Masking the self: Understanding the link between eating disorders and child sexual abuse

Abstract

The discourses of child sexual abuse and eating disorders are inextricably shaped by gender politics. Medical discourses conceptualise abuse as resulting in permanent damage to the personality and continue to draw on the notion of hysteria when explaining anorexia. Yet the circulation of such pathologising discourses masks aspects of female subjectivity and leave other explanations unexplored. We argue that women make decisions and experience eating disorders beyond these privileged understandings. Indepth interviews, artwork and poetry are obtained from seven women and a feminist application of Bakhtin’s sociological linguistics is used to gain deeper insights into meanings and emotions. Our argument will unfold in three sections: Masking Emotions; The Mask Representing Powerlessness; and Revising the Self. Collectively the data reveals how gendered discourses dominate the women’s narratives when making claims about the self. Although these women’s voices are largely marginalised in society they nevertheless disrupt authoritative discourses on child sexual abuse and eating disorders.

“Once Again It Becomes a Friend in Times of Adversity”: A Qualitative Exploration of Interrelationships between Anorexia Nervosa and Trauma over Ten Years

“…Intrapersonal coping involved managing trauma-related emotions, thoughts, and memories. In line with previous research, self-starvation was used to self-punish for abuse [18,24,28] as well as to regain a sense of power that was lost during abuse [18]. Furthermore, some women utilised AN as a means of regulating their emotions, which supports etiological models of AN and trauma [26].…”

“…However, the nature of emotional regulation varied from controlling, re-enacting, or escaping emotions altogether. While these differing responses have been captured in previous research [23][24][25]35,36], the variability present in the current study reinforces the individualised nature of emotional regulation and highlights the limitations of models that seek to capture these complexities using a single etiological pathway [34].…”

“…Following this approach, the research has elucidated a complex relationship between AN and trauma, whereby AN is used as a way of coping with the emotional and psychological effects of trauma and abuse [18]. While the specific functions of AN vary from person to person, one key theme present in the literature is its function in managing abuse-related emotions [23][24][25], such that difficulties with emotional regulation are theorised to be a key etiological pathway in the development of AN after trauma [26]. Emotions experienced during abuse-such as guilt and shame-are particularly difficult to regulate due to their sheer overwhelming and foreign nature for which the experiencing person (or child) did not have the resources to deal with them [27].…”

“…Emotions experienced during abuse-such as guilt and shame-are particularly difficult to regulate due to their sheer overwhelming and foreign nature for which the experiencing person (or child) did not have the resources to deal with them [27]. In connection with this, AN has been found to function as a form of self-punishment and atonement for abuse [18,24,28], which results from shame and blame being internalised-a process that is perpetuated by societal and perpetrator victim-blaming attitudes as well as a cognitive tendency for survivors to make sense of the abuse by developing a system of beliefs around their own inherent "badness" [27,29]. To mitigate against these problematic identities, a valuing of AN itself may also go some way towards reinstating a sense of self-worth.…”