Eating Disorders
Starvation is occurring in the most affluent and best educated parts of our national community. In fact, the starvation is sometimes thought of as a “rich girl’s disease” although it can strike any socio-economic strata and either gender. Still, there is a “profile” of a likely anorexia victim: 15 to 25, female, highly intelligent, upper income, academically or athletically driven, and unusually pretty. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that deep at the core of these young people is a feeling of being worthless. There is a drive to accomplish “success” by some external standard in order to feel “good enough”. There is a deep sense that one is unloved, abandoned, and unlovable.
The primary diagnosis is “phobic” — a fear of food. The secondary but almost always present diagnosis is anxiety and/or depression. Why a phobia of food? Well, “why any phobia?”, might be the threshold question. A phobia is a specific focused fear that otherwise would be so general as to be completely unmanageable. One can avoid a specific source of danger, but not a generalized anxiety that is unrelenting. Food becomes the enemy, and avoiding it gives a sense of control and safety. In the process, the person develops “body dysmorphia”, or the inability to see in the mirror what everyone around her can see clearly: she looks like a holocaust victim. This dysmorphia persists as her bones disintegrate from osteoporosis and her internal organs begin to fail, including her heart. There is a 10-20% mortality rate associated with this disease.
Anorexia is a disease that baffles the general public, and still challenges the understanding of the medical community. It can be treated, and if treated early with a combination of medication and psychotherapy by professionals specializing in the disease, it can even be managed over the patient’s lifetime. The disease is not “cured’ in a permanent sense.
For sometime, medical personnel sought to treat alcoholism by various ineffective protocols. Carl Jung, founder of Jungian psychology, did all he knew to do, unsuccessfully, to treat an alcoholic. He told him there was no treatment he could offer that would cure the patient. The patient was near death and desperate, and pleaded for a referral. Jung replied that he had heard of a few men like his patient who had turned to one another for support, and that they had seemed to find some recovery through a belief in God. The group was the beginning of the original 12 step program, and Jung’s patient found hope among these fellow lost souls.
The 12 Step program requires as its first steps that the adherrent acknowledge his life is unmanageable, and that only a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity.
Anorexia, although quite different diagnostically than alcoholism, still is a spiritual as well as a physical disease. The unmet love needs deep within the human heart account for the insane drive to meet those needs through self-destructive methods. Medications can provide a platform from which an individual can better address those spiritual needs, but no medication can provide the core love and core healing needed to recover from phobias and addictions.
Sin is very much a spiritual disease also. We all suffer from it, and we all are in denial in varying degrees that we are in need of help. We can handle our lives for ourselves, thank you very much. We dig our personal and societal holes deeper and deeper, until we fall in it, and can’t get out, all the while declaring that we know better than God how to run our lives.
Some see God as a stern and unfeeling task master who sets arbitrary and impossible rules. In truth, God is a compassionate Father who sets guidelines for right living so that His children can mature into fully alive and happy people who will live with Him forever.
How can we know such love? We must first ask God to for us what we cannot do for ourselves: to see clearly our predicament and to see the depth of our need for divine help. Secondly, we must put aside our pride and call out to a God we may hardly even know to rescue us from our misery and pain. Finally, as God responds to our need, we must respond to Him. We must learn more about Him through the study of Scripture, and by community with “safe” persons who know Him also.
Our deepest hunger is not for food, but for God. We are meant to “feed upon the word of God” and to find comfort and refuge in His Spirit. In our spiritual illness we have come to loathe and resist the very Source of Life. We suffer from a sort of “Spirit Dysmorphia” similar to the anorexics “body dysmorphia”. We cannot see that we are dying, and we vigorously deny and even chide Christans who may in one way or another tell us that our eternal lives are at risk.
John 6:35 - Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.
