Hurt People Hurt People
Last week I wrote a little about diet culture and old social media (magazines) while acknowledging that there are tons of reasons why eating disorders develop and that everyone’s experience is different because we are all fundamentally unique.
I think it’s worth saying this several times.
We are all unique.
And yet so very similar!
When I first went to Thailand in 1990 all the Thai’s I met said, same, same but different by way of explanation for all sorts of things.
What I didn’t explore last week was how diet culture thrived within my family.
This isn’t about pointing the finger, it's to do with how diet culture affected them. Diet culture isn’t new. Nor is our obsession with how we look or perceived notions around beauty and the ideal body shape. During the Renaissance the desired shape for women was curvy and more rounded because this denoted fertility. The “thin ideal” didn’t really get going within Western culture until the 20th century particularly the 1920’s.
My Dad was born in 1927 and was obsessed with body weight, particularly his own. I remember him always being on a diet, and trying not to drink/eat too much. Whenever we used to visit (my parents divorced when I was 6) there would be the statutory bottle of PLJ (lemon juice) in the fridge which he drank to curb his appetite.
Dad would often comment on my weight and height. And anyone else’s for that matter, but particularly women. He would laugh but it never felt funny. A classic case of projection; once I was much older I realised he was talking about himself (5ft 9 and rotund until his 80’s)
Later he turned his attention to one of his grandchildren and would comment loudly about her shape and size. Thankfully she never heard him. I told him off at her sister’s wedding his comments masked by cognitive impairment, but he knew exactly what he was saying. I told him to keep quiet.
When he died I read some letters written by his aunt when she was a teenager. He’d kept them all that time. Turns out my Dad had the kind of parenting that stifles empathy and compassion. I knew his mother had been very critical and judgemental. But she hadn’t always been that way.
Her much loved first son died when he was only nine and her heart broke. My Dad’s parents never recovered, from what I can gather anecdotally, by the time he came along there was no love left.
I don't know much about his Dad, my Grandad, I never met either of my paternal grandparents, and he never mentioned them, but I do know my Grandad was a gentle and quiet man who used to escape to his garden shed to smoke his pipe.
My Dad absorbed his critical mothering she showed up in his relationship with food and his body and then he passed it onto us. He must have been such a lonely and confused boy.
As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.
Unless you are able to intervene on your own behalf the cycles and patterns continue.
I’m very fortunate to have had the kind of support and awakening that means learnt behaviours and ancestral trauma stops with me.
Check our Inherited Trauma Release Therapy podcast with the brilliant Jonathan Meenagh here.
Having said that I do the work and will continue to do so until I pop off this mortal coil and if I can heal my ancient past so it no longer resonates within me then my family can only benefit.
This is how it works.
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