Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride

Preface

7. Repeatedly, I have Done battle with the black crow sitting on my left shoulder croaking, “It isn’t good enough. You haven’t anything new to say. You don’t say it well enough.” Repeatedly, I have had to stop trying to perfect a sentence here, a paragraph there, while the rest of the book remained unwritten.

8. The important thing is that you are relaxed so that if the bell does ring you will hear it and allow it to resonate through all the rungs of your own spiral. The word of the feminine resonates. Timing is everything. If it doesn’t ring, either it is the wrong spiral or the wrong time or there is no bell.

10. I am convinced that the same problem is at the root of all addictions. The problem manifests differently, of course, with the individual, but within everyone there are collective patterns and attitudes that unconsciously influence behavior.
11. Driven to do our best at school, on the job, in our relationships—in every corner of our lives—we try to make ourselves into works of art. Working so hard to create our own perfection we forget that we are human beings.

1. Introduction

This book is about serious eaters and serious drinkers, serious house cleaners, serious anyones. (12)

Consciously the individuals are being driven to do better and better within the rigid framework they have created for themselves; unconsciously they cannot control their behavior. (12)

Compulsions narrow life down until there is no living–existence perhaps, but no living. (12)

All day the mask, or persona, performs with perfect efficiency, but when the job is done, those frenzied, foreign rhythms continue to dominate body and Being. (13)

The wolf attitude which demands more and more and more during the day, howls I want, I want, I want at night. Society’s values based on the work ethic and perfectionist standards, ambitions and goals uphold the wolf attitude in the professional jungle, but society can do nothing to feed the lonely wolf at night. (13)

What is missing is the balance which would restore the quality of the living. (13)

Masculinity and femininity have nothing to do with being locked into a male or female body. (14)

With growing maturity the individual is able to avoid the extreme of either polarity, so that the pendulum does not gain too much momentum by swinging too far to the right only to come crashing back to the left in a relentless cycle of action and reaction, inflation and depression. (15)

…the more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I’m going to have in my dreams. (15)

And that ego can only be strong enough if it is supported by the wisdom of the body whose messages are directly in touch with the instincts. Without that interplay between spirit and body, the spirit is always trapped. At the very moment when it could soar, it is undermined by fear and lack of confidence because it cannot depend on its instinctual ground even for survival. Without that ground, the body is experienced as the enemy… If, on the other hand, spirit and body are attuned to each other, each complements the other with its own special wisdom. (16)

The gall of their disappointment their child drank with the mother’s milk. (17)

18. Encapsulated in their ideals and their projections, they lose contact with the intimate bond that kept them human.

Her masculinity burned out her femininity—a fatal error for any woman. For when this happens, life inevitably becomes

… a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (19)

Often unconscious of the duality of their feelings and the contradiction that lies in the center of their personality, one the one hand they seem to be clinging to life, on the other they are systematically destroying themselves. (21)

Such girls seek husbands who will provide that day-to-day cherishing, and therefore in marriage they may lock themselves yet again into the mother they sought to escape. (22)

Increasingly, I see the food complex as a neurosis compelling intelligent women towards consciousness. This is to view the food complex positively, in terms of its purpose. (22)

It begins in what looks like a weight problem where the conflict is not yet in consciousness, it takes psychosomatic form. Fat in our culture is taboo, so the neurosis hits where it hurts the most—at the heart of the female ego. The fat girl is not one with her peers: she cannot eat the junk foods, she is not invited to the adolescent parties, she cannot wear jeans, she is not attractive sexually. In short, in our society she is not a female, and no one knows it as well as she. Isolation forces her into her own inner world where fantasies compensate for the unlived life and the images of the imagination gradually take on numinous power. The forbidden becomes at once the revered and the dangerous object. (22)

Their task is to rescue themselves from a drive alien to her nature. (23)

It is about recognizing the enemy and giving it a name in order to deal creatively with it. (23)

The sins of one generation are visited on the next; that is the human situation, and to the extent that parents are unconscious, their children suffer. It is the task of mature individuals to differentiate infantile imagos from the actual parents, to differentiate what was wholesome in their heritage from what was destructive, and to forgive. (23)

The task which her own mother may have failed to perform, she must perform. (23)

2. Ritual: Sacred and Demonic

This sense of finality is partly why compulsions, particularly those having to do with the body, are constellating so forcibly in our culture. (25)

Coupled with this dread of extinction is the natural propensity of compulsives to live in the future. Often intuitive by nature, they don’t clasp the here-and-now reality with which they cannot cope; rather they dream about what they could be, should be, were meant to be in the future. The gap between reality and dream is often filled by the obsession. (25)

If we ignore the small symptoms, the body eventually takes its revenge. (26)

Without that maternal matrix she moves alone in the landscape of her own terror, shrinking from the chaos of a new life and paralyzed by dreams of the old. For her, life is not the issue. Her sole purpose is to fashion the object in the mirror into a work of art, totally acceptable, ironically, to the collective value system she despises. (27)

Aloneness is a crucial component in compulsive syndromes, as it is a crucial component in modern society. Real compulsives carry out their rituals alone. (27)

One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with food addicts, as with alcoholics, is helping them overcome their sense of despair when they lose the high associated with these addictions. In fact the overcoming of one addiction may activate another, and many an anorexic or obese girl has been born in full armor from an alcoholic’s brain. (27)

Many people in our society are being driven to addictions because there is no collective container for their natural spiritual needs. Their natural propensity for transcendent experience, for ritual, for connection to some energy greater than their own, is being distorted into addictive behavior. (29)

If this behavior is looked at carefully, it is clear that almost all the food they eat is stolen—even from their own refrigerators. They tell themselves they will fast but they don’t; in effect they steal the food from themselves. This craving to do the forbidden often comes from a lifelong relationship with the negative mother who is constantly judging, so that if “I” am doing what I want to do, it is wrong, and therefore I must do it quickly and surreptitiously if I am to enjoy it without condemnation. (30)

During this conflict their energy swings from one pole to the other. This sudden reversal of energy is called enantiodromia. (30)

The stronger the ego the more the projections can be taken back from the food. If psychic health is patiently reconstructed this way, then there may be no need for new symptoms to appear once the weight loss begins. (33)

The eucharist begins sacred and ends demonic, thus repeating the child’s experience of the mother. (35)

The mother, to be sure, may have felt trapped by her daughter’s need. If she was locked into a loveless marriage, confined at home with children, desperate to get out, then her child’s needs would become her nightmare. Thus in relation to the child’s yearning for a positive mother, the actual mother may in fact become negative no matter how much she “gives.” (35)

40. One the rituals are “betrayed” to the analyst, or some other perceptive person, then they are open to change.

42. In spite of popular belief, a binge does not depend on how much a person eats. For a person trapped in her negative mother, even one muffin eaten in her name is enough to produce painful bloating or a swollen allergic reaction. For those who have lived with a food complex most of their lives, great patience is required in the process of healing.

Fate, as all my anorexic and obese analysands recognize, is what pursues them. (45)

Ch. 3: Addiction to Perfection

47. There was a stillness around her, a kind of silent strength that too many had clung to. Too many had put their burdens on her and she had carried them. She had carried them so well that she was old beyond her twenty-five years and heavy beyond the weight her scales could bear. She smiled a slow, poignant smile that did not light her eyes.

I want things to be true and yet the image of myself that I present is absolutely false. I do nothing to enter the world. If I can’t do the whole thing, I’ll do nothing. (48)

I tell the truth but I am playing games at the same time. (48)

49. The hated body persisted in its attempts to survive even when the spirit refused to inhabit it.

49. But where the individual is going through the experience alone, without the orthodox ritual, she cannot know that the sacrifice of the old will lead to the birth of the new.

50. The great danger in solitary rituals is that the ego becomes identified with the positive or negative side of the god.

51. The point here is that perfection belongs to the gods; completeness or wholeness is the most a human being can hope for.

52. It is in seeking perfection by isolating and exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic.

52. Obsession is always a fixation—a freezing-over of the personality so that it becomes not a living being but something fixed, like a piece of sculpture, locked into a complex.

Most people locked in this syndrome are born Gnostics–they deny the incarnation… Like them, God never lived on earth. (55)

56. What must be established is a loving attitude of the ego toward the body, so that the body’s nourishment becomes the ego’s concern.

56. A woman possessed by the ugliness of her body looks at her complex hour after hour and literally cannot see it. It is a construction of mind which believes itself truly omnipotent, saying to the body “BE,” and it is.

Crucial to the healing process, therefore, is working creatively with the rejected body.

57. And the unconscious responds by becoming the perceived object.

 Ch. 4: Through Thick and Thin

61. Mother and daughter may have a close relationship, but both my share a negative mother complex, and both as a result are terrified of the “instinctive, unconscious inner man [and woman]… cut off from life.” That terror of the instinctive bedevils daily living.

61. Even after the complex has been dealt with, any life-threatening situation may cause the body to take on weight without any change in caloric intake.

61. Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are. If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can’t be all “must,” “ought to,” “have to.” And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren’t there. Then the house of cards collapses. In trying to live out your principles and ideals, the part that matters the most was lost.

62. If an individual is being fed and nourished emotionally by the mother—or a mother surrogate such as husband, company, Church, collective values—she is probably starving in relation to herself. She is dependent on the mother and therefore open to manipulation by the mother, vulnerable to her praise or rejection. She is not nourishing herself and her own feelings are being unrecognized or denied. She is starving. She has to perform perfectly in order to be loved. Her emotional stability is determined by another’s reaction.

62. She cannot depend on a love which accepts her for who she is. Whether the original manipulators are still in her life doesn’t matter; they are alive in her psyche as complexes and if she isn’t projecting them onto her “loved ones,” she is turning them against herself.

62. In an effort to be mature and independent, such a woman tries to be more and more perfect because the only way she can alleviate her dependence on that judgmental voice is to be perfect enough to shut it up. But there is no shutting it up. It wants more and more and more.

62. The child picks up the unconscious of the parent and carries that weight with her.

63. So long as her energy is going into that war with the complex, she has no energy to put into finding out who she is and what nourishment she needs.

65. If the woman can take that projection back and, instead of blaming her man, recognize that she treats herself the same way, she may find that the elegant animus is a combination of her mother’s animus and her father. (For better, for worse, partners do seem to deserve each other.) #relationships

66. Women who as tiny children had to begin mothering younger siblings, or even their own “dear” mothers, may project this helpless child onto others. Beneath it is considerable resentment because they wre never allowed their own childhood and, ironically, resent the responsibility they automatically assume in most situations.

66. So the spinning begins, the thread becoming so twisted around itself that the woman may sit for hours drawing in more and more material without getting a clear perspective, and wind up at the end of the day with piles of books and notes but still no unified coherent approach to the material.

Such chaos can drive a woman to eat or drink in an attempt both to escape and to stay on the ground. She may have begun with a genuine interest in the paper, but when the complex takes over, mountains of material are accumulated under which the positive, creative animus suffocates. When the creative spirit is not breathing into the material, it dies. The essay becomes an overwhelming duty. One thing that complex hates is fun; it reduces everything to grim responsibility. (66) 

68. So long as we are petrified in a static world there is no danger of us opening ourselves to weeping our own tears or singing our own song. #music

68. The daughter thinks of herself as an object. However it is disguised—beautiful, intelligent, efficient, valuable, rare—it still remains dehumanized. Such a daughter has no inner standpoint of her own.

69. Once she discovers what her mother never introduced her to—the deep, rich love of being alive—her life becomes her possession. She is then free to shape her own life.

72. Needless to say, a woman suffering from this syndrome is not concerned with the larger world issues; she simply wants to lose weight.

72. What we see in women’s mysteries is the process by which contradiction is transformed into paradox.

In the intellectualizing of a problem, the body is cruelly abandoned. The shock that follows the analytic hour is the return to the body. (77)

To allow the woman to leave the session joyous in her heady illumination, then face her shadow in the mirror as she puts on her coat, is a cruel reinforcement of the split. (78)

And the way to do this is to allow the body to play, to give it space and allow it to make whatever movements it wants to make. (78)

Any self-respecting artist is mindful of the difference between writing out of the creative center and writing out of the complex. (105)