brown sugar
light corn syrup
vanilla
peanut butter
cereal flakes
flaked coconut (optional)
By nature, I was an anxious and sensitive child. I was easily overwhelmed when I heard stories of people suffering. When I was about five years old, I remember seeing a cartoon with a character wearing a barrel held up by suspenders. That night, I have a distinct memory of praying for that man to get clothes.
Whenever I saw a person holding a sign asking for money on the side of the road, I would ask my parents to go buy food to give to him or her. We did this quite a few times during my childhood.
My feelings of wanting to help others were out of kindness, but more than anything, they were from guilt. Why did I have things and other people didn't? Why were people mean to others? Why don't people share the food they have?
As I moved into my teenage years, my intense desire to not see people hurting continued, but the world began showing itself to be more cruel and unforgiving than I could handle. Life seemed overwhelming, chaotic, scary, and unmanageable, and I did not feel prepared to face this world as an adult.
According to the book Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by Becky A. Bailey, there are seven powers for self-control necessary for individuals to learn and practice. I always had family, friends, and church members who loved me and let me know that they loved me. But there was a disconnect that did not allow me to learn the powers of self-control that Bailey writes about; the powers of: attention, love, acceptance, perception, intention, free will, and unity. Being ill-equipped with the powers of self-control, I turned to other forms of surviving the overwhelming feelings of fear I had.
http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Love-Difficult-Discipline-Cooperation/dp/0060007753
As a young child, obsessive compulsive thoughts and behaviors had already manifested, and by the fifth grade, those obsessive compulsive thoughts became centered on my physical body. I have memories of asking my mom and my sister multiple times a day if I was fat or pudgy. After my sophomore year of high school, those thoughts became obsessive compulsive behaviors.
I went on a diet to lose weight the summer after tenth grade, and that was the beginning of me engaging in eating disordered behavior. It began a long road of isolation, self-hatred, and continued guilt.
After many years of therapy and recovery work with people who love me deeply, one of the things that I have discovered about having an eating disorder, is that it does exactly the opposite of what I intended it to do.
I wanted to be in control of my body, how I looked, how people perceived me, and what they thought about what I looked like. I wanted to be perfect and not do anything that would allow people to be upset with me for any reason.
It numbed the sensitive, caring side of me that allowed me to see people in need and want to help them. Instead, it made me only able to think about myself, about my body, about my weight.
My ability to empathize was diminished, which consequently lowered my ability for compassion. Empathy is "the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another sentient or fictional being. One may need to have a certain amount of empathy before being able to experience accurate sympathy or compassion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
And being in a state of semi-starvation did not allow for me to expend any energy on recognizing the emotions being experienced by those around me. All I could focus on was my need to restrict calories, exercise more, and lose more weight.
The article "Empathy and social functioning in anorexia nervosa before and after recovery" by Robin Morris, Jessica Bramhan, Emma Smith, and Kate Tchanturia, comes to the following conclusion:
"Results. The acute AN (anorexia nervosa) group reported lower levels of empathy than the recovered AN group and HC (healthy control), but they also reported less antisocial behaviour. No differences were found in emotional recognition or social conformity.
Conclusions. These results suggest that emotional empathy is reduced during acute AN. Lower levels of antisocial behaviour may reflect a contrasting desire of people with AN to minimise presentation of antisocial behaviour in the acute state."
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/empathy-and-social-functioning-in-anorexia-nervosa-before-and-after-recovery%28f4af3016-2076-4964-8cce-c9af828ef2ec%29.html
So, according to this article, I was able to recognize emotions and artificially conform socially to fit in with the people around me, but I was unable to fake it with being empathetic.
Once my body, brain, soul, and spirit were well nourished with food and love, I was able to learn how to empathize with people in a way that allowed me to show compassion not based on guilt.
Empathy is a skill that is essential for individuals to learn but seems to be increasingly difficult to teach to our children. Lack of empathy comes from a focus on self for whatever reason and getting one's own needs met.
A comedian named Louis C.K. was recently in an interview where he said the following about his hatred for cell phones:
"And they (kids) don’t look at people when they talk to them and they don’t build the empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it’s ’cause they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, 'you’re fat,' and then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, 'oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.' But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write 'you’re fat,' then they just go, 'mmm, that was fun, I like that.'" http://lybio.net/louis-c-k-hates-cell-phones/comedy/
As a person with AN, my empathy was hampered by my isolation within my physical body. Many of us today are experiencing this same isolation due to our computers, cell phones, single-family dwellings, individual cars, and the ability to do everything for ourselves.
Isolation diminishes empathy, which leads to less compassion, which allows for violence. The violence that I inflicted was on my own body. Other people's isolation becomes violence turned on others.
The More-with-Less cookbook challenges us as disciples of Jesus to empathize with the hungry of the world and show compassion on others by recognizing that the choices we make about our own food are not isolated decisions.
As Longacre states,"Communication happens swiftly in our world. How can we continue overeating in the face of starvation and be at peace with ourselves and our neighbors...Jesus recognized the desire to get more and more as a destructive force when he asked, 'For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?'" p. 24
We do not live in isolation, but we act as if we do, which leads to lack of empathy, which in turn leads to violence. To counter this destructive chain, we must actively seek to follow Jesus and his example of empathy and compassion towards others.
ReplyDeleteOf course it is. This is the body protecting itself, pulling physical and emotional energy into oneself to focus on dealing with a crisis. Even animals do this, pull into themselves, try to find a physial quiet and safe space. We do it mentally too. This is not pathological, but natural, and healing: "Conclusions. These results suggest that emotional empathy is reduced during acute AN." When we are well, and functioning in a healthy and normal way, we have energy and ability to help others. Our bodies are wise. Listen.