by Sheila M Reindl (Author)
Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa, outsiders may wonder, How could you ever start? Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, How can I ever stop? How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery. Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self--to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience. Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Edition: Revised ed.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 01 Oct 2002
ISBN 10: 0674010116
ISBN 13: 9780674010116
Book Overview: Sensing the Self is an eloquent and important book, potentially a turning point in the study of eating disorders. Its most original insight is highlighted in the title: the importance of coming to experience a sense of self, with the stress on sense rather than self. No other book so successfully combines psychodynamic understanding and a practical, systematic how-to approach. Reindl describes the impairments in sensing self-experience that lead to bulimia, the six essential elements that enable individuals to sense when enough is enough, the aspects of oneself that need to be sensed, including the beast, and how one learns to sense self-experience. Her understanding of the way elements of bulimia can persist throughout life, and yet not ruin life, is simultaneously realistic and hopeful. Sensing the Self will appeal to therapists and patients alike, and for that matter, to all women who have struggled with eating and deep self-doubts about their bodies. -- Susan Sands, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley Sensing the Self is unique in that it goes beyond what any other study has attempted in terms of the depth of the interviews conducted and the thorough and compelling nature of Reindl's analysis. Reindl brings us back to our clinical senses in recognizing recovery as much more complicated than just the elimination of symptoms. This is a book which reasserts the importance of attending to and deeply understanding the self-experience of women struggling with bulimia nervosa, if we are truly to develop effective and enduring treatments, and ultimately, prevention strategies. -- Laura Weisberg, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School