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Not deserving this is woven deep in the fabric of anorexia. Centrally, of course, it’s about the food. I don’t deserve to eat unless I’ve been hungry a long enough time, unless I’ve exhausted myself on the treadmill, unless I’m under x kg/lb, unless the food has xyz qualities, unless I’ve fainted at least once today with weakness, unless… And the conditions become more numerous and/or more deathly, and the circuitous obsessive-compulsive rituals grow ever more entangled.
All this is bolstered by the distorted moral code in which morality is associated with the rejection of pleasure, and especially physical pleasure—and especially for women, because moral codes (especially religious ones) have tended to be created by men well served by women’s disavowal of their own desires. Whether it rears its head in the form of (for example) religious/cultural infringements of women’s freedom or those self-subjugations encouraged by the diet and fitness industries, a significant part of the underlying structure is the same: real appetite is dangerous, animal, and to be denied. I make a (more or less lightly coerced) choice to believe, of anything I want too much, that I don’t deserve it.
Anorexia probably begins, for most people, as a response to some aspect of this wide-reaching and unhealthy belief system. It might be triggered by someone else systematically (intentionally or not) chipping away at our self-worth, or emerge in our own impulse to seize control in an uncontrollable universe, or manifest in wanting to be slimmer to be prettier and more desirable—they all have that structural similarity (though important differences too).
And the patterns of refusal to act on bodily appetites easily get embedded, as habits have a way of doing, and the habits, in turn, start to distort the appetites, either lessening or heightening them or both in alternation or simultaneously. So now it probably would be a lot riskier to act on those appetites than it would have been before because they’ve become erratic and unreliable. So, of course, the iron grip masquerading as self-abasement makes sense. And at some point, the default flips from ‘should I eat less?’ to ‘is it OK to eat now?’ And so somehow you’ve reached the point where not-deserving is just an unquestioned habit, the foundation of your day.
And this is the same person who decides, one day in the future, that enough is maybe enough, and it’s time for recovery. But it’s one thing to decide in theory that you no longer want to be ill, quite another to actively rebel against all those non-deserving habits. So you sit down with food and if you’re not achingly hungry, or if you haven’t been for a run or worked for ten hours, the food feels illegitimate; it feels too much; too self-indulgent; too easy; too not-you.
Many people I correspond with say some variant on this about why recovery from anorexia feels so hard. And the usual response by well-meaning family, friends, therapists, et al.—or the person herself pre-empting all these people—is to help you to remember or discover all the reasons why you do deserve to eat: why you deserve to be well and happy because you’re a good person.
You may or may not be a wonderfully good person by whatever elements of your particular moral code you choose to measure yourself against (which illness will inevitably have made unreliable) or let someone else measure you by. But in reality, that gets you nowhere, because your moral score bears absolutely no relation to your deserving anything or not.
It’s so easy to create that link between being good and having rights. We create it so often when trying to be helpful, by encouraging someone to know that they do deserve a, b, or c. But it’s both false and pernicious.
It’s false because you don’t deserve anything. You came into being as a result of infinite grand and minuscule chance happenings stretching back into the dawn of the universe and beyond, which ultimately brought the sperm of your father and the egg of your mother into contact at the precise time when all the other processes that in turn led to who you are now were unleashed in all their vast complexity. You are one conglomeration of chance occurrences in a vast universe of chance occurrences; the universe owes you nothing.
No element of existence deserves anything, and humans are no different. Of course, because we are different in other ways, we have done things like create verbalized and institutionalized structures of deserving, which we give labels like human rights. But those structures are absolutely created, and they change with time as we change. They didn’t inhere in the universe until our words and actions put them there.
So I can decide to say that all humans deserve to be healthy and happy, but that doesn’t mean anything except that I’d like it to be true, and that I may take actions to make it more likely. Those actions are the things that count. If you want the world to be a nicer place to live, go out and make it so (and yourself happier in the process). Deserving needn’t come into it.
The same goes for when I apply such statements to myself: it is neither true that I deserve to be happy and healthy, nor true that I don’t deserve to be. There is no fact of the matter about it. I’m just a remarkably complex collection of cells, molecules, atoms, existing. Deserving or not are value judgments I choose to apply, or not, depending on another vast set of contingent circumstances that channel out into things like mood and self-esteem and my interpretations of other people’s interpretations of me, and everything else that affects how I make any given momentary assessment of myself.
And the reason why deserving is pernicious? It’s that if you encourage someone to accept that they deserve, for example, this creamy sugary slice of Victoria sponge sitting on the plate in front of them on this, Day 12 of their recovery (or Day 2 of the rest of their life), you might get them to agree in the end. But then say you’re cajoling me into acknowledging my self-worth so that I’m more likely to eat the cake. Well, in a subtle but significant way you’ve actually made me helpless.
Think about the contrast between this and some other apparently similar cognitive-behavioral intervention, like reconfiguring how you look at yourself in the mirror. Your problem is you hate what you see. The solution involves first identifying what contributes to the problem, by teasing apart the various elements of how you use the mirror: zeroing in on isolated body parts, applying impossible criteria of acceptability to those parts, discounting the impression made by the whole body, approaching the mirror aiming to find fault, leaping straight from aesthetic conclusions to wider self-judgements, confusing bodily sensations like fullness with fatness, and fatness with ugliness, and ugliness with stupidity… Then you start to replace the faulty mechanisms with ones that make you like what you see rather than hate it: reorientating your gaze, dismantling and pre-empting the syllogisms, finding new questions to ask of the mirror, etc. And once you introduce the new habits, the old ones start to collapse, and you like what you see more because it was indeed the case that all these were the reasons why you disliked what you saw. And if none of these changes helps very much, you dig a bit more and find some other contributor to tackle, until you do basically feel good in front of the mirror more than bad.
But compare this with what happens when I try to apply the same procedure for deserving. The problem I want to address is that I don’t feel like I deserve this piece of cake. The solution is to (re)discover why I do in fact deserve it: I’ve been very ill for a very long time (i.e. I have suffered so now I deserve to stop suffering), or I’ve always tried to be a good person (i.e. I have moral qualities so now I deserve a reward), or something along those lines. But the trouble is, again, that neither having suffered nor having moral qualities has anything inherently to do with eating food. So this time there’s a gap where the logic gives out. Nothing can fill it except pseudo-reasons, and those will never be very satisfactory to a mind and body longing for ways out, away from the table.
But you’ll object, rightly, that there is a way forward—or a way back, along the causal chain—that doesn’t stop at the pseudo-reasons, but takes them as grist to the analytical mill. The pseudo-reasons we come up with in our well-meaning attempt to convince ourselves to eat might be ones like: no one should have to suffer this much (who says?), or my many kindly acts towards humans or woodlice make it OK for me to eat this cake (eh?). But there are really good reasons hiding behind these ones, and they require asking ourselves difficult questions about what underlies the moralizing language of not-deserving.
When I tell myself I’ve suffered enough, am I really saying that I want to stop suffering now? When I inventory my moral actions, am I saying I want someone to tell me I did OK? When I declare that I deserve to take a bite off this fork right now, am I saying that any one of the reasons I have always given for not-deserving it now no longer holds: that I was afraid of not liking the food, afraid of liking it too much, afraid of getting fat, afraid of not having rules, afraid of growing too much in too unpredictable directions? Or that I was and am no longer afraid of being robbed of that great pretense: that what I pretend to believe I don’t deserve is actually the one thing that makes me feel powerful, in control, superior? I loved that feeling, though I also hated it; I’m scared of losing it, but maybe prepared to. Is some of that what you're really saying when you try to tell yourself you deserve this sponge?
Once we’ve dared to identify all that’s cloaked by the easy moralizing concepts of deserving and not deserving, we can do something about them: start to dismantle those fears by acting differently. Or we can decide we aren’t ready to yet: that the fear is still too strong and its consequences not yet (or, in half-recovery, no longer) ruinous enough for us to change. If this is still true now, at least asking the question may have got us a bit closer to saying yes to it later.
And once we do start to change, for example by starting to do something about the fear of liking eating too much (not least by doing more eating), then probably quite rapidly (after an initial dip where everything is temporarily harder) we’ll become healthier and happier. We’ll understand that life is far too brief to be waiting for anyone to grant us the right to health or happiness—least of all ourselves. And our beginning to get healthier and happier makes those who care about us happier—and maybe healthier too, depending on how much our suffering was causing them to suffer.
For that, of course, is the gaping irony in all the moralizing: that by believing ourselves unworthy of food (or pretending to), we make those who care about us miserable, and thus practice the greatest selfishness of them all: causing other creatures suffering. There's nothing inherently wrong with selfishness either—as I explore in this post, it's the inevitable bedrock of all we do—but people who worry about deserving tend to worry about selfishness too. And here, worrying about the one neatly entails more of the other.
So with your next slice of cake, don’t stop at not-deserving. You can do better than that.
