A HUNGRY AND HURTING: EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE (ELSA’S STORY)

ELSA: "I always felt like my soul was skinny. My soul was free. My soul sort of flew. I was tied down by this big bag of rocks that was my body."

Elsa is a forty-six-year-old Latina mother who was raised in Argentina and came to the United States with her husband and three children seven years before our interview. She has worried about her weight since she was six years old and has struggled with dieting, bingeing, anorexia, and major weight fluctuations since she was eleven. She was born into an upper-class family and, as is customary among wealthy families in Argentina, was raised by governesses. She had almost no contact with her alcoholic mother until she was ten years old. In Argentina, it was not considered proper for rich women to take care of their children themselves. Elsa says, "Rich people have more power than poor people. They suffer less unless they are extremely rich like when I was a kid. I was deprived emotionally because my family was so rich." She felt rejected by her mother and was deeply dismayed about being cared for by governesses. She thought they hated the job and were only doing the work for economic reasons: "They would talk about their childhoods and how they became poor and how they had to work. I felt really very bad about it. Being a servant in Argentina was kind of the worst thing." She knew that in order to take care of her, they had to leave their own children behind and that they resented her because of this. They told her stories about children they had loved and been separated from, sometimes because of misunderstandings with their employers. The situation was painful for almost everyone involved. Elsa needed love but felt guilty about wanting it.

Elsa also hated the power the governesses had over her body. They would slap her when she wouldn't eat all of her food. She has memories of her nose bleeding and of trying to choke down food while blood was dripping out of her nose. The governesses did not allow her any autonomy. Living at home was like living in military barracks, she says; every aspect of her life was monitored. Each evening, she was subjected to a rigid schedule for completing her homework, bathing, and brushing her teeth—timed almost to the minute. Besides being forced to eat, she was forced to produce a bowel movement every day, even though her metabolism was slow and she was not a very active child. She remembers being five or six years old and being made to sit on the toilet until she was finished, by the caretaker's definition. She says now, "This felt like such a violation. I hated it. I thought it was invasive and disrespectful and so abusive."

Elsa also identified her father's behavior as emotionally abusive. He was a wealthy man who saw his children as

living off his generosity, his work, his sweat, . . . [as] a bunch of babies. A bunch of useless, worthless beings. He gave us all of our worth. There wasn't anything intrinsic to us that made us worthy.

From her father's perspective, Elsa was unworthy not only because she was financially dependent but also because she was a girl. Although she was intellectually gifted, because she was a girl her education did not matter to him. From his perspective, all that was important was how she looked. In this she failed miserably because she was fat. Her father yelled at her constantly, which terrified her. Her mother blamed Elsa for his rages, leaving her feeling totally alone. As Elsa puts it, "He was the master of ceremonies and all the rest of us had to obey or pay very dearly for it."

For as long as Elsa can remember, she hated the sexist limitations imposed upon her. Boys could eat more, didn't have a curfew, were supported intellectually, were taken seriously. Being a girl, she thought, meant being like her mother, whom Elsa saw as "a modern-day slave. A geisha." When her mother discovered that Elsa has begun to menstruate, she said, "You poor thing. You've become a woman." Elsa thought:

If this is being a woman I don't like it. This felt like even more deprivation of freedom than before. This is even worse. A locked-up woman. I felt so much for the Egyptian women in the harems being locked out of life. I hated it.

Elsa was routinely teased because of her weight. Although the asthma that plagued her as a young child eventually subsided, she still had little energy, was chronically exhausted, and gained weight easily. When she became chubby, her parents chastised her and told her she was ugly. She was often teased at school, in stores, and on the street because of her weight. In public she was subjected to insulting questions from strangers who asked if she was pregnant, if there was a reason she was fat, or if there was something wrong with her. Her father told her that "fat was very degenerative and self-indulgent. He had almost a Nazi thing about health and beauty." Her mother was ashamed of having a fat daughter and tried to avoid walking into stores with Elsa, embarrassed to be seen in public with a fat daughter.

At eleven, Elsa was sexually abused by her sister's husband. As is common among victims of sexual abuse, she believed she was abused because she was fat. When she was younger, she had overheard adults talking about men who harassed women in public and how these men preferred chubby girls: "I had this notion that these old perverts like these plump little girls. You heard adults say this too. Sex and flesh being associated." At first, Elsa liked his interest in her; her abuser was the first person who had ever paid much attention to her. But she also felt like a sinner, "the temptress of Babylon," and believed she was responsible for causing this man to be unfaithful to her sister. When she told her mother, the abuse stopped, but her mother told her that if she told anyone else the scandal would ruin her sister's life. Elsa was left feeling guilty, ashamed, and sickened.

Sexual abuse contributed to Elsa's eating problem by adding to her insecurity about her body, since she thought the size of her body caused the abuse. But the despair she felt about her body originated as a consequence of emotional abuse, only to be exacerbated by sexual abuse. Elsa felt guilty about eating before the abuse. More important, she had never had a chance to appreciate her body or understand it as her own.

As a consequence of her beleaguered childhood, Elsa dissociated her soul—which she believed was free and skinny—from her fat and uncontrollable body:

When Elsa told me that the most important goal in her life is to be thin, I asked her how a woman who had the strength and courage to leave her native country despite her family's protests, divorce her husband, and raise her children as a single mother could, at forty-six, still believe that being thin was the most important goal in her life. She answered my question with a story:

In a way I was never meant to be fat. I was sort of broken. My world was broken. I was reading about this elephant in San Diego that the trainer had trouble dealing with. She was a female elephant who would not obey the orders. What the trainer did, he and his co-workers, is they beat the elephant over the head with sticks. Not terribly hard, yet enough to cause the skin of the elephant to rub off, to get sore after two days. Periodically the guy would offer the elephant a treat and she would refuse. She refused it for two days. At the end of the two days, she finally accepted the treat. That is when the guy finally stopped the beating. The guy said, I had to do it. This is an environment where you could not allow the elephant to go wild. This is standard procedure in these cases. 'Cause I guess most of them don't take two days but his critics say, it is not training. It is not even behavior modification. This is breaking. Breaking the animal's will, breaking the animal's soul. Something in the animal gave way. Its dignity. Its sense of self or whatever. And [long pause]

my feeling is that is what was done with me when I was a kid. It was so bad that at the time ... I don't know what.

Elsa coped with being denied dignity as a child by believing that thinness would take away the limits. When she separated her "skinny" soul from her fat body, she was protecting her soul from abuse.

Elsa was careful to say that she was not born hating her body. The hatred was elicited and enforced. The fact that she still considers being thin the most important goal in her life suggests that the integration between her body and her soul has yet to occur. Her hatred of fat symbolizes her anger about still being broken: "I associated fat with holding back my dreams. I thought if I was thin I would be this beautiful person. . . . Being thin meant freedom, appreciation, love, fun." Now she's not sure that she will ever recover:

What I ate, what I did, when I moved, when I did not move, every little aspect of my physical life was controlled. Somehow I was violated as a human being. It broke something in me. [Long silence] I don't know if I can get it back together.

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