Sensing the Self
Subtitle: Women's Recovery from Bulimia
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: May 29, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 350
ISBN-13: 9780674004870
Subjects: Coping with personal problems; Eating disorders; Self-Help; Health and hygiene; Psychology; Women; General; Psychopathology - Eating Disorders; Women's Health - General; Psychology & Psychiatry / Eating Disorders; Bulimia
Description: "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 M. 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 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."--BOOK JACKET.