They are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess.
In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess.
Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out.
Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction.
Imagine two magnets. The energy field in one reacts to the energy field in the other.
As they come closer, the pull between positive and negative becomes more intense until they leap together.
If the magnets have the same energy field, they repel each other.
They refuse to connect. Similarly, something in addicts reacts to the food and they are compulsively drawn to or repelled by its energy.
“I’ll die if I eat, I’ll die if I don’t.”
They may be trapped into going with the compulsion (binging), rigidly withstanding it (starving), or be alternately attracted to and repelled by it (bulimic eating and vomiting).
Whatever their reaction, food is the magnet around which their lives circulate.
In that context, food symbolizes the life force, the Great Mother, with which the wisdom of the body is desperately attempting to connect.
Attraction and repulsion are clear in the following diary excerpt.
This woman had worked her way through to seeing food as a symbol of power—power she had learned from her mother.
Eating had been simultaneously an identification with her power drive and an avoidance of looking at it. F
ood fed her fat animus and her tyrannical child. It did not feed her soul child, starving for love.
Before she wrote these lines she had had a quarrel with her partner and phoned me because she was so upset.
Something in my response, she said later, made her feel as if her hands had been slapped. She swung for some days between her tyrannical power hungry sisters, then she wrote the following:
How much bullshit do I have to put myself through before I can get out of this mirror maze? I can rationalize anything.
I can play any game in the book and make believe it is real. SHIT.
I’m not yet ready to give up the role of the mad little girl who didn’t get her own way.
Or the other end of that game, “See Mommy what a good girl I am.
See how much I try to do to please you? Love me. Love me.
I’ll be anything you want, just love me.”
This baby needs to be garbaged. I applauded myself by having a tantrum because I didn’t get my own way right away. (I would rather not know this!)
Why does it have to be played out to its awful extreme before it can be clearly seen and dealt with.
And the other childish thing I do is to make mountains out of mole hills and then mistake that dramatization for reality.
If I can’t be in control, then I play out the role of victim and convince myself that my failure to get my own way is someone else’s fault.
It’s a pretty righteous form of self justification and means that I never have to confront the fact that I play power games.
That I like to play power games! If it suits my position of power to play helpless, I will play helpless.
I’ll play it any way I can to keep control.
If I’m not in control, then I’m nobody, then nobody loves me because I have to be somebody for anyone to love me.
If I can’t be the most WONDERFUL woman in the world then I can be a POWERFUL woman and if I can’t be a powerful woman then I can be an awful little girl that nobody loves.
(Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. Going to the garden to eat worms.)
Any way that best suits the situation so I can be the center of attention!
Does the world not revolve around me? Was heaven and earth not made for me alone?
And this is the other side of the coin of not being able to take oneself seriously. ALL or NOTHING!!!
And the line that holds these forces in place is not some magic mana from heaven that one waits for, but a grownup sense of proportion, the understanding and acceptance that I am a part of a larger whole of things, that I have a place in the picture.
One place that is mine, not more special, nor less, than any other place.
It is my given place. It is my fate.
And I can play the overstated games out all my life if I like and by so doing miss my life. I DO NOT WANT TO MISS MY LIFE. ~Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 103-104
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