Inspired Life Health Centre Toronto

Almost everyone knows someone who has struggled or who is struggling with an eating disorder as it has become an epidemic in North America.  In a society that places body size and shape as crucial to a women's social value, we learn to focus on our appearances.  As a result, policing and controlling our appearance becomes essential for achieving both inner satisfaction and social success. Women learn that looking good is a form of currency in the world.

By exerting control over their bodies, women anticipate success, gain self-confidence and increase their sense of mastery and control over their lives. Women's sense of powerlessness and dissatisfaction can be reinstated by the self-satisfaction, social approval, and sense of accomplishments won through controlling their bodies appearance.

Eating Disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia and over eating) are disturbing diseases  which affect the mind, body and soul. It appears that a single approach directed at helping someone overcome this disorder is ineffective. The complexity found in attempting to understand the development and maintenance of  an eating disorder reinforces the need for an integrative and multidimensional approach that accounts for the many aspects of the disorder itself.

Obsession with food and weight are often attempts to cope with unresolved emotional issues such as depression, rage, powerlessness, and loss. Art therapy is a special tool that can help provide access to those hidden feelings that contain the key to our struggles. Eating disorders and art are similar in that they both enable the individual to express oneself without using words. Art therapy offers striking advantages as a treatment modality since it helps the client to form a strong therapeutic alliance and aids clients in establishing a sense of trust in their own feelings, intuitions, and abilities.

When using art therapy, the client is allowed to control his or her own therapy.  They can choose the materials they want to use and are in charge of what the interpretation of their piece is.  This sense of control is often something a person with an eating disorder is seeking, they have lost a sense of control in their lives and have established a form of control over their bodies. While in art therapy the emphasis will be on discovering new ways to nurture oneself and to take the conflict away from the arena of the body into an area where it can be expressed in images and words.

Art therapy can be particularly helpful  in providing a means of expression which is more physical (which the sufferer is already using by restricting, bingeing/purging or over eating food) than a verbal exchange. Eating disorders tends to be a very secretive disease, and allowing someone a safe space where they can depict their suffering without being "talked at", or asked to discuss their disorder in words, can be a place where healing can begin.

Many may wonder what the experience of art therapy is like. Below is a young woman's account of her experience with art therapy and how it served as a valuable tool in her recovery from anorexia nervosa. She began art therapy as part of her treatment plan and wrote about her experience;

At the time I had no idea how art therapy would help my personal development.  Initial one-to-one sessions were based on talking through ideas, feelings and events of the week and then drawing and painting. My therapist and I would then discuss the art work. I was constantly surprised by the amount of seemingly subconscious information that was being relayed about these situations which could be interpreted by my use of colour, relationships of figures and so forth.  This led on to more talking based on the subconscious information and brought out deep rooted feelings of which I had not been previously aware.  These sessions also involved acting out dreams, and role play in order to verbalize and deal with events within a safe environment. This activity and supported creative space gave me perhaps the first opportunity to explore emotive and personal areas which had not been dealt with previously. Although I had not learnt to rely on these outward resources to vent my feelings it certainly helped me to become aware of new ways of coping.  Strange as it may seem, anorexia and illustration have at least one thing in common.  They are both about expressing oneself without words, yet one is destructive and the other creative.

The real battle during the sessions was to learn to deal with these emotions in a creative way.  There was a difficulty, though, since my low self-esteem filled me with the concern that, rather than self-inflicting the anger and pain which I had done in the past, I was now afflicting others with the distress I felt. However, my art therapist guided my through my difficulties and together we built up a visual dictionary with which to communicate my feelings. One of the greatest assets of art therapy for me was that I had a creative space in which to explore my emotions. Due to my lack of self-confidence, I had felt unable to share emotions, because I did not believe that they were important....Finding this visual language not only helped me to communicate, but this time and space actually dedicated to them gave my emotions an importance....Putting emotions down on paper also helped to make them real.  No longer could I reject them as a figment of imagination, invisible and therefore unimportant, because they were actually down on paper. This also distanced them from myself and I felt more able to analyze and share their meaning. As time moved on I felt more and more confident to acknowledge their importance, to rely on their interpretations and to accept them as part of me.

Art therapy was very different from other treatments I had had. I have done family therapy and seen many psychiatrists and psychologists, so I was used to the seemingly shallowness of talk and one-way silence. Yet art therapy was a far deeper experience; tuning into the subconscious was like fumbling about in the dark. It was up to me to draw from within and I had control over how much I kept in or let out.

To a certain extent, if anorexia was used as a numbing agent, art therapy brought the pain into the open.... Anorexia had replaced the need to communicate my feelings because it had become the answer to all my problems.  Art therapy had helped and guided me back to communication with others.  The relevance of producing imagery during therapeutic sessions was a vital link between myself and the outside world.

The art therapy sessions spanned a year and it was easy to see the improvement made just through the sessions themselves. Ironically, this was highlighted at the end by hardly any drawing done during the sessions. They were mainly talking. At last through the visual language I had found my voice and a confidence to communicate.

Although this article focuses on eating disorders among women, it is no longer just a women's issue and many adolescent and adult males  suffer from this disease as well.  It is eating disorders awarenessweek from February 3 -9, 2008.

During this week , and everyday after, remember that we are more than our weight and appearances and that there are other ways to communicate our anger, powerlessness and suffering without directing it inward towards our bodies.

Resources from the following texts:

• Mury Rabin, Art Therapy and Eating Disorders
  
• Ditty Dokter, Arts Therapies and Clients with Eating Disorders
  
• Catrina Brown & Karin Jasper, Consuming Passions

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