There are many frightening, even horrifying, anecdotes.
They are found in Peggy Claude-Pierre’s “The Secret Language of Eating Disorders” (Times Books, $25), a book about her personal and professional experience with anorexics and bulimics. Perhaps the most poignant is one she tells about her youngest daughter, Nicole.
It is particularly touching because Nicole falls into the fathomless well of eating disorders after she has helped her older sister, Kirsten, recover from anorexia.
“One morning at 4 a.m.,” Claude-Pierre writes, “I was writing in my journal, sitting on the cold bathroom floor, when I heard Nikki creep into the kitchen. When I followed her, she had disappeared. Then I heard a sound. I found her under the table, eating dog food out of a dog dish. We had no dog.
“I did not know where the dish or the dog food had come from. She was on all fours, weeping, as she crouched down to eat. I went over to her and held her and begged, `Don’t do this, darling. You don’t need to do this. We will figure this out.’
“She just sobbed in my arms and held on. `I don’t know why I do this. I’m so bad.’ “
This feeling of abject badness, of humiliation and self-denial, is a common thread throughout each of the case histories Claude-Pierre presents, advancing theories on anorexia and bulimia that go against much of the traditional medical belief of these diseases.
A widely held theory on anorexia is that this eating disorder is a result of a culture that values very thin women, that most victims are girls who are economically advantaged perfectionists who use anorexia as a tool for control. Anorexia also is seen by some as being caused by some form of abuse or dysfunctional parents.
Claude-Pierre calls these misconceptions. “Unfortunately,” she writes, “many of these myths still hold sway today and are often the basis upon which we regard and treat patients with eating disorders.”
Anorexia isn’t a disease, she says; it’s a symptom of something larger and has to be viewed that way to be treated most effectively.
She argues that people with eating disorders are at war with themselves. They have no sense of self, she says, and are overpowered by what she calls “confirmed negativity condition,” a voice that takes over their will and becomes “tyrannical, hypercritical, destructive and despair-confirming.” She sees this as the underlying disease.
Claude-Pierre says the medical community’s reaction to her theories has been, happily, surprising. She has, for instance, been invited to speak at several major conferences by eating-disorder associations.
“They are thanking me for making the disease understood by government and insurance companies,” said Claude-Pierre, who lives in Victoria, Canada. “The book shows this isn’t something that can be cured in six weeks, as insurance (companies) think.”
For Claude-Pierre, it was dealing with the battles of her two daughters that prompted her to begin her research into the disease and, eventually, devote herself full time to helping others. As word spread about her work and successes with individual children she had brought into her home, she opened an outpatient practice specializing in eating disorders in 1988. Her Montreux Clinic began its residential in-patient program in 1993.
In “The Secret Language of Eating Disorders,” Claude-Pierre explains how confirmed negativity condition can manifest itself in any number of self-negating ways. She insists “anorexia is the symptom, not the disease.” She explains that an eating disorder is to CNC as a rash is to measles or swollen glands are to mumps and only by reversing the underlying CNC can an eating disorder be cured.
What, exactly, is CNC? It is, she says, “the culmination of negative subjectivity turned against oneself. This . . . will cause the victim to interpret every comment made to her as a negative reflection on her, or it will make the victim assume blame for every event, no matter how objectively unrelated to her.”
Claude-Pierre’s treatment is slow but steady. In some cases, she insists on putting distance between the patient and her parents–not because the parents’ caring for their child was inadequate. Claude-Pierre goes to great lengths to assure parents that their children’s condition is not their fault.
Part of Claude-Pierre’s mission is to educate the medical community and the general public about how a predisposition to CNC early in life can bloom into a warped, hypercritical perspective that often results in eating disorders.
“It is imperative,” she says, “not to make your child your confidante. Let your child be a child as long as he or she can. You do not want a child taking on too much adult responsibilities.”
