From Geneen Roth’s When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair: 50 Ways to Feel Thin, Gorgeous, and Happy (When You Feel Anything But) (1998)
Chapter 11 – Whenever You Feel Fat or Ugly or Worthless, Ask Yourself Whose Instructions You Are Following
During a recent workshop in St. Louis, I was speaking about the importance of questioning and challenging the instructions we receive from our families, the ones we still follow. A woman named Amy jumped up and bolted for the door. I motioned to one of the support counselors to follow her as she ran from the room. A few minutes later, the counselor returned and told me that Amy refused to talk. At the break, I saw her sitting on the couch by herself, smoking a cigarette.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” I asked.
“No. I came here with my daughter. Eating is her problem, not mine, and I just want to be left alone.”
“Mind if I sit here with you?” I said.
“You can do anything you want,” she said.
We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then she looked at me and said, “My mother didn’t notice my accomplishments, and my father is dead, so there’s nothing to be done.”
“What happens when you notice your accomplishments?” I asked.
“I feel as if I’m not allowed. My mother told me it was wrong to brag.”
“Is that why you ran out of the room? Because I was asking you to feel good about something your mother told you was wrong?”
“I ran out because it’s too late. My mother still doesn’t notice what I do, and my father is dead,” she repeated.
“But what about you noticing what you do? What about not listening to your mother anymore?”
“Forget it. It’s too late.”
“Okay, but before I go back in the room, I just want to point out that by sitting here, you are following your mother’s instructions to a tee. You’d rather leave the class and sit here by yourself than disobey her.”
She glared at me. Then she popped up and shouted, “I WILL NOT!” and went running back into the room. With tears in her eyes, Amy told the rest of the group what had happened. “I know it’s not a matter of just deciding I won’t listen to her,” she said. “I know this will take practice, but I also see for the first time in my life that what my mother said might not have been the truth.”
Feeling fat, incompetent, and worthless are the ways most of us stay connected to our families, even if we live three thousand miles away or are eighty-five years old. We learn at an early age what we are allowed to do and who we are allowed to be in relation to the people from whom we need love, and we usually follow these instructions for the rest of our lives.
“Stop being so full of yourself.”
“Keep your anger to yourself.”
“If you let them see how happy you are, they’ll feel bad about their lives. You don’t want people being jealous of you.”
“Better not speak up. Better not let them know how you really feel. No one likes bossy, know-it-all girls.”
When, as children, the people around us were depressed or angry or lonely, we learned that being joyful or feeling good about ourselves was not a great idea. Not if we wanted to be loved.
For many of us, therefore, allowing ourselves to even recognize (not to mention celebrate) our accomplishments and good fortune feels dangerous. So dangerous that we censor our happiness the very instant we feel it, and replace it with the familiar nonthreatening ways we’ve come to know ourselves: as always struggling, as fat and ugly and miserable. To most of us, letting go of these self-images feels as if we are three years old and are being asked to let go of our mothers and fathers. Scared to death of being alone, we insist on defining ourselves in reference to our historical families, no matter how old we are. Not because we are juvenile or masochistic, but because we want to be loved and safe and know who we are.
Keep an ongoing list of the instructions you obey or feel guilty about not obeying. This list will include instructions about having too much, about being too happy, about what you need to do to make and keep friends. Remember that these instructions are usually so embedded in your unconscious that you take them to be the truth. Just becoming aware enough to write down these instructions is the first step toward disengaging from them.
Another way to approach this is to consider the beliefs you have about your life. Beliefs about what is allowed to be easy and what needs to be a struggle. Beliefs about beauty, about clothes, about people who have what they want. All these are shaped by the environment in which you were raised. Unless you examine them and make conscious choices about which ones fit into your life now, you will continue to live either in obedience to or in reaction against the set of instructions given to you at age three.
The most painful thing about these instructions is that they diminish your capacity for joy and keep you in the dark about who you really are.
You can take back your life. Suffering is not noble. Feeling fat won’t keep you safe. You are allowed to jump for joy.
