DYING TO PLEASE: ANOREXIA NERVOSA AND ITS CURE By Avis Rumney, 1983, PB, Ex-Lib

Description: Thank you for looking at our listing. A purchase is supporting Friends of Spanish Peaks Library District! These books are all donated from different sources. This book is in good condition, and an ex-library book with library stamps and markings, see photos for details. I will combine shipping for each additional item purchased. Please do not pay for books until you are done bidding/shopping, and I will create a new Invoice with the reduced shipping charges. Please, please, I cannot issue refunds due to penalties that EBay assesses. Feel free to submit any questions you have. Thanks! Anorexia nervosa is a morbid, life-threatening and emotionally crippling disorder which is distressing both for the anorexic, relentlessly driven by her obsession with thinness, and for her family and friends, helpless witnesses to her wasting disease. The anorexic is impelled by an unquenchable need to please others because her own sense of self-worth is dependent on others' approval. She decides to starve herself to acquire the love, attention and approbation she seeks. How-ever, it is an endless quest, since no matter how thin the anorexic becomes, she still lacks an internal sense of self-worth and believes that if only she were thinner, and were more pleasing to others, she would attain this. Extreme emaciation, physical debilitation and ultimately death can result from the anorexic's pursuit. But anorexia can be cured, and it is my intention that this book will provide hope and direction to anorexics, their families and friends, as well as offer insight to therapists, professionals and other interested individuals. Intervention and treatment can arrest the tragic course of this disorder. However, since anorexia arises within and is perpetuated by characteristic family dynamics, the anorexic can only attain cure either if the family dynamics change or if the anorexic, living outside of her family of origin, learns a new way of relating to surrogate family members or other people. I was anorexic for over 17 years and never sought treatment until I had left home. I experimented with psychoanalysis and drug therapy before being successfully treated at Cathexis Institute, a transactional analysis-oriented treatment program in Oakland, California. For most of the time that I suffered from anorexia, I didn't know that I was too thin or anorexic, but only that I was chronically obsessed with bodies and food and was discouraged, dissatisfied and depressed. This book is a personal account both of some parts of my life as an anorexic and of my path towards cure. I describe here some of the major thinking patterns (the quest for perfection, the desire for others' approval, the competitive belief system, the distortion of body image, the fear of sexuality and of sulthood) which are characteristic of anorexia and which dominated my own thoughts as an anorexic. I discuss the methods and results of several kinds of therapy used to treat anorexia, including behavior modification, drug therapy, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and family therapy, and then talk about my own treatment process at Cathexis Institute, a nurturing, confrontive environment where the staff employed techniques derived from behavior modification and transactional analysis. Cathexis employs a reparenting approach in which the client receives from the therapist the parental messages absent during his own upbringing. With staff consent, the client may choose, as I did, to form "parenting contracts" with staff members to solidify the reparenting process. I attribute my benefitting from the Cathexis treatment program to a combination both of my own motivation to get well and to remain in treatment despite the hard work and discomfort which treatment entailed, and to the dedication of the staff at Cathexis to helping me get well. The treatment model I propose combines management of both the medical and the psychological aspects of the disorder and requires that the anorexic develop her own self-identity and a sense of her own competence and of control over her own life rather than over her body size. I believe that treatment requires a warm, personal approach and that a trusted and respected female role model is essential for the anorexic to achieve cure. While during treatment the anorexic must become dependent on her therapists for nurturing, information and parenting, getting well ultimately requires that the anorexic learn to accept herself as a person separate from others, whose objective in life is not to please others but to achieve her own goals. While anorexia more readily develops in specific kinds of families, and my natural family was of an anorexogenic type, I do not blame my natural parents for my becoming anorexic or believe that it was as the result of deliberate actions or willful neglect on their part that I became anorexic. My natural parents are responsible and caring adults who loved their children and did the best that they knew how to provide for myself and my two brothers. Rather, it was against a backdrop of a protective family environment where information was lacking about how to help kids grow up, and where food, material goods and physical well-being were frequent centers of attention, and in a cultural milieu in which slenderness was highly esteemed, that I chose "being thin" as a way to define myself, to seek attention and ap-proval, and to remain immature so I would not have to grow up and learn how to cope with the seemingly complicated and frightening adult world around me.

Price: 18.25 USD

Location: Walsenburg, Colorado

End Time: 2024-11-24T00:01:53.000Z

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