ABSTRACT
Madeleine L’Engle once said, “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability . . . To be alive is to be vulnerable.” In this paper, I will share a personal story and two clinical vignettes to illustrate how fear, courage, shame – the mutuality of our experiences in body and mind – speak to the underbelly and emotional tenor of much of our work with eating-disordered patients. These emotions exist in between states of hyperawareness and hyperdeadness. These states emerge in our eating-disordered patients’ struggle against their own desires: wanting, longing, hunger, yearning, and the vulnerability of reaching with one’s appetite towards the world of others is subverted.
