The Mother Wound, Eating Disorders, and Patriarchal Culture: What's the Connection?

When staying small means staying in control

Photo by Alex Boyd on Unsplash

Bless The Daughters: An Examination into the Mother Wound, Inherited Pain and the Legacies that Shape our Lives

Chapter Nine ~ Eating Disorders: When Staying Small Means Staying In Control

“I’m abusing my body every day. I’m miserable. I’m depleted. And yet the compliments keep pouring in.” ~ Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

I’m sitting at my desk when a clap of thunder arrives out of nowhere. It shakes the house, rattles the windows; the lights flicker and then only the sound of rain as it hammers down upon the roof. Heavy rain that we have had such little of this winter. Proper rain, as the farmers would say; all the better for the way it falls in late winter, setting up the pastures for a good spring. Lulled by its steady rhythm, I find myself thankful that winter is not yet ready to end; that I do not yet have to unfold myself from this place of darkness.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this chapter, unsure where to even begin. Eating disorders are complex and multi-faceted at the best of times. To try and understand such things in the context of the Mother Wound feels difficult — if not impossible — for me to do. I find myself pulling all my tricks of procrastination every time I open this chapter, wanting to run from the feelings of inadequacy that afflict me as I wonder how to write of things I feel so unqualified to write.

Outside, raindrops land and fall and puddle and with each one that is lost to the ground another takes its place and I have to remind myself I am not writing this book because I know — because I am an expert in any of these things of which I write — but because I want to understand more of how the Mother Wound has affected me, and women like me. I have to remind myself these words are not a dissertation but an exploration between cause and symptom; one that allows me to follow curiosity and ask questions and be open to learning that of which I do not know; to interpret information I gather and view it in the context of my own experience.

I consider at what age I first became aware of weight as more than just a physical size but as something which could be tied to a woman's identity; more so to her entire worth. I could not tell you exactly when I became aware of such things but first recall feeling shame and embarrassment around my mother's weight in my early teenage years. Though I did not understand the root of this shame and embarrassment at the time, when I reflect upon such feelings now I understand that her excess weight, to me, implied a lack of control and discipline around food and exercise — triggering resentment due to the presence of this lack of control and discipline in other areas of her life impinged by addiction. Addictions that had not only impacted her life negatively, but mine also.

Many times I found myself wishing she could be more like other mothers. What I mean by this is not necessarily that she could be thinner, but that she could show more control. More discipline. More restriction. More restraint. Because for so much of my foundational years I had witnessed my mother out of control and I had suffered and because of that, I believed the key to feeling safe — to being safe — must be found in staying in control.

This need to stay in control — and therefore safe — is a theme that has inadvertently woven itself through the composition of my life and no less so in the case of eating disorders. Until recently, if you had asked if I’d ever had an eating disorder, I would have answered no. I had never obviously starved myself as I had seen in those with anorexia, nor had ever found myself in the binge and purge cycle of bulimia.

Instead, I was a woman obsessed with health. With keto and paleo and raw food and juice diets, with intermittent fasting, with almond flour and cauliflower rice and coconut oil. What began as wanting to make some lifestyle changes in the face of health challenges that had presented themselves in my early 30’s soon became a preoccupation with clean eating that began to control me.

Orthorexia Nervosa is described as an eating disorder where a person becomes obsessed with eating in a way that is perfect; often beginning with an intention to eat as healthy or clean as possible, but soon turning into such a strict and inflexible diet there is psychological distress when the rules around a certain way of eating cannot be fulfilled.

Labelled the “healthy eating disorder," it has not yet been classed as an official eating disorder but is being recognised by health professionals as part of the eating disorder spectrum. Orthorexia begins with healthy eating: raw, vegan, paleo, keto, fruitarian, etc, but the desire for good health soon becomes an obsessive striving for dietary perfectionism. More and more foods are eliminated and more time is spent obsessing over food and self-imposed rules around food. Cycles of guilt and punishment are implemented, as well as social isolation, often malnourishment, and disinterest in other areas of life.

During this season of my life every thought became centred around the need to be in control of my food choices. I became anxious about social events and declined invitations knowing an event would compromise my need for perfection around food, creating isolation and withdrawal. If I was away from home and not in complete control of my food choices I would most often choose not to eat, resulting in caloric and nutrient deficiency, fatigue, unnecessary stress on my body and long term damage to my health.

If I had to eat something I didn’t feel aligned with the standard of health I had imposed upon myself, I would feel anxious, guilty and unclean; often punishing myself with detox cleanses or more fasting. I grew thinner and thinner, finding twisted satisfaction in feeling bones poking out from beneath my skin yet was still never thin enough. I soon found myself in a cycle of obsession, control, guilt, punishment and reward — an eating disorder justified as the strive for perfect health.

Alongside this I was exercising to extremes. I would exercise every day, without fail. Never less than one hour, often more than two. Through exhaustion. Through illness. Through injury, and ongoing chronic pain. Through the compliments that kept pouring in. All the while convincing myself there was nothing abnormal about this; that I was keeping fit, that I was staying healthy.

That I was being everything my mother was not.

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“Well, sweetheart, if you really want to know how to stay small, there’s this secret thing you can do… it’s called calorie restriction.” ~ Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

My experience with disordered eating is perhaps the less common version of events around mother-daughter relationships and how they shape our narrative around food and body image.

Chelsea Fielder-Jenks, a licensed professional counsellor and designated expert writer on the website, Eating Disorder Hope, writes of the correlation between cause and symptom of disordered eating behaviours, saying that while there is no single cause of an eating disorder, the mother-daughter relationship must still be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of an eating disorder.

In an article titled, Mothers, Daughters and Eating Disorders, she lists some of the ways the mother-daughter relationship may be involved in eating disorders:

• Mothers act as models for their children’s thoughts and behaviours. This is based on the notion that, as mothers raise their child, the child will naturally adopt their mother’s thoughts or behaviours; in other words, “model” after their mothers. These include eating related thoughts and behaviours.

• Mothers who talk more frequently about their own weight, shape, or size are more likely to have daughters with lower self-worth and greater feelings of depression. Conversations focused on healthful eating are protective against disordered eating behaviours.

• When compared to mothers of girls with no disordered eating behaviours, mothers of daughters with disordered eating behaviours are more likely to have disordered eating habits and attitudes and are more likely to be critical of their daughters’ weight and appearance.

• Mothers who make more frequent comments about weight are more likely to have daughters who use extreme weight control behaviours (such as using diet pills, self-induced vomiting, using laxatives and/or diuretics) and binge eat.

• Daughters of mothers who report feeling a lack of control over their daughter’s activities are more likely to experience body dissatisfaction and engage in restrictive eating behaviours.

• When mothers and daughters find it important that their relationship lack boundaries (ie, are enmeshed), daughters are more likely to engage in restrictive eating behaviours.

• Daughters are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies when their mother feels that they do not have a right to their own autonomy as well as if their mother finds it important that their relationship lack boundaries.

• 50-80% of eating disorder risk is due to genetic effects. Eating disorder symptoms (eg, body dissatisfaction, purging, binge eating) tend to run in families.

• The parents, children, and siblings of individuals with anorexia are eleven times more likely to have anorexia themselves and six times more likely to have some disordered eating behaviours. This is likely due to both genes and the modelling of eating disordered behaviours. ¹

In her best-selling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy tells of the way she experienced decades of disordered eating and how her mother influenced, if not enabled, these disordered behaviours. She writes,

'I proudly show my half-eaten portions to Mom after every meal. She beams. Each Sunday, she weighs me and measures my thighs with a measuring tape.'

This, I feel, aligns with many of the points listed above and is a clear example of the passing down of disordered thoughts and behaviours; the incredible influence our mothers have to create a maelstrom of pressure and expectation on the beliefs and bodies of their daughters.

I think, however, to better understand the belief system of our mothers we must take a moment to understand the Mother Wound in the context of our culture, specifically our patriarchal culture. In her definition of the Mother Wound, Bethany Webster defines the Mother Wound as existing on four different levels — one of them being cultural — which she explains as,

'The systematic devaluation of women in most aspects of patriarchal cultures, rooted in colonisation, that have come to dominate much of the world, and the dysfunctional imbalance in the world as a result.' ²

In relation to eating disorders, systematic devaluation of women in our culture appears as the conditioning of women to define their value on the appearance of her body. We are taught a woman’s worth is found in how small she can remain, how little space she can occupy, and how pleasing to the male gaze she can be.

From an early age we find ourselves railroaded into the world of diet culture; obsessed with how little we can eat and how thin we can become. Obsessed with trying to shape our bodies into the cultural standards enforced by our patriarchal society; a society that knows a woman fixated on remaining small is a woman who is easier to control.

And while we tend to think of the patriarchy in terms of men controlling women, this isn’t always the case. As Justine Musk so aptly describes,

'Patriarchy is not men. It’s a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality.'

We ourselves perpetuate patriarchal systems when we commit our focus to our outward appearance and to the desire to diminish ourselves in exchange for love and acceptance. We do this to ourselves and we do this to each other and we must remember that our mothers, too, have lived their lives within these systematical structures and therefore have done it to themselves and done it to each other and now are doing it to their daughters whether they are consciously aware of this, or not.

I think about all of this in the context of my own mother and her beliefs and ideals around food and body image and diet culture. I feel in many ways I had the opposite experience to the typical dynamic of many mother-daughter relationships.

My mother, being overweight, was critical of women who weren’t. Women who exercised, who chose to eat healthy, who wore make up and were well-groomed were women my mother would judge as being vain and self-centred. Women who were too into themselves.

As I think of this I wonder if the orthorexia I experienced and the obsession with health and thinness came from both a place of control and a place of rebellion. I wonder if my actions were an underhanded way of defying her beliefs; of almost wanting to punish her by becoming everything she had disparaged throughout my upbringing while also ensuring I would be nothing like her. I wonder if it was a way to prove I was more in control of my life than she had ever been — and that because of this, I was a better mother than she had ever been.

What I do know now is that since healing from orthorexia my body has rounded and softened yet with that it has become my battleground, despite the desperate desire that it not. As I have struggled to look in the mirror, cried over clothes that no longer fit and grappled over the discomfort I feel in this foreign body, what I have come to realise is that the woman I fight each day is not me, but my mother.

It is her I see in the mirror: her lack of control, her lack of discipline, her addictions and dependencies, even though I know none of these things are mine. For decades I have strived to be nothing like her and now there is this thread that connects us and there is something that makes me like her and it has disarmed me.

I do not know how to fight this without placing myself on the frontline of diet culture and eating disorders. I do not know how to be softer without it calling it failure. I do not know how to disentangle myself from the dysfunction of this; to look in the mirror and separate myself from the shame of my mother. I do not know how to stop the insidiousness of patriarchal thinking from seeping into my belief system when I still believe control of my world can only be found through how much I am willing to restrict it.

It is this, as Glennon Doyle reasons in her book, Untamed — that we can either control ourselves or love ourselves but we cannot do both.

It is a battle of which I am still learning how to fight.

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Next week: Chapter Ten ~ Comparison: When Will I Ever Be Good Enough?

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1. Fielder-Jenks, C. Mothers, Daughters and Eating Disorders. Eating Disorder Hope. https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/treatment-for-eating-disorders/family-role/mothers-daughters-and-eating-disorders

2. Webster, B. About the Mother Wound. Bethany Webster. https://www.bethanywebster.com/about-the-mother-wound/