The character of Harry Potter touches a cultural nerve. His story and all such fiction built around knights and wizards and magic fill a void, a longing that first opens up in adolescence. This longing is a quest for deeper meaning in life. Teens start looking for answers to the big questions: Why am I here? Why does suffering happen in the world? This is the realm of the spiritual self. A teenage girl wants to understand, at the deepest level, that she is part of something much larger than her self. And sometimes when she gains that understanding, it is at a gut level.
She may love the exuberant sensation of being absorbed into something larger: rock concerts with other people gyrating around her; iPods drowning out sounds of the real world in favor of throbbing rhythms and shocking lyrics. She may build an alternate reality through instant messaging and chat rooms. Or she may embrace ideologies, embracing causes and "isms" - environmentalism, human rights activism, feminism, vegetarianism. She may even try religious exploration, embracing the practices of her family; or she may rebel and seek belonging in an alternative cultlike group.
But problems can emerge if an individual overidentifies with any particular group. A vulnerable teen, one prone to an eating disorder, tends to conform at the expense of her own internal self. Or she will let the group tell her who she is without doing the hard work of her own discovery.
How this relates to eating disorders can be seen in the Internetdriven subculture of those who have anorexia or bulimia. There the disease takes on the force of a religious doctrine. "Pro-ana" (for anorexia) and "pro-mia" (for bulimia) websites have cropped up to establish solidarity around having an eating disorder. In fact, the trend is spreading, according to researcher Anna Bardone-Cone. In preliminary work, she has counted more than four hundred pro–eating disorder websites.
Girls who identify with and participate in these sites attempt to "transcend" their culture, setting themselves above all others as the starving, self-abusing saints of old once did. The saints had God as their pinnacle. Girls with eating disorders today have no such higher ideal guiding their actions. So identification with the group, a natural sentiment in adolescence, goes horribly awry.
Instead, girls have to do their own soul-searching. They have to find the behaviors that make larger statements to the world - for example, eating no meat, an action that may say, I don't agree with exploiting animals. They have to find teachers, spiritual directors, or groups that help them make sense of injustices. They have to understand that the world can be a safe, meaningful place.
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09122010
1. Recover from eating disorders by being honest with yourself
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