar achiever. And that’s when my insides and my outsides started not to match. I became really obsessed with food to block out my inner feelings of shyness and insecurity that didn’t match my confident exterior.”

The more she tried to present only one side of herself to the outside world, the more difficult it became to keep her shadow side, her disowned feelings of inferiority, of shame and pain, confined to the underworld. Unwilling to remain hidden from view, her shadow sister was gaining strength and threatening to take over her life. In a frantic attempt to keep her away, “I would make secret runs to the grocery store, secret runs to McDonald’s. I remember one time late at night, I was lying on the couch agonizing over a McDonald’s caramel sundae with nuts. I didn’t live in a real great area, but I got up and drove to this horrible part of town because it has the closest McDonald’s and got french fries and a sundae. That’s when the real crazy behavior started. I remember coming home and feeling so out of control, having no sense of how to stop it.

“My food volume really increased. I had no concept of my hunger. I was totally lost in every sense of the word and yet, marching out there every day looking as though I had it all together. The stress I put myself through was tremendous, and that’s when I finally tumbled into a counseling center at the university.

“That began my journey toward recovery even though at that point it wasn’t about food I began to see that my mother’s alcoholism had hurt me deeply. My compulsive eating continued to hum along at that time while I began to deal with that litany of characteristics that are inherent in an adult child of an alcoholic: low self-esteem, feeling not good enough, a whole medley of things.

“I got out of graduate school and went back into this profession. Now I had this very expensive master’s degree, and the guilt that came out of that was incredible. I became determined to earn my value, my sense of self-worth, through this career. Through all this, my eating got worse and worse, and the bingeing became a constant thing. I was drinking and smoking cigarettes. Even more than the alcohol, food was what I couldn’t control. I could control the alcohol.

“I got more therapy after graduate school, mostly to cope with the frustrations of work and to help me come to terms with getting married to my husband and the strong opposition from my parents. It was yet another example of how inappropriate and controlling their behavior was. They tried to influence me. They never valued that I loved this person and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Oh, God, no, that had no value at all.”

Her journey was a long one. But she persisted, winding around the periphery of the labyrinth, looking for the gateway that would lead her toward freedom from her food and fat obsessions. She found it by speaking her truth, by sharing her pain and shame about her eating.

“At that time, I told my husband I don’t want to have any secrets in this marriage. I told him I have a terrible problem with eating. And from then on I was very up front with him. I would hide from him what I was eating but I would usually tell him later. He was wonderful about it. It hurt him to see me destroying myself and he was so concerned he wanted to help in any way, but he let it be my problem. He didn’t try to fix me, which I thank him so much for because I needed to face this on my own and have his support for as long as I needed it, but I couldn’t have coped with him getting all involved”

She began with a weight loss program, in hot pursuit of her runaway eating behavior. And like the Japanese woman who chased after her runaway rice cakes, she found herself heading toward a den where the Oni lived.

“After a while, I was able to lose forty pounds by cutting out a lot of things and eating very healthy meals and exercising. But I knew that the demon was still there, that I hadn’t cured anything. By that time, I knew that although I wasn’t such an awful person, something was wounded deep down inside of me. But I didn’t know what it was. And I knew that until I got to it, this would never go away. I used to pray to God that I would get to it.”

She began therapy again and joined a women’s disordered eating group. This led her down the shadowy pathway toward where her demons lived. Along the way, she discovered the connection between her compulsive eating and her career.

“Because my mom was such a nightmare, I turned to my dad very early on and valued what he valued I realized that I was trying to be more like his son than his daughter, to be his little ‘protege.’ My dad was very successful, and I wanted so desperately to win his approval so I could be like him, not like her. That’s why I took the college route and the graduate school route to be a professional woman. He used to talk to me all the time about what kind of jobs he saw me in. They were all very glamorous professional positions. That’s what he wanted for me. Having a family and not having a career was just heresy to my father. It wasn’t something he valued. His ambition came from a loving place, but I think it was really misguided And he liked it when I looked a certain way, when I had my coiffed hair and got my master’s degree. Boy, I got big points with him for that. So I realized that all my efforts were to win his love and to align with him completely. Because that was the only safe place there was. That was survival”

“In therapy, I would tell my worst truths and learn to see that my disordered eating either had a reason or had value, that there was value in what I thought was so horrible. I began to see my eating as having a purpose, that it wasn’t about ‘I’m so diseased and broken.’ Everybody had always been so quick to say, ‘Too bad that you’re like this. How can we get you out of this? Let’s fix you and get you better. I was always someone who needed to be fixed. Suddenly it was, ‘Let’s look at what that’s about’ as opposed to fixing it.

“And I finally got at what that poor, hurt place was and discovered that I was totally shamed as a child and made to feel as though I had no value except for maybe how I looked I was so utterly and deeply shamed, and told that my value came from the exterior, how closely I could fit the standards of others. My insights, my ability to see the invisible, my sensitivity, were not valued in any way within my family.”

“Learning in therapy about the imbalance between the male and female energies within me was so important. I realize now that ever since I was a little girl, I absolutely abhorred women’s things. I wanted a boy’s bike, I wanted boy’s tennis shoes. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I wanted to be a woman that was so bold I could enter the man’s world and have it work for me. I realize that is what has been fueling this career obsession and why I’ve been so reluctant to have a family.

“Until I got to know my inner feminine self, I had no understanding of my own pace and my own needs. That was totally alien to me. Every day there were things I had to do, a schedule I had to adjust to. I had to be up to what the day had in store for me, and if I wasn’t up to it, I just beat myself I realize now that I was totally out of synch with my feminine side, my rhythms, my intuition. Everything was shut off. No wonder I was so lost and so hungry. And so desperate. I see that so clearly now.”

“It all came to light through my dreams. I learned to look at my dreams and use them, especially for learning about my inner masculine and feminine selves. Working with my dreams was so important. I discovered over and over that dreams were an incredible source of information for me. Now I look forward to having them.

“I had always been so angry at myself because I found it so hard to get out of bed in the morning. I still do. But now I recognize that those dozing minutes are times of great insight. That is when my spirit, my soul, presents itself. Now I'm so grateful that I’m like that. And I just love to lie there in that half-and-half place. It’s been really valuable.”

“When I stopped having my period, I saw it was all about this, to help me see how out of balance I was with my masculine and feminine sides. One of the most important pieces in this journey was learning to value my menstrual cycle and recognize how it gives me information. It draws out my intuitive side, which is so strong and so fully formed, and yet I had never paid attention to it. I learned to trust it and rejoice in the fact that I have a menstrual cycle. My period going away, that was the best thing that ever happened because it led me down this path.”

Unable to reconcile with her own mother who remained alcoholic, she was nevertheless able to develop a strong inner mother who could nourish her and guide her toward acceptance and understanding of her feelings.

“I learned that when I feel the urge to binge, I‘m not tuned in to what’s happening in my life. I have not allowed myself to feel a feeling. And it’s taken a long time to understand that feelings aren’t right or wrong. That they are here to guide me. And if I have one and I ignore it, it’s only going to get worse.

“It’s all a part of the concept of eating when I’m hungry. And when I’m hungry, I don’t want junk food. I say, ‘Do you want cake or candy?’ and I get ‘No, I want a balanced diet. ’Those food obsessions kick in when I’m not hungry, and then I know there’s an emotional hunger I’m trying to feed with food. What’s so funny is that I’m starting to cook more. You would think that somebody obsessed with food would have cooked all the time. I never cooked. Now I’m taking the time to make nice dinners.”

“I see that I’ve been on an incredible journey. I like myself now. I value myself. Once I stopped relying on a fake exterior, the master’s degree, and all the trappings of the career, I became open to wherever my life takes me.

“I feel more like the little girl I was at seven than that maniac I was at sixteen, or the scared Bambi I was at twenty-six. They are all in me but I feel much more like that little girl who walked down with her hair flying, who believed in herself and went about her life without having to have radar going to keep from being hurt. I’ve come back to that.

“For the first time in all of the work that I’ve done, I know that this time my recovery is real, genuine, because I got at what was so wounded inside of me. I can tune in, listen, and self-regulate. I have a sense of wholeness, a sense of self-worth. I know in my heart of hearts that I’m finally there.”

And so you have it. Some of the stories of women who entered the labyrinth of recovery. Each woman’s healing journey was one that took her not out into the world to seek her fortune, but, rather, into the dark center of her being.

She began this inward journey from a place of great pain and confusion in search of a reprieve from an obsession that persecuted her. Traveling at her own pace, with her daily feelings as her trusty companions, she made her way down this circular, twisting, winding path. She learned to rely on her bodily sensations, instincts, and natural rhythms; sometimes plodding, sometimes racing, sometimes waiting, sometimes resting. Along the way, she gained new skills and reclaimed old strengths as she discovered parts of herself that had been disowned and devalued. She encountered hungry ogres and voracious dragons that needed to be fed, not slain, so she could continue her journey.

To lighten her load on this sometimes long and difficult journey, she needed to discard old perceptions of herself and ways of relating to others. She had to find the courage to let go of old habits with food that had once upon a time been helpful.

And as she made her way back out into the world, guided by the soft, reflective light of the moon, she found herself getting stronger and stronger. Her step became lighter and easier, and she became more and more comfortable in her own skin. She had the courage to speak her truth, over and over, and the strength to set her limits, time and time again, so others could not trample on her newfound self.