WEIGHT PROBLEMS: ABOUT SELF-BLAME
“Why am I so fat?”
“Who made me such a pig?”
“Why is my child starving herself?”
“Why am I so disgusting?”
“How come I’m such a loser?”
“Where did I fail as a parent?”
“What did I do?”
“What didn’t I do?”
If an eating disorder has shattered your life, questions like these constantly bewilder you. All of these questions derive from one dominating issue:
“Whose fault is it, anyway?”
The question is simple. The answer, however, is complex. We all want to know who’s responsible. For every problem, there must be an identifiable cause, or someone to take the blame. At the end of our favorite television shows, guilty criminals always blurt out: “Yes, your honor, I did it! I killed the man!” Simple, tidy endings that resolve all the riddles and tie up all the loose ends make us feel better.
Eating disorder victims want desperately to solve the mystery of their illness. The urge to place blame is so strong that a bulimic often “confesses” to a crime she didn’t even commit: “It’s all my fault,” she thinks. “If I were stronger, I’d be more in control. I’d be thin.”
Others sometimes step forward to share the guilt. When a child develops an eating disorder, family members search frantically for information about it. They talk to friends, scan magazines at the checkout counter, or listen to health experts on radio and television talk shows.
Unfortunately, they often wind up with wrong information. They might read, for example, that children starve themselves because their parents give them too little attention, or too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention. Given such conflicting signals, who wouldn’t be confused? The parent thinks, “It’s all my fault. If I were a better mother [or father], I wouldn’t have caused my child to act this way.”
Or they might hear that children are more prone to develop an eating disorder if their families have a history of psychiatric disorders, such as depression or substance abuse. Parents naturally conclude that their child’s illness results from their own troubled situation. They torture themselves by thinking, “It’s all our fault – we should never have had children.”
Round up the suspects, book ‘em, and throw away the key. Let me assure you: Self-blame is wrong, dead wrong. Such mistaken thinking only contributes to the severity of an eating disorder. Even worse, such attitudes can actually interfere with therapy, making it more difficult for a patient to seek, receive, and respond to treatment.
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Tags: Weight Loss