Untold Stories and Silenced Selves:A Critique of Psychosocial Discourses on Eating Disorder Recovery

Kendall Soucie & Jen Rinaldi

Metanarratives Self-stories may be structured to fit within canonical, socially acceptable

metanarratives Eg, the redemption narrative

Some stories are privileged or valued, over others

The result is that stories that do not fit may be reshaped, devalued, or ignored

“[people] attempt to shape their lives by the available narratives. If the available narrative is limiting, people’s lives are limited, textually disenfranchised” (Richardson, 1997, p. 58).

Anorexia Greek: an (without) and orexis (appetite)

DSM-V diagnoses anorexia according to the following criteria: Distorted body image

Pathological fear of weight gain

Behaviours that result in extreme weight loss

Below 85% normal weight for age and height

Cognitive behavioural therapy common

Typically 1/3rd persons diagnosed recover fully

DSM-V lists residual anorexia as catch-all category for people struggling with recovery, or who manifest symptoms but do not satisfy weight requirement

Framing the Cause “[eating disorders are the result of] the failure of early parent-child

interactions to effectively discriminate or reinforce the child’s emerging identity and sense of self” (Bruch, 1973; as cited in Paulson, 1999, p. 44).

Anorexia often correlated with poor self-concept

Feminist scholarship on eating disorders point to cultural conditions that inferiorize women

“the obsessive and destructive relationship that most women have with their bodies is an internalization of society’s relationship to women’s bodies—simultaneously one of contempt and worship” (Hutchinson, 1994, p. 154).

“a cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience” (Wolf, 1994, p. 97).

ED Recovery in-Context Recovery strategies reinforce body management

“[treatment strategies] participate in contemporary cultural discourses that help constitute…anorexia’s conditions of possibility” (Gremillion, 2003, p. 22).

“the psychiatric representation of ‘the anorexic’…as a pathologized object of therapeutic knowledge and practice re-creates the culturally dominant idea that the female body is an obstacle in the making of fitness/health” (p. 47).

Example: “people who recover from eating disorders can’t be expected to have higher standards than the rest of society, most of whom would like to alter a body part or two. The difference now is that I’m no longer willing to compromise my health to achieve that” (de Rossi, 2010, p. 300).

Recovery as a Redemption Narrative Recovery is enacted so one’s body and mental state are no longer read as

abject

Results in a story organized around central themes of overcoming and redemption

Stories told about ED recovery erase the daily, sustained struggle

This absolves a community of responsibility for the effects of cultural expectations around women’s bodies

“plucking, waxing, dyeing, bleaching, curling, starving, shaving, straightening, painting, teasing, trimming, tucking and tightening are all contortions. …these contortions are acts of violence which can cause physical and psychological damage, the long term consequences of which are only beginning to be acknowledged.” (Rice & Langdon, 1998, p. 30).

The Untold Stories “the conceptualization of recovery suffers from its individualistic framing as

a personal journey, which has neglected a wider analysis of social and structural relations of power” (Morrow, 2013, p. 325).

The silenced or untold self-story has subversive potential

The self-story of what recovery looks like breaks down our redemption metanarratives, and opens those narratives up to the cultural conditions that manage bodies from diagnosis through recovery