ABSTRACT
Chapter Seven pieces together the escalating emotional sequence that begins with ‘food thoughts’, leads up to a binge, and culminates in the physical and emotional relief provided by the purge. Looking at this anatomy of a binge/purge cycle, the chapter illustrates how dysregulating emotional experiences persistently trigger physiological responses for the perseverant individual rather than the thought-based solutions they really need to calm and make sense of their emotional distress. The chapter introduces the author’s newly-coined term/concept of “dysensithymia”—what she defines as an impairment in the ability to discern between felt-states or senses of the body and the mind. Dysensithymia includes the confusion of internal or ‘gut’ feelings of longing, anxiety, sadness, etc., with sensations of hunger; the inability to differentiate between ingestion of toxic emotional experiences and ingestion of food or fat; the attempt at garnering emotional fortitude by eating (or not eating); and the replacement of normally intact thought processing with food thoughts in the face of overwhelming emotional experience.
