What causes anorexia? Self criticism, body consciousness, and neurotransmitter imbalances can contribute to eating disorders like anorexia nervosa. There are some of their ideas and things that we can attribute...
There are some of their ideas and things that we can attribute to the development of anorexia, but specifically there is no one thing. It is like a predisposition; we certainly do not to blame society or the media for the contribution, but I think women in general tend to be self critical and body conscious. Women often associate with their parents. I think that predisposes them to perfectionism and then they have a tendency to want to do things very well and they also have a tendency sometimes to feel responsible for how other people feel. I think if I had to just distinctly say what I think about eating disorders in general (including anorexia) it is that eating disorders have very little to do with food and weight. They primarily have to do with feelings and feelings about acceptance and approval and control. When someone doesn't feel accepted or approved, they will search for a means to control something in their environment or within themselves to help them move towards feeling more secure about acceptance and approval. Women often tend to think they will be more accepting or approved of, if they looked a certain way and they feel very out of control about a number of things in their life, the food is something they can control or believe they can. And their weight is often something they think they can focus on to control. So their feelings of inadequacy and insecurities somehow seem to get attached to food and weight. And many times they will tell me, if I didn't have the eating disorder I wouldn't have anything. If I didn't have my eating disorder to sort of represent my identity, I wouldn't be anyone, so that has taken it to an extreme. I also would like to say that eating disorders do not just have an immediate onset. They are insidiously developmental and most people start out to move in a direction to become healthier or for a positive outcome. They walk more. They reduce their saturated fats or minimize the amount of junk food they may be eating all in a way to becoming healthier. Then at some point, it becomes an obsession and they cross over that line and then they are stuck and diagnosed with an eating disorder. In general, those who tend to have more of a predisposition to being obsessive and perfectionists feel insecure or question their validity. They are vulnerable too to the development of an eating disorder.
But if you look at our societal message, potential neurotransmitter imbalance, the prevalence of depression or anxiety, and familial messages or the nature and structure of the family; what types of messages are given? Approximately half of those who have eating disorders have a mother who also has an eating disorder. So even unspoken messages can be very discerning and if a child sees a parent making negative or making negative statements about themselves and sees if they are excessively exercising or eating minimally, they internalize that. The parent did not cause the child to have an eating disorder but they probably will contribute to the child's perceptions and behaviour and then eventually they have developed an eating disorder. I was working with a young person. He was 14 and he said his goal in therapy was to determine what caused his eating disorder. That is a great thing to do because if we understand the underlying issues or causes, then we can help prevent them from recurring. I described to him as a flower arrangement that we put together. We looked at the floral arrangement. Each piece in there makes a contribution. Together, they make the bouquet and so really what we are looking for is your eating disorder bouquet. With some people there is trauma; approximately half of those who have eating disorders have had sexual trauma. We can't expect that each person coming in had a functional family or sexual trauma occurring in their life, but we have to look at their bouquet and determine which piece contributes the most to that bouquet. We work on those issues and no one's eating disorder is identical to anyone else's. So we have to look at what might have contributed and what their underlying causes are and then begin to resolve this.
