ANTONIA: If you don't have any coping mechanisms, you eat.
Antonia is a thirty-five-year-old Italian-American woman who has had problems with compulsive eating since she was four years old. She has often wondered why she ate compulsively in early childhood, and she recently recovered "emotional memories" of being sexually abused by her grandfather when she was four. By "emotional memories" she means that she has remembered the emotions connected with being sexually abused; she cannot yet remember the details.
As a toddler, Antonia was big and tall, but not fat. When she was four, her parents sent her to stay with her grandparents in Florida for the summer. When Antonia's mother came to get her a month later, she took one look at Antonia and "burst into tears because I looked like a little brown butterball. That is what she called me." Although Antonia blocked the memories at the time, she now realizes that her grandfather had been sexually molesting her and that one way she responded was to eat. Beginning that summer and for many years after, Antonia often woke up during the middle of the night with anxiety attacks and nightmares.
Bingeing, she says, made her "disappear," which made her feel protected; it began as a way to numb and block painful feelings. She describes bingeing as a nurturing act, a way of feeding herself when she was scared: "What else do you do? If you don't have any coping mechanisms, you eat." Like many women who began to binge when they were young, Antonia was not always fully conscious as she did it. When she ate during the night it was
like sleep walking. ... It was mostly desperate like I had to have it ... I keep coming to that sense that it would make me go away. I didn't care after that. I didn't care. [So you could go back to sleep? I asked.] Yeah. It is not really even physically waking up. ... It doesn't seem to have anything to do with how much I eat or what I eat ... I would just have to go to bed. I would just literally have to go to bed and pass out. But it is mostly about going away. The second I reach for something I am gone. That would make a lot of sense if you feel like you have to disappear.
Bingeing was Antonia's response to the split caused by trauma. When the sexual abuse occurred, Antonia felt she had lost her body. In her mind, the body she lived in afterwards was not really hers. Antonia described herself as "not. . . the girl I was before the abuse. The girl who was abused was someone else." In this description, Antonia identifies the process of splitting or dissociation by which a person separates consciousness from body, or "leaves the body." It begins as a way to protect oneself from trauma, a way of removing oneself from the location of pain. Initially, it is possible to dissociate at will, but to maintain dissociation over time, it is necessary to use a substance such as food or alcohol. Dissociation may begin as a coping technique but develop into an autonomous symptom. A person may dissociate mind from body to escape the pain of sexual victimization and eventually use this method of "leaving the body" to escape other traumas and stressful situations.
Antonia began to binge at night after she had a nightmare and couldn't go back to sleep. Some of the nightmares may have been memories she had repressed because she did not yet have the support she needed to deal with them. Bingeing sedated her and made her feel as if she "didn't exist." In a way, she didn't: the integrated Antonia had been destroyed. Just as her mother could not believe that the chubby girl who greeted her at the end of the summer was Antonia, Antonia no longer saw herself as she had once been:
This wasn't me that he was doing this to and I will show you why it wasn't me. Because I don't look like me anymore ... I felt like I wasn't me for the rest of my life.
The girl her grandfather was abusing was not her (the thin girl). The girl being molested was someone else (the fat girl). To protect herself, Antonia split into two parts—her consciousness (the thin girl) and her fat body (the one being molested). Bingeing ensured Antonia the split that was necessary to keep the memories repressed. By sedating her, it allowed her to repress memories too painful to acknowledge. The fat was the physical proof that the girl Antonia's mother once knew had been destroyed. Bingeing then reconfirmed that the thin girl was not there. As Antonia says, "If you don't believe you exist then it is very comforting to be doing something that makes you not exist."
The fact that Antonia binged rather than dieted in response to trauma also made sense since she saw little reason to try to be petite, as girls were supposed to be. Growing up as one of only a few Italian-Americans in a Protestant town where most people were of Northern European descent, Antonia felt that everything from her weight to the dark hair on her upper lip were out of place. From an early age, she knew she "never embodied the essence of the good girl. I don't like her, I have never acted like her. I can't be like her. I sort of gave up." Antonia's body signified her outsider status.
She knew that other people would consider her eating at night wrong; if she got caught, she would be blamed. She was told that she should be ashamed of being fat, so she told herself that she wasn't going to sneak food, but in the middle of the night she would eat anyway. As she ate, she felt "defiant" and "gross" but unable to stop herself. It was the only way she knew to calm herself and go back to sleep.
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