If I order my room enough can I reorganize my disorganized attachment?
My supervisor recently handed me a recording of a lecture given by Marc Schwartz on Eating Disorders and Sexuality. Having now listened to it three times over and taken scrupulous notes, this is possibly the single most influential teaching I have ever heard on the topic of eating disorders. Schwartz looks at how an eating disorder is an intimacy disorder. He claims that an eating disorder can be traced back to a rupture in attachment with primary caregivers during the early years of life.
He points primarily to disorganized attachment. What is this exactly? He explains it as a kind of narcissistic love on the part of the parent. For reasons of their own, the parents are unable to truly open up and connect with the child. Instead, perhaps they indulge the child with loads of stuff, activities, and opportunities. These parents are genuinely kind and caring people who desire the best for their child. They attend the soccer games and volunteer with the PTA. They hold and hug the child, but it is more for their own sake than for the sake of the child. When the child asks, “do you really love me?” the parent responds, “Of course I love you! Didn’t I get you that car and buy you all those clothes?” But the child still feels distant and lonely. She is objectified as an extension of the parent. She can’t pinpoint why she feels empty inside and feels guilty for being ungrateful for all she’s been given.
These are often the clients who find themselves in treatment surrounded by all these patients who have horrific childhoods and histories of abuse and trauma. They say to themselves, “I don’t deserve to be here. I had the perfect childhood and parents who loved me. My dad came to all my swim meets and I had everything I ever needed. I wasn’t raped or abused. I’m just spoiled and ungrateful. There’s just something wrong with me.” This confusion over the cause of their eating disorder can pile more guilt and shame on top of their already heaping mound of loneliness and detachment. Because their parents did not know how to truly connect with themselves or with their child, the child, in turn, never learns how to connect with themselves or others.
This kind of person becomes a bypasser through life. She floats through life in a depersonalized state. She eats because the food is in front of her without knowing what it tastes like. She has sex because that is what you are supposed to do in relationships. She goes to school and gets A’s but finds no meaning or enjoyment in what she learns. She doesn’t know how to have an appetite. She has no internal gage or awareness of her inner state. Touch is often scary and uncomfortable. There is complete ego state separation. She is, in fact, detached from herself and dissociated from life.
Schwartz points to a study which reveals that disorganized attachment actually predicts more severe dissociation than trauma. In other words, trauma conducted by the primary caregiver causes more distress and dissociation for the child than other forms of trauma. This can actually cause more confusion and distress because there is not a concrete event to point to. The trauma is ongoing, insidious, and nebulous. The child is left feeling empty and hungry for love without knowing why.
So is this kind of person doomed for life? Can a secure attachment be made? Schwartz refers to an “earned attachment” which can be formed later in life. This involves the long and tedious process of forming a kind, loving connection with oneself. The eating disordered person must learn to truly know herself. She must take up residence in her own body, replace the critical voice with kind and loving one, and slowly open herself up to others. Once she connects to herself she can then attach to others and let go of that eating disorder that served for so long as her comfort blanket.
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