Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia

by Sheila M. Reindl

Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa , outsiders may wonder, "How could you ever start?" Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, "How can I ever stop?" How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery.

Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self--to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience.

Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Self Help, Mental Health

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, sensitive, informative book based on several women with lots of quotes.

I just acquired this book. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who has ever struggled with eating issues. I'm happy to loan it out.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most helpful book on bulimia. Its written by a Harvard professor, I emailed with her after I read it, she's great. This book is really important just for information even if you're not on a recovery path.

[Olwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's taken me over two years to get through this book. It's full of heart felt personal experiences, first-person descriptions of what it's like to experience and recover from bulimia. Heartily recommended for any counsellor working from a client-centered perspective.

[Mary Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, best self help Bulimia recovery book I have ever read. So many things in the book I identified with. I learned so much from this book!

[Shruti · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting decision to batch the narratives of recovering bulimics as components of psychological disturbance and later, pillars of (successful) recovery. Might have appreciated the effort more had these stories retained some sense of continuity rather than becoming spare parts for clinical/diagnostic reasoning, though I think I understand the rationale nonetheless.

Enjoyed a few of the narrative analogies, for example, to Beauty and the Beast, as I found these appropriately supportive for abstract explanations of the more knotty processes of how bulimia takes shape and thrives along the intersecting axes of hereditary temperament, family upbringing, and social circumstance.

Informative, but in terms of reading pleasure, discontinuous.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reindl's observation of recovering bulimics asks us to revise the standard conception of the Self as an object, and instead consider it as a process.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better books on the topic.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book.