Musteryou brought a link to a terrifying article about the tragedy of a little girl whose abusive and self-involved parents illustrate perfectly well how little anorexics / bulimics / neurotics / addicts, etc. are manufactured. The article is written by a mother whose selfishness and lack of self-awareness is nothing short of stomach-turning.
“The doctor has told me and my husband, oh I don’t know, maybe 25 times, that it is not our fault. But that mother’s guilt has a way of creeping right in there. She also said there’s no prescribed method of parenting that can prevent a kid from becoming anorexic.”
Of course, to hell with the pesky kid. The important thing is that the paying customer, the Mommy, is placated and never has to face what a shitty parent she is.
“And truly, I don’t care where it came from, as long as my daughter gets over it.”
This is just priceless. “I don’t care what is going on with her. Just repair her already so that I don’t have to be paying any more attention to this.” Note how she is not even trying to pretend she cares where the child’s problems come from.
“Every night, we went to bed exhausted from trying to get our increasingly furious kid to take yet another bite at the dinner table. We coaxed her along in the “dolphin” method we’d learned.”
Instead of searching for the root of the problem, the irresponsible and cruel parents choose to subject the kid to outright torture that will create a multitude of problems for her later on. But what can you expect from people who say:
“Our natural inclination was to say, “Eat your freaking food or the wrath of your parents will rain down on your head with a vengeance you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares.”
Got it? This is a natural inclination for such parents. Now we know what kind of natural parenting practices were used on this girl and drover her to anorexia.
During that meal, my daughter gave the girl in “The Exorcist” a run for her money. She glared. She pouted. She ranted. She raved. She acted possessed — the same way she sometimes acted during dinner at home. The therapist reassured us it wasn’t really our daughter. It was the “eating disorder,” which she said had a life of its own. Now, that’s not something any parent wants to try to wrap their head around.
People who act in horrible ways love to generalize. They convince themselves that everybody is exactly like they are, and this means they don’t need to do anything about their lousy behavior.
The infantile and cruel mother thinks nothing of making the descriptions of how she tortured her daughter public. She even seems to expect praise for what she has been doing. She managed to break the girl’s will and bully her into eating. What price the kid will pay for that when she grows up doesn’t concern the abuser. The daughter’s job is to pretend that she is like all other kids and thereby allow the mother to get the social approval that is the entire goal of her existence.
Clarissa's Blog 
I had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. Imagining my mother writing a book, or an article, about it in gory detail, casting a sympathetic light on her, when she and her horrible boyfriend were the one who made me feel like shit about my body in the first place (calling me “fat as a pig”, making “suck suck” noises and calling me a fat calf whenever I drank milk instead of water or diet soda, and telling me that I was disgusting, for three examples of their total behaviour) makes me shiver. I would never recover from that.
I’m sick of parenting blogs writing about their children’s difficulties with such raw relish and delight, not even thinking about how this is going to impact their children’s lives in the short and long term. It used to be the exclusive domain of ridiculous “autism mommies and daddies” or other parents of kids with disabilities, but it’s spilled over into every single website regardless of the kid being disabled or not. I weep for these children like no tomorrow. Children are not fucking colouring books upon which the parents scribble their fucked up needs for validation.
LikeLike
I know exactly what you mean. It is horrifying that the mother is using the child’s suffering to draw attention to herself and make money. The tone she uses to describe the daughter’s suffering is cold and detached. The focus is completely narcissistic.
I feel so sad for the poor kid. 😦 😦
LikeLike
This parental pity porn has got to stop. If it doesn’t, I at least hope when the kids get older, they strike back at their parents by blogging their side of the story.
LikeLike
I think the most telling sentence is this one at the very top:
“I never thought this could happen to a child so young, in a body-positive household like ours. Boy, was I wrong”
It’s a very religious construct about sin and inner corruption, although the issue is displaced onto the body. Parents who obsess about never showing any anger are very likely to raise extremely angry children. Don’t focus on something and try to repress it.
LikeLike
Yes, exactly. We are so perfect, how dare she do that to us?
It is all about image for people like that. They have decided that the label of body-positive applies to them, and any aspect of reality that intrudes upon the fantasy is to be banished.
LikeLike
Supposing I grew up in American and I only knew one language, English. Whenever I spoke it, my mother came around and said: “That’s the way! We’re very English language positive in this house.” Sometimes I might sing nonsense rhymes, at which point my mother would hasten to my side to warn me: “Are you okay, dear? We are very, very English language positive in this house. Please try to pay attention to my needs to hear you speaking clearly and calmly the English language we have brought you up to speak!”
I think from this I would get the message that there was something defective about me, perhaps in terms of my English language speaking skills. In all probability I might start imagining myself Russian or French.
LikeLike
This reminds me of a particularly foolish post making its rounds along Tumblr. The author proposes raising girls to feel good about their bodies by never, ever telling them that they’re beautiful and complementing them about their sports skills (for example) instead. Even presuming the media has such a large influence on the way girls feel about their bodies as the people passing this gem on think (which I disagree with) I fail to see the logic in fighting the scourge of its nasty poisonous insecurity-creating messages by offering no competing messages in return.
LikeLike
@Stille – yeah, I read that essay and while I liked some parts of it, in general it sounded like a recipe for making The Body a hugely taboo subject and thus planting the seeds of anxiety about it in the daughter.
LikeLike
I knew a girl who became anorexic. She had a mother and an older sister whom her mother praised the whole time. Daughter2 was not ignored but there was no unending discussion of her perfection as there was with Daughter1.
D2 did gymnastics, and the crunch came when her trainer said that she was too fat and should lose weight – she just had a bit of puppy fat. The result was that she became anorexic and the mother was shocked to find out that she had to undergo therapy too because of course she thought it was ‘not her fault’.
Parents should always be part of the therapy because they play an integral part in the child’s life so how could they not be involved?! The woman in the article sounds exceptionally stupid at best or incredibly deluded at worst if she thinks her daughter’s anorexia has nothing to do with her. From the article, she comes across as very controlling…
LikeLike
—and the mother was shocked to find out that she had to undergo therapy too
Girl was lucky enough to find a decent therapist. Not someone pretending to deal with “eating disorder” is if it is some kind of a demon (see original post)…(Additional implication of “demon approach” is that demons tend to attack weaker souls, which further absolves parents of any responsibility.)
LikeLike
Holy crap, paging Baron Von Munchausen; there’s a mother wants to talk about You By Proxy.
LikeLike