ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the narratival accounts of the association between eating disorders and childhood sexual abuse given by the women interviewed for the study. All asserted: ‘A link clearly exists’. Feeling, knowing, and using their various forms of eating disorders as a vehicle for expressing, coping with, and reenacting the abuse, their eating disorders serve(d) them as a way of communicating the original unspeakable, unmentalizable trauma. The connections between the two phenomena fall into several categories, each of which is illustrated in this chapter by the women’s own accounts: a ‘disguised language of secrets too terrible for words’; an expression of self-blame, self-destruction, self-punishment, and self-harm; a form of slow suicide and method to get rid of the exploited body; an illusion of regaining control; and a form of ‘self-medication’.
