The short answer is, because we wouldn’t know what to do with it if we got it.
I have a client who has an eating disorder and she doesn’t want to get better because if she does, she will have no chance of people seeing how difficult her life is and worrying about her. She doesn’t want anyone except family to know she has an eating disorder, so if a co-worker were to express concern, she’d deny having a problem. “I can’t let them know that I’m stressed because then they might think I can’t handle things. And I can’t have people thinking that.” She also believes that the only way to show someone that you love them is to worry about them.
Sound Familiar?
“I can’t let them know that I’m stressed because then they might think I can’t handle things. And I can’t have people thinking that.”
She is desperate to have people worry about her, but if they do, they might think she can’t handle her life and that “is just not okay.” At times, she has wanted people to step in and “take something off my plate”, but if they actually offered, she’d reject it because then she would owe them. “It’s too much work to have someone worry about me if they’re gonna try to help.” And yet, her fear of never getting this “worry and concern” from others is so strong that she is desperate to maintain her eating disorder to the point that she PANICS if she thinks she’s getting better. She does have one friend who is constantly offering help but it drives my client crazy – “she’s smothering me.” The other day she said, “I like my other friends because they don’t offer to help unless I ask.” And yet, she has always said, “If I have to ask, it doesn’t count.
Family History
She is the granddaughter of two concentration camp survivors who lost 90% of their families in the camps. A couple years after the war ended and they were released from their respective camps, they gave birth to my client’s mother. Her mom married a sensitive man who was an alcoholic and became violent toward objects, not people, when drinking and openly cheated on my client’s mother. Her mother talked openly in sessions about taking her daughter at age 9 to the strip club parking lot and saying, “Daddy is there cheating on me with a stripper.” My client doesn’t remember her childhood at all (everything she knows has been told to her, including the above which was told to us by her mother during sessions), but she insists her childhood was great and happy and that her dad was wonderful (he passed away in 1995 while she was pregnant with her first child). A few years after his death, my client, chronically overweight since childhood, went on a diet. She took the diet too far and developed anorexia nervosa. Her mother was horrified by how skinny her daughter was and began frantically trying to help her. My client, likely for the first time ever, felt worried about, cared for and that she was someone else’s priority. It’s been 15 years and she is still trying, in vain, to get that worry and care back.