ABSTRACT
Patients with eating disorders hold shameful, frightening secrets that create psychic terror and physical body tyranny. Their body-states are fluid and shift with anxiety and the fear of being shamed as the secrets they bring to therapy reveal a basic ambivalence between the urge to retain and the urge to expel. Their relationship to secrets could be thought of like their relationship to food – the dynamics in the tensions of wanting and not wanting to know themselves and be known in revealing their secrets to another; doing and undoing, depriving and oversharing. This chapter touches on the complex dialectical relationship between these patients’ bodily experience, mental anguish, and the loss of their vitality, which is often highlighted in being ‘center stage.’
