Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [91]
Prudence cried as she told me about their last serious talk. Greg had warned her about junior high and all the temptations she would face. He’d advised her to avoid sex and alcohol at least till high school. “I’ve followed his advice about sex,” she said. “I really don’t want to get involved anyway.”
She said, “After he died, we stopped talking about him. Mom shut his bedroom door, and we acted like he was away at camp or sleeping in late. I felt our family would fall apart if I brought it up.”
“The only person who could have helped us through this was Greg,” she said. “He knew the right things to say.”
I handed Prudence a Kleenex, and five minutes later she continued. “I was mad at God. Why couldn’t He have taken an old person with Alzheimer’s or a child murderer on death row? Why did he have to take the best person in the world?”
She cried more, but afterward she said, “It feels good to talk about it.”
“You have lots of catching up to do,” I said.
I felt pleased with that session. Prudence, like many bulimic young women, had learned to deal with feelings by bingeing and purging. I was hopeful that as she faced her biggest pain, she’d be able to face others and talk rather than binge when she was upset.
Over the next few months we talked about Greg. Prudence brought in other pictures of him and letters he had written her from basketball camps. She told me stories about their adventures together. She talked about Greg with her mother and Greg’s old girlfriend. She even tried to talk to her dad, but he said firmly, “Pru, I can’t do it.”
One day I suggested she find something in the natural world that reminded her of her brother, something that could help her feel connected to him whenever she saw it. I’d invented this strategy myself as a way to cope with loss. When I look at the Pleiades, for example, I think of a relative I lost who had many sisters. Next session Prudence came in with her connection. Her brother reminded her of cattails because he was tall, thin, brown-haired and loved the water. When she missed him, she walked to a nearby ditch with cattails and thought of him.
In addition to talking about her brother, we attacked the bulimia. Prudence found that she actually binged less on the days she talked about her brother. She learned to deal with other pain by facing it as well—by writing in her journal or talking to someone she trusted.
I encouraged her to take better care of herself. I told her the Overeaters Anonymous slogan: HALT—Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired. She learned to identify her feelings and not to label everything as hunger. She learned to rest when she was tired, tell people when she was angry, find something to do when she was bored.
Prudence liked the OA group very much. It was a relief to hear others talk so honestly about their eating disorders. She was heartened that some of the women were in recovery and doing well. She liked the support and conversations about feelings. She had a consciousness-raising notebook in which she kept track of lookist, sexist remarks. She brought in ads featuring thin women. She hated how women were portrayed as vacant-eyed sexual objects with no personality. Prudence prided herself on her independence and she grew even more outspoken in her resistance to being “bimboized.”
Then she decided to fight the incredible cravings to binge. This is a necessary and critical step in recovery, but it’s terribly difficult. From my clinical experience, I’ve learned that fighting the urge to binge is at least as hard as fighting the urge for drugs. It requires incredible self-discipline and pain tolerance. Prudence learned to call on her brother for help. She formed a picture of his face