self-discipline and punish (with insincere apologies to foucault)
Wednesday 27 June 2007 | 2 cookies in the jar
So I had this lying-around-sweating naptime conversation with the Brujo, in which I redacted the orthorexia post to him and he offered his thoughts, one of which was the innocent observation that he doesn’t feel guilty about eating. Ever.
I was incredulous.
“You’re saying you don’t, like, eat ice cream and then feel bad about it?”
“No. If I don’t want to eat it, I don’t eat it.”
“But what if you want to eat it but you know you shouldn’t and then you feel bad? Like hot dogs!”
“I don’t feel bad about eating hot dogs.”
“Not ever?“
“Nah.”
“Why not?! What the hell’s wrong with you?” I’m only half-kidding. “You have to feel guilty about something else then. Sleeping in? Not cleaning the house enough? Not doing the dishes? Not exercising? Smoking?”
He stares at the ceiling, thinking. “Well, I’m alcoholic. Isn’t that bad enough?”
We talk further and it turns out, funny thing, after drinking binges he’d go through the exact same thing I go through about the Tofutti Cuties (which pretend to be all healthy, you know—tofu! dairy-free!—but which are in reality little more than frozen chunks of corn syrup): Disgust, revulsion, promising never to do it again, making many plans for improvement and self-betterment and turning over new leaves—and then doing it again that very day, at least in part to deal with the guilt of having done it in the first place.
Crap. So all those people who say eating disorders are an addiction probably have a point.
I can’t tell you how many times I’m going to eat better and start exercising right away, and how often these intentions have deteriorated into “but right after I finish this novel and the last few cocoa meringues.” I was much less happy but curiously also in much better shape when living with my body-Nazi ex-husband, with whom I would run up and down the arroyos and virtuously shun foods that were neither chickpeas nor brown rice, neither salmon nor broccoli. Thus putting paid to the often-aired-around-me theory that diet largely or even mediumly contributes to my being mentally interesting. I was plenty damn interesting then, even without any corn syrup. Maybe this isn’t true for others, like the raw-foodist in our DBT group, the only one among us not on meds. (Though some of us privately thought you could kind of tell that.) Unfortunately I seem to be one of the lucky ones who really isn’t able to treat her bipolar disorder with long-chain fatty acids and raw kale stems.
“Take two beakers full of hydrochloric acid at the concentration that’s in the human stomach, and put a brownie in one and a piece of broccoli in the other. Come back in the morning and I promise you will not be able to see the difference. Chemicals and poop, that’s all that’s left after something’s been in our digestive tracts.” (In Which the Brujo Was a High School Science Teacher for Eighteen Years.)
I contemplate this, consider counter-arguments, get sidetracked. “It seems like where eating gets all messed up is in getting cathected in our heads with childhood stuff—being good, being bad. And how can we even know we’re doing that until we know we’ve been doing it?”
“Exactly—it’s like alcoholics and being ‘in denial.’ You can’t know you were in denial until you’re not in it anymore. And when we talk about it in meetings it just turns into this big self-flagellation. ‘Oh, I was in so much denial. How sick and twisted I was! And now, thanks to the program, I’m not.’ “
“Let me guess—the Brujo version of Gnostic AA probably maintains that those people are all still in denial.”
“And not only that, but they were in denial about what? A ‘problem.’ And there never was a problem. Sometimes I just want to grab everybody and tell them: You can’t do anything wrong. Everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be.” (The Brujo’s approach to recovery often leaves fellow sufferers mystified. I’ve seen their bafflement myself, though equally often someone will approach him with a quiet, What you said meant a lot to me.)
He goes on to talk about the total impossibility of budging anyone out of their denial. The Sponsor avers: Denial is a concept that’s strictly for the people who surround an alcoholic. It has no use whatsoever for the active addict.
“Right! Because those of us around denial want to come up with some kind of story to explain what we’re seeing, and validate ourselves so we don’t wonder if we’re crazy—’I keep telling her I’m worried, but she says there’s nothing wrong….’ ” I pause. “But, also, sometimes, you know, interventions do work. People who love us tell us their concern and something cracks a little and we can see something we couldn’t see before. Like the Buddha said to Ananda, the whole of the spiritual life is good friends.” I remember being threatened with expulsion from the Women’s College unless I maintained a weight of at least 100 pounds. How angry I was at the time, how righteous, and how many times I shoved rolls of laundry quarters deep in the pockets of my blue jeans.
“It’s just that it doesn’t always work—it’s not a formula. Any more than getting a DUI conviction is guaranteed to break through denial. Most people will just ignore it, blame the cops, and keep drinking. Or they think, Okay, fine, I’ll get new friends who are willing to be blind to my addiction.” He rifles for a passage in the Big Book which reminds snobby pink-cloud alcoholics that there are still many, many more people drinking than sober. We consider Mandarin’s new interest in Harm Reduction Therapy, and its imminent practicality, especially given her client population, few of whom have any real interest in quitting using.
“To stay stuck on what terrible people we were when we were in denial, and how bad we still are now, though somewhat less terrible, is to take the focus away from the mystery. It’s a way of taking grace for granted—that miracle of whatever it was that moved us toward being awake.”
As usual, we’ve left the topic, whatever it was, far behind and moved into our familiar shifty territory of mystical post-Jungian/crypto-Taoist spiritual revisionism. We lie there beneath the oscillating fan, taking a moment of silence for the addicts who are still suffering in and out of these rooms (”not who are still drinking—who are still suffering. Which just means, still alive!“)
What would it be like to eat spontaneously, truly without premeditation or postmortem? What would it be like not to feel guilty about not eating the “right” things, not working on the Dying Book, not doing the dishes enough?
I fell in love with Cheri Huber’s writing a few years ago at Tassajara, despite the supremely silly child-hand typeface in which her books are printed—mostly at first because how can you not love a book called flatly There Is Nothing Wrong with You—I walked around for days repeating that title to myself. Her website features a similar essay called “There Is Nothing Wrong with Us” and has a passage on which I’ve been chewing and digesting since I read it last week—metaphors deliberate—so here, taste some of this.
Here is an example of how passive awareness might work. I hope you apply it to whatever “fault” you are on a self-improvement campaign about. It could be something like cutting back on coffee, engaging in fewer mindnumbing entertainments, eating less, being on time, keeping your temper, meditating more–we all have those pet areas of self-torture being perpetuated under the guise of being a better person.
The example: I hate to do the dishes. I put it off for as long as I can, and let everything stack up until it becomes moldy and disgusting. I feel ashamed, guilty, and embarrassed. I know this is a sign of some deep flaw, but life is hard and I don’t want to do one more hard thing!
Each time I go into the kitchen the anxiety builds. I decide to bite the bullet and wash those dishes. The voices begin, “Not now. You’re too tired. It’s been a long day. You deserve to relax. Why are you so compulsive? You can do the dishes later. All you do is work. Go see what’s on TV and just relax.” Later, as I’m brushing my teeth, a little voice says, “You didn’t do the dishes. Again. You know you said you were going to. Now they’re going to be awful tomorrow and you won’t do them then either.” I look myself in the eye in the mirror and say, “No! I’m sick of this. I am going in there right now and do those dishes.” On the way to the kitchen I remember I promised to call my sister. “Is it too late? No, I’ll only talk for a minute.” A half-hour later I’m getting into bed and the little voice says, “You forgot to do the dishes.” My heart sinks, I plunge into despair. “Oh, it’s okay,” comforts the little voice, “you can do them tomorrow.”
After having exasperating scenes like this play out over and over with a variety of subjects, I begin to suspect there is more to this than meets the eye. I want to know experientially, not intellectually, what is going on here. I begin to practice compassionate, passive awareness, paying attention, believing nothing, and taking none of it personally.
So, with passive awareness added to the mix, I eat a meal and watch very closely how I avoid washing the dishes afterward. “I’m too tired. It would ruin the meal to have to clean up right now. I’ll do it later.” I listen to what the voices tell me as I don’t do the dishes. “You really should do them now. You won’t do them later. You are a lazy slob and you always will be.” I notice how I feel when the voices are talking to me and I’m caught in this “I should do the dishes/I’m not doing the dishes” duality. I begin to feel the toll it takes on me physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. I observe that I feel defeated and depressed.
As I practice, I realize that if this were only a matter of doing the dishes, they could be done in no time. But this is not about doing the dishes. It’s about keeping me in prison. All my time, energy, attention, and awareness are locked up in “Will I wash the dishes and be a good person, or will I not and be a bad person?” If doing the dishes didn’t make me a good person, and not doing the dishes didn’t make me a bad person, what would I do about the dishes?
This is where spiritual practice, awareness practice, begins. Spiritual practice does not begin until the beatings have stopped. If I become aware of something about myself that I don’t like, and I beat myself up for it, I am once again using the old childhood system of conditioning. The missing element is compassionate self-acceptance.
2 cookies in the jar
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
“As usual, we’ve left the topic, whatever it was, far behind and moved into our familiar shifty territory of mystical post-Jungian/crypto-Taoist spiritual revisionism.”
I’m bound to say that where we headed *was* the topic. Denial was not the topic, as there is no such thing as denial. There is only before and after. And we only get to “after” by some grace of being able to see, to take a look, that is not “under our control” or “in our power.”
Why does Huber write little comics? Not that they aren’t charming. I like the example you include. Self-discipline number 1 is often the only way I know how to go about getting anything done. What the “after” will look like, I lack the imaginal capacity to envision.
Penurious Bastid
oh, dear, I can feel another over-long reply coming on, and want to just say how lucky a girl I am to get to read some real thinking on these topics and get second-hand Brujo wisdom. This isn’t easy stuff to untangle, and I would be so deeply suspicious if an answer were handed, as it were, on a plate.
After commenting last night on the orthorexia post, I got up this morning and procrastinated my morning pages, a habit lately that I recognize as cyclical and probably another manifestation of weird hypergraphia, but decided to call my sister, a cello teacher, who has just spent two weeks doing Suzuki teacher training. Part of our conversation included the idea that you can start a child very young and they learn very slowly or start them older and they learn more quickly — so you may not be able to tell a 12 year old who has been playing since she was 7 from a 12 year old who has been playing since she was 3. So why start a kid on cello when they’re just three? If you’re looking for some sort of return on an investment of precious resources of time and money spent on instruction and practicing, perhaps you shouldn’t. But that sort of misses the point, the twelve year old who’s been playing since she was three doesn’t remember not playing, and if the parents manage to overcome their own competitive and achievement-based neuroses and insecurities and let it be about the joy of being able to make music, then this kid has known her whole life as one in which music has been a part of who she is. Somehow, though, you have to recognize making music as a good in itself, at whatever level you’re at — not something you do FOR something else, entrance to college, scholarships, and um, the inevitable ensuing economic success that being educated has somehow been misconstrued as guaranteeing. The weird part of parenting is other parents and an unexamined mindset of competition and limited resources and giving your kids an advantage. But you don’t have to follow that very far to wonder where it leads. I remember seeing at 14 or 15 the graffiti “Work Consume Die” and being terribly depressed by it. But if you start thing about things in your life which are intrinsically good, poetry and music and avocadoes and thunderstorms, you can escape that a little.
What does this have to do with eating disordered thinking? I have been trying to sort out whether food is, in itself, a good thing, or if its goodness lies in what it allows us to do. I think of a Buddhist prayer one friend had in her kitchen, blessing the food for giving us the strength to relieve suffering, or a sort of Jewish blessing of the food to enable one to do God’s work. That does lay a moral value on food, and I can sidle, crab-like from there to thinking, then, “empty calories” are those beyond what one needs to do good in the world, and feeling guilt about consumption and even maybe that weird recognition of bounty you experience after reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that easily translates into guilt. But maybe the guilt comes with thinking consumption is the point of all of this.
Somehow if I am to avoid curling up fetally, reciting the pilgrim’s prayer obsessively, I need to remind myself that saints and assholes are equally dead when they’re dead, famous writers and delusional dabblers, members of exclusive country clubs and homeless winos, women in size 0 and women in size 16: all wormfood. So accepting the intrinsic goods, that God in Her wisdom did imbue strawberries with glorious flavor and chocolate cake with warm, moist, richness and hot dogs with delicious salty juiciness, when surely we could all live on protein pellets or something not much more appetizing than the limited range of all those restricted diets, and virtue seems to lie more in our ability to reach others and improve their lives than self-obsessed calorie-counting.
After some skepticism I read one of Marshall Rosenberg’s books on Non Violent Communication a few weeks ago and it triggered in me a strong sense of how I will pass judgement on my needs and refuse to acknowledge them like bastard children, but still they haunt me, wearing multiple masks of self-righteousness and resentment and eternal martyrdom, making it so hard for me to recognize and embrace them. Which for some reason reminds me strongly of one of the damned in The Great Divorce who was held mostly by her attachment to her suffering. Of course it’s easy to beat one’s own self up for failing to practice compassionate self-acceptance, it does help so much to have friends who can help you see when you’re doing it and laugh a bit.