Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia - Hardcover

Reindl, Sheila M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674004876 ISBN 13: 9780674004870

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa, outsiders may wonder, "How could you ever start?" Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, "How can I ever stop?" How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery.

Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self--to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience.

Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.

About this title

About the Author

Sheila M. Reindl is a psychologist at Harvard University's Bureau of Study Counsel and has a private practice of psychotherapy in Cambridge.

From Library Journal

How can those suffering from bulimia end the self-destructive and often fatal cycle of compulsive eating and purging? What conditions contribute toward recovery and wellness? Seeking answers to these questions, psychotherapist Reindl (Bureau of Study Counsel, Harvard) interviewed 13 recovering bulimics, listening for common themes in their stories. Her informants (middle-class working women and postgraduate students mostly in their mid-twenties) described the process of recovery as a process of turning inward, of learning to listen, identify, and accept one's own physical, psychic, and social self-experience. Finding parallels in their accounts to themes from Beauty and the Beast, Reindl demonstrates that these women had to acknowledge, appreciate, and embrace the aggressive, needy, and unpleasant aspects of themselves they had denied in order to become well and whole. Reindl's informants used a variety of therapeutic methods to foster this process of recovery. Implications for treatment and further research are discussed. Not a traditional self-help book, this work is recommended for therapists, counselors, and others seeking to understand and help people with eating disorders. For collections in academic and larger public libraries. Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., CA Semans, Anne & Cathy Winks.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0674004876
• ISBN 13: 9780674004870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350