Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
Speaker 1: I returned to Boulder, my body was different. A summer
Speaker 1: metamorphosis was a familiar plot line in the y A
Speaker 1: novels I had once read. Often the teenage girl character
Speaker 1: transformed by growing breasts or by getting her period, something
Speaker 1: that advanced her maturity. I felt I'd been forward to
Speaker 1: even though I turned back the clock, I was no
Speaker 1: longer menstruating. But if you had glimpsed me on the street,
Speaker 1: then you would not have been startled or necessarily thought
Speaker 1: that girl needs to eat. You might have thought, as
Speaker 1: I did, then, that girl looks pretty. In my bathroom,
Speaker 1: I took off my pajamas and wrapped myself in the towel.
Speaker 1: Through my mother's bedroom door, I heard the fuzz of
Speaker 1: the shower. I waited a few minutes for her to
Speaker 1: be done. When I went into the master sweet she
Speaker 1: was in her closet choosing clothes. Morning Edition was playing
Speaker 1: through a clock radio. I entered her bathroom, hung my
Speaker 1: towel on the bar across the shower door, and stood
Speaker 1: naked on the scale. This was the white scale from Target.
Speaker 1: I could go through all the scales we'd ever had.
Speaker 1: The one with the big round dial that my grandparents
Speaker 1: had sent the first digital scale we owned, where the
Speaker 1: led readout was raised on a stick. Now Here I
Speaker 1: was on a pebbly white surface at the beginning of
Speaker 1: a new year, lighter than I'd ever been. Lighter. Everything
Speaker 1: in that word air and joy and wonder. That's Susan Burton,
Speaker 1: reading from her recent memoir Empty. Susan's is the story
Speaker 1: of an addiction invisible on the surface to a substance
Speaker 1: that can't be quit. Food. We just can't quit food.
Speaker 1: But what happened when eating becomes so disordered that everything
Speaker 1: about it consuming? Purging, starving withholding binging is a dangerous
Speaker 1: and consuming obsession that takes over a life. This is
Speaker 1: a story of hidden shame, distorted body image, perfectionism gone haywire,
Speaker 1: and ultimately what it takes to heal. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. So described for me the
Speaker 1: landscape of your childhood. I was from two places, and
Speaker 1: that feeling of being from two places really defined my childhood.
Speaker 1: I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up
Speaker 1: in a suburb of that city called Aida. It was
Speaker 1: a landscape of kind of roller coaster hills and farmland
Speaker 1: that was now suburbia. I grew up in a you know,
Speaker 1: gray house with black shutters, kind of picture perfect. My
Speaker 1: mother decorated it with Laura Ashley, so there were you know,
Speaker 1: Laura Ashley floral pleated lamp shades and balloon blinds. And
Speaker 1: I moved when I was thirteen to Boulder, Colorado. My
Speaker 1: parents got divorced, and my mother and sister and I
Speaker 1: went west. My mother had romantic notions about the frontier,
Speaker 1: and I sort of internalized that I didn't have any
Speaker 1: real understanding of the history of the American West. But
Speaker 1: I had my own amantic notions about the frontier too,
Speaker 1: because I wanted to reinvent myself in this new place.
Speaker 1: I've been sort of a nerdy middle schooler, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to be um a popular girl in this place
Speaker 1: where nobody knew me. So Boulder, you know, it was
Speaker 1: a very different landscape than West Michigan. Boulder is where
Speaker 1: the Great Plains explode into the rocky mountains. Essential skyline
Speaker 1: of the city is a dramatic rock backdrop called the
Speaker 1: flat Irons, and the white peaks of the Rockies are behind.
Speaker 1: And it took a while for that landscape to feel
Speaker 1: like home for years. Not for years, but maybe for
Speaker 1: the first year it felt to me sort of like
Speaker 1: a Hollywood backdrop. But I don't live in the West anymore,
Speaker 1: and it's now a landscape that I longed for, the
Speaker 1: feeling of being in that dry air under you know,
Speaker 1: those enormous skies and that hot sun and you know
Speaker 1: sort of the daily thunderstorms in the sun er. There's
Speaker 1: a lot about the openness of the West that I
Speaker 1: miss in both landscape and spirit. It's interesting that you
Speaker 1: use the phrase like a Hollywood backdrop, because then this
Speaker 1: sense of reinvention, for you know, self invention at the
Speaker 1: age of thirteen, starts to take root when you're a
Speaker 1: new kid in a new school, um starting a new chapter.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely yeah. I'd been a very kind of studious
Speaker 1: middle schooler, and once I knew that I was going
Speaker 1: to be in a new place where nobody knew my history,
Speaker 1: I had this fantasy that I could be a girl
Speaker 1: like the one in the pages of seventeen Maxine, which
Speaker 1: I loved. But when I say I wanted to be
Speaker 1: like a girl in seventeen, I wasn't really thinking about body.
Speaker 1: It was more a question of personality for me. I
Speaker 1: wanted to be like a bubbly girl with like a
Speaker 1: side pony hail and a boyfriend, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: wear leg warmers and tam PACs like I It was.
Speaker 1: It was more of kind of a vibe I was after.
Speaker 1: But I think what's important is that I wasn't okay
Speaker 1: with who I was. I wasn't okay with showing my
Speaker 1: real self and that there's something I have to hide,
Speaker 1: and that I need to pretend to be somebody else
Speaker 1: in order to have friends in order to connect, in
Speaker 1: order to be okay. Could you describe both of your
Speaker 1: parents for me. Yeah. We lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
Speaker 1: because my father was the news director of a local
Speaker 1: radio station called Wood and some my earliest memories are
Speaker 1: of sitting at the kitchen table eating an English muffin
Speaker 1: very early in the morning and hearing my father's voice
Speaker 1: come out of the radio behind me. He quit that
Speaker 1: job when I was six years old to write a
Speaker 1: novel and then did sort of various I guess now
Speaker 1: we would call them passion projects at home in the study.
Speaker 1: For most of my childhood, my father was a very
Speaker 1: handsome and charismatic figure. He'd gone to and Over and Yale,
Speaker 1: both my parents had grown up in the Northeast, and
Speaker 1: he was very funny. But he had a temper, he
Speaker 1: had a darker side, and he had a tendency to isolate.
Speaker 1: You know. I think I bring up those passion projects
Speaker 1: in the study because my memories of my father are
Speaker 1: very tied to him sort of retreating, retreating into the study.
Speaker 1: In the basement, he had a dark room where he
Speaker 1: developed photographs, and he had a room he called his
Speaker 1: ham shack where he kept his ham radio equipment, and
Speaker 1: he would go down to those spaces. There was a
Speaker 1: real need to be alone, you know. He was somebody
Speaker 1: I wanted to do well for, I wanted to please.
Speaker 1: I feel very connected him. We share the same middle name,
Speaker 1: and we share similar looks. My mother and my sister
Speaker 1: are both dark haired and dark eyed, and my father
Speaker 1: and I are both fair and blue eyed. And it
Speaker 1: was just, you know, one one way that I always
Speaker 1: felt very connected to him as a kid. I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about your mother too, and not looking like
Speaker 1: your mother. It's funny, you know when I say it,
Speaker 1: it sounds slight, but it's It was the kind of
Speaker 1: thing like I remember being a kid and being in
Speaker 1: the checkout line at the grocery store with my mother
Speaker 1: and you know, and a grocery store cashier saying, she
Speaker 1: doesn't look like your daughter, which is so strange to me. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were to see my like if my mother
Speaker 1: and I were walking down the sidewalk, it would be
Speaker 1: so clear we were mother and daughter. We have very
Speaker 1: similar features, but I think the dark hair and kind
Speaker 1: of the you know, white blonde hair of of a
Speaker 1: young child maybe was so striking. So where my father
Speaker 1: was sort of charismatic and could command a room, it
Speaker 1: was literally a broadcaster, you know, holding a mic and
Speaker 1: asking questions. My mother was shyre. She always had lots
Speaker 1: of friends, but wasn't you know, it wasn't like she
Speaker 1: was like throwing dinner party. She had close friends. Both
Speaker 1: my parents were readers. My mother, more than anyone else
Speaker 1: in my life, is the person who made me a
Speaker 1: reader and a writer. I wouldn't say she was the
Speaker 1: She wasn't the kind of mother who would for example,
Speaker 1: sit down on the floor with me and play with
Speaker 1: my dollhouse. Which she was a mother who understood how
Speaker 1: potent and how wonderful it was to be a little
Speaker 1: girl playing with the dollhouse. So she she granted me
Speaker 1: a lot of like imaginative freedom and space. But they had,
Speaker 1: you know, they had a troubled marriage, and my mother's
Speaker 1: sort of acquiescence and passivity in their marriage, she sort
Speaker 1: of exploded that hall. She ended up leaving my father
Speaker 1: um when I was thirteen, and that's when we went
Speaker 1: to Boulder. So many stories of family secrets originate in shame.
Speaker 1: It is so often a shame that causes the islands
Speaker 1: in which secrets fester and grow, making it impossible or
Speaker 1: at least terrifying, to speak the truth of our inner lives.
Speaker 1: One particular evening, when Susan is thirteen, she hears her
Speaker 1: parents fighting, and she hears her father say something truly
Speaker 1: horrible to her mother. He calls her disgusting. Susan internalizes
Speaker 1: this word. In time, it becomes a weapon she turns
Speaker 1: on herself. I was thirteen, I was in eighth grade.
Speaker 1: I had a friend sleeping over and I remember waking
Speaker 1: early in the morning and I heard my parents. You know,
Speaker 1: people talk about their parents fighting. I sort of don't
Speaker 1: think of my parents as fighting, and this sounds cruel,
Speaker 1: but but I think of my father be rating my mother.
Speaker 1: And that was essentially what was happening in their room
Speaker 1: across the landing. And at one point I heard my
Speaker 1: father say, you disgusted me, You're disgusting, And then I
Speaker 1: heard him leave the room and walked down the stairs,
Speaker 1: opened the door and closed the door and go running.
Speaker 1: It was a frightening moment. I was thirteen years old.
Speaker 1: Part of me was wondering about my friend. Was she asleep,
Speaker 1: had she heard? But I really wondered what my father
Speaker 1: found disgusting about my mother. And the answer that seemed
Speaker 1: the realist to me in that moment. The answer my
Speaker 1: you know, my head sort of offered up was that
Speaker 1: he was disgusted by her body, and not just her
Speaker 1: body in general, but in my mind, it was a
Speaker 1: specific part of her body. He was disgusted by her stomach.
Speaker 1: She was often talking about how she had a little
Speaker 1: pot belly. There was a lot of focus among the
Speaker 1: women in my family on stomachs, and reflecting on that,
Speaker 1: now you know the specificity of that with which that
Speaker 1: rose up for me at thirteen. I mean, my god,
Speaker 1: was I not going to, you know, spend decades having
Speaker 1: a seating disorder where I was focused on my stomach
Speaker 1: like it was just it was all, it was all
Speaker 1: right there for me already I assumed that was the
Speaker 1: site of his disgust. Yeah, that's that's so interesting because
Speaker 1: throughout your book you write about hip bones and the
Speaker 1: different variations of emptiness and fullness, and the ideal in
Speaker 1: the midst of your eating disorders being that when you're
Speaker 1: not just lying down but actually standing up, your hip
Speaker 1: bones like a ruler could be put across them, that
Speaker 1: there would be no stomach, you know, kind of in
Speaker 1: the way, which is actually something that I feel so
Speaker 1: many young women contend with in varying degrees. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think of eating disorders as like sort of being
Speaker 1: on a slide rule in some way, or there's problematic
Speaker 1: eating or not eating, and then there's a place where
Speaker 1: a switch gets flipped and it becomes dangerous and pernicious.
Speaker 1: I mean, can you talk about the first time that
Speaker 1: that switch that flipped for you? Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: think that you're, uh, the analogy of a slide rule
Speaker 1: I think is really smart because um so, I'll mention
Speaker 1: a couple like markers on the slide rule before I
Speaker 1: get to the switch flip. But I mean, I think
Speaker 1: one thing that's important to know is that I was
Speaker 1: always a really kind of restricted eater as a kid,
Speaker 1: and not in a way of limiting calories, although that
Speaker 1: was there too. I went on my first diet when
Speaker 1: I was nine, but I was scared of a lot
Speaker 1: of food. I was the kid who at the birthday
Speaker 1: party wouldn't eat pizza. Um. I didn't like soda. I
Speaker 1: didn't like potato chips. I had a lot of fears
Speaker 1: about tastes. I had a lot of fears that food
Speaker 1: would make me sick. So there was something kind of
Speaker 1: fraud for me with food early on. Another import and
Speaker 1: thing that happened is that I got my period when
Speaker 1: I was ten. Um So, this is in n and
Speaker 1: not a lot of other girls had their periods at ten.
Speaker 1: And not only did I have my period, but I had,
Speaker 1: you know, everything that went along with it. I had
Speaker 1: hips and breasts and waste. And I was profoundly destabilized
Speaker 1: by this. I didn't feel at home in this new body.
Speaker 1: I wanted my old body. And that feeling of wanting
Speaker 1: my old body wasn't something I did something about right away,
Speaker 1: but it was something that kind of haunted me throughout
Speaker 1: my early adolescence. So when I was a sophomore in
Speaker 1: high school, I was fifteen, I got a stomach bug
Speaker 1: over Christmas break and I lost a couple of pounds,
Speaker 1: And at Christmas dinner, I mentioned it to everyone at
Speaker 1: the table. That was the kind of thing women in
Speaker 1: my family mentioned to each other, you know, I lost
Speaker 1: a couple of pounds, and my aunt said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just waterway, You'll mean it back, but um, I didn't.
Speaker 1: And I found that I liked the feeling of being
Speaker 1: just a little bit lighter. There was something about it
Speaker 1: that felt like an unburdening. I liked the feeling of
Speaker 1: my pants having a little more you know, air inside them,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. I liked the feeling of emptiness,
Speaker 1: and I saw it more of that feeling that I craved.
Speaker 1: And several months later I'd lost my period. I was intorexic,
Speaker 1: and really quickly after that, the anorexia shifted into binge eating,
Speaker 1: which is a really typical trajectory. Though I didn't know
Speaker 1: this at the time, So that switch flipping happens for me,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of fifteen going on sixteen, at the
Speaker 1: very beginning of my junior year of high school. You know,
Speaker 1: at one point you describe a paper that you read
Speaker 1: in article in Psychological bulletin, and it describes binge eating
Speaker 1: as a short term escape from an adversive awareness of self.
Speaker 1: And that was like such a powerful phrase for me.
Speaker 1: I think it could actually describe any number of addictions
Speaker 1: at their root with well short term escape. First of all,
Speaker 1: it's always a short term escape, you know, it's never
Speaker 1: a long term escape um from an adversive awareness of self.
Speaker 1: And you know what you've been describing with that sense
Speaker 1: of the pot bellies of the women in your family
Speaker 1: and the way that women would talk about their bodies
Speaker 1: and your own sense of yourself getting your period at
Speaker 1: the age of ten, is that adversive sense of self
Speaker 1: that just I think like lights up all the switchboards mentally, psychologically, emotionally,
Speaker 1: for you know, I need to turn this down and
Speaker 1: find a way to not feel this or hear this noise.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. Yeah, I'm so glad that that line, that
Speaker 1: that sentence spoke to you because it's still to me
Speaker 1: is among the best descriptions of what it is to binge,
Speaker 1: and to some degree with anorexia too, although the quality
Speaker 1: of not eating for me is slightly different than the
Speaker 1: quality of eating too much. But I mean, the thing
Speaker 1: with a binge is that as long as I was eating,
Speaker 1: as long as my hand was on my way to
Speaker 1: my mouth, as long as I was chewing something, I
Speaker 1: didn't have to think about anything. There was only this.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to think about any loss or pain
Speaker 1: or longing. And even when it was over and there
Speaker 1: was kind of a wave of self loathing that still
Speaker 1: prevented me from thinking about anything else other than my
Speaker 1: own disappointment in myself and the first of awareness that
Speaker 1: I was trying to escape. Sure was certainly some of
Speaker 1: it was about body, but but so much of it
Speaker 1: was just about feelings of isolation or inadequacy or flawed
Speaker 1: parts of myself that I didn't want to face, lack
Speaker 1: of connection. A lot of this for me was happening
Speaker 1: in high school and college, so you know, somebody hadn't
Speaker 1: invited me to the party, or I wanted to be
Speaker 1: close to someone who didn't want to be close to me,
Speaker 1: or deeper things I didn't want to face, like my
Speaker 1: parents divorce, things that were hard to look at about
Speaker 1: my father. And then there's also your mother's drinking, which
Speaker 1: runs throughout your teenage years, and then certainly your college
Speaker 1: years becomes more serious as as you're starting to become
Speaker 1: a late teen right mm hmmm. Susan's mom hides her
Speaker 1: drinking and in a way become is a model of
Speaker 1: how to have and maintain a hidden life. Susan's binge
Speaker 1: eating is also very possible for her to maintain in
Speaker 1: secret at this point. After all, she excels academically and
Speaker 1: is admitted to Yale, but her binge eating takes on
Speaker 1: a whole new level of intensity once she's away from
Speaker 1: home and on her own for the first time. It
Speaker 1: was so upsetting to me because I thought that being
Speaker 1: out of my mother's house, being out of that kitchen
Speaker 1: would fix it. That it was so you know, it
Speaker 1: was just it was just habit, it was just setting,
Speaker 1: it was just environment. And getting to Yale and finding
Speaker 1: out very quickly that it wasn't was just devastating. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would wake up in the morning, I would get
Speaker 1: dressed in one of the you know, three elastic waist
Speaker 1: skirts I had that that fit I would put on
Speaker 1: my broken stocks because that was one thing that happened
Speaker 1: in those years was I felt again that I could
Speaker 1: not be myself and I felt I could not be
Speaker 1: kind of a slender perfectionist I had once been because
Speaker 1: I was no longer that girl, and I sort of
Speaker 1: developed this new persona to accommodate my body. I embraced
Speaker 1: being from Boulder. I smoked a lot of pot, which
Speaker 1: I hated. I was. I'm one of the people. Uh
Speaker 1: pot doesn't relax me, it just makes me paranoid. But
Speaker 1: I was so you know, disconnected from who I was
Speaker 1: in my own desires that I did it anyway because
Speaker 1: I felt it matched the person I needed to be anyway.
Speaker 1: So so I would, you know, get up, put in
Speaker 1: my elastic waistkirt, my birkenstocks, go to the dining hall
Speaker 1: resolving to you know, eat granola and soy milk. You
Speaker 1: actually develop an alter ego, right, I mean she has
Speaker 1: a name. Yes, Kasha Susan's alter ego's name is Kasha.
Speaker 1: Susan is small, almost elphin, elegant, delicate. She's intense electric
Speaker 1: as Kasha She wears birken stocks and a knee length skirt,
Speaker 1: and she walks around campus dreamily, spooning ice cream into
Speaker 1: her mouth. She is rubic and dazed, dreamy, an earth
Speaker 1: mama who doesn't care about her size, doesn't even think
Speaker 1: about it. So there's again this kind of attempt to
Speaker 1: put on an identity, to create an identity. And you
Speaker 1: actually you right at one point that Kasha could carry
Speaker 1: the weight like you. Susan couldn't carry the weight, but
Speaker 1: Kasha could, right, And you know, I wish, I wish
Speaker 1: i'd know that Susan could carry the weight, and that
Speaker 1: Susan needed to carry the weight. But I was hiding,
Speaker 1: you know, I was hiding who I was, and I
Speaker 1: was hiding the binging. And it was hard to hide
Speaker 1: the midging. I mean, anybody who's been in a college
Speaker 1: dorm situation, the feeling of never having a space to
Speaker 1: myself was so strong in those early days. UM I
Speaker 1: would kind of make my rounds of different food shops
Speaker 1: on campus, and I would almost inevitably wind up on
Speaker 1: the top floor of the stacks in the library with
Speaker 1: kind of whatever. The tail end of the binge was
Speaker 1: usually like a scone in a brown paper bag, and
Speaker 1: then I would sit up at this little steady carol
Speaker 1: beside this little arched window, and I would write. Writing
Speaker 1: for me was a purgative act, kind of this ritual
Speaker 1: purification that almost inevitably followed a binge. And I would
Speaker 1: sit up there and I would read the two eating
Speaker 1: disorder memoirs um that were in the library's collection. Then
Speaker 1: it was, And there are many more eating disorder memoirs now,
Speaker 1: but there were fewer than the librarhead too, and I
Speaker 1: read them over and over again. I felt so isolated
Speaker 1: and so alone, and I found real solace in these
Speaker 1: other women's stories. You also described trying to research eating
Speaker 1: disorders at a certain point in the library and the
Speaker 1: books being constantly checked out. Yeah. I knew I couldn't
Speaker 1: be the only one going through this, but it was
Speaker 1: impossible for me to imagine telling someone, Although that's not
Speaker 1: entirely true. As much as I fantasized about quitting, about
Speaker 1: not binging anymore, I fantasized about telling UM. So I
Speaker 1: was committed to secrecy, but I simultaneously wanted to tell
Speaker 1: so badly. But I only wanted to tell once I
Speaker 1: was over it. I had a very concrete fantasy actually
Speaker 1: about what that would look like. Freshman year of college.
Speaker 1: I would sit in my dorm room and my little
Speaker 1: Macintosh um and I would write letters to best friend
Speaker 1: cheva Um. But the letters were set in the future.
Speaker 1: The letters were written from the me six months Hence,
Speaker 1: I would be in Boulder for the summer and I
Speaker 1: would write to my friend from this future me that
Speaker 1: you know, I'd started attending this eating disorders group, and
Speaker 1: then I would sort of lay out my story, lay
Speaker 1: out what was going on for me. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to tell because and eating disorder, like any addiction, it
Speaker 1: leads to erratic behavior. It leads to guardedness, it leads
Speaker 1: to hiding, that leads to deception, to you know, not
Speaker 1: not telling the whole story. But I also desperately wanted
Speaker 1: to be known and understood and close to people. But
Speaker 1: it was it was too impossible to imagine telling until
Speaker 1: I was over it. And then once I was over it,
Speaker 1: the urge to tell went dormant for a long time.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick a cure for a
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor. There is such tension in Susan's
Speaker 1: story between longing to be seen and known, but feeling
Speaker 1: completely unable to share her deepest and most shameful secret.
Speaker 1: We can't be known if we don't allow ourselves to
Speaker 1: be open and vulnerable, but our secrets shut us down.
Speaker 1: Susan has a very close friend in high school, Julie,
Speaker 1: who she comes close to telling the truth, but she
Speaker 1: stops herself. The two women lose touch for twenty years,
Speaker 1: and then Susan sees Julie again at a reunion. She's
Speaker 1: now thirty seven years old. Susan thinks of finally telling
Speaker 1: Julie what she had been going through beginning in high school.
Speaker 1: After all, now Susan has a loving family and a
Speaker 1: thriving career, and all this happened so long ago, but
Speaker 1: she's still in shame's guip. That was when I had
Speaker 1: already started work on the book that became empty, on
Speaker 1: the book that tells the story of these eating disorders.
Speaker 1: But it was a very different book. It was meant
Speaker 1: to be a book that intertwined a cultural history of
Speaker 1: the teenage girl with the story of my own adolescence,
Speaker 1: and at that point I had already written a draft
Speaker 1: of it, and a lot of what had wound up
Speaker 1: on the page was about binging, was about my eating disorders.
Speaker 1: But I was too scared at that point to admit
Speaker 1: that that was the book I wanted to write. So
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to be able to sit across from jewels,
Speaker 1: you know, with a glass of wine at a table
Speaker 1: at our high school reunion and say any of this.
Speaker 1: And I also wasn't ready to admit to myself that
Speaker 1: this was kind of the story that I needed to
Speaker 1: tell more than any other story. When did you have
Speaker 1: the language for what you were going through? There's anorexia,
Speaker 1: there's bulimia, which involves purging. At one point, you describe
Speaker 1: something that I actually hadn't really considered before, which is
Speaker 1: that excessive exercise, which is something that you engaged in,
Speaker 1: is also a form of purging, the different kind of
Speaker 1: purging than making oneself throw up. You know. It strikes
Speaker 1: me and correct me if I'm wrong about this, But
Speaker 1: it seems like there are places, almost like a Van diagram,
Speaker 1: where eating disorders kind of meat and share certain characteristics
Speaker 1: or become more subtle gradations as opposed to something being
Speaker 1: you know, just clearly like in the d S M
Speaker 1: four this is the diagnosis. It's a good question I mean,
Speaker 1: growing up in the eighties inorexia and bulimia were the ones.
Speaker 1: There were after school specials in first person essays about
Speaker 1: those are the ones. I knew. Binge eating disorder. Yes,
Speaker 1: it had a name. The researchers and psychologists were writing
Speaker 1: about it in academic journals in the early nineties when
Speaker 1: I was searching for information, But I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever would have said I have binge eating disorder. I
Speaker 1: knew the word binge because that was part of bolimia,
Speaker 1: but I wouldn't have been able to say what I had.
Speaker 1: I think I would have described it as it's bolimia,
Speaker 1: but I don't throw up is probably the language I
Speaker 1: would have used. I don't remember the first time I
Speaker 1: saw the term binge eating disorder, but it was very
Speaker 1: clear to me, you know, that that had absolutely described
Speaker 1: my experience. My solution eventually to the binging was to
Speaker 1: quit food, is how I put it in my head.
Speaker 1: That was the way that I addressed it in my
Speaker 1: early twenties, and I became pretty severely interorexic. And once
Speaker 1: I got through that and started menstruating again, and you know,
Speaker 1: went on to have healthy pregnancys and physically healthy adulthood.
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have identified myself as anorexic.
Speaker 1: It took me a really long time to get to therapy.
Speaker 1: When I started therapy, I was forty five. I'm forty
Speaker 1: six now. So I started therapy, you know, a little
Speaker 1: over a year and a half ago, and it took
Speaker 1: me a couple of months to look at my diagnosis code.
Speaker 1: I just didn't want to know what it was. And
Speaker 1: when I did, I saw it was anorexia. And my
Speaker 1: first thought was, she doesn't understand. I had this impulse.
Speaker 1: I wanted to take off all my clothes. I wanted
Speaker 1: to show her like, I'm look at my body, I'm
Speaker 1: not anorexic, which I now understand is first of all,
Speaker 1: a part of the illness is not believing that you're
Speaker 1: thin enough, that you're not intorexic enough. But also, you know,
Speaker 1: even though I was underweight, I didn't look like the
Speaker 1: emaciated kind of feeding to skeletal figure that one often
Speaker 1: imagines when anorexia is a cooked anorexia is the diagnosis
Speaker 1: is no longer tied to, you know, loss of a
Speaker 1: certain percentage of body weight or cessation of the menstrual period. Um,
Speaker 1: it's no longer as tied to size as it was
Speaker 1: and instead describes like a more restrictive style of eating anyway.
Speaker 1: So it's so it took me a long time to
Speaker 1: embrace embrace the language. You can't quit food, and you
Speaker 1: have to learn to make your peace with it, and
Speaker 1: not only to make your piece with it, but hopefully
Speaker 1: to find joy in it and delight in it and
Speaker 1: nourishment and to learn to savor it. And I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm finally at that place. I mean, for so long,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to not be preoccupied by food or
Speaker 1: distracted by food. Um, And now I finally moved to
Speaker 1: the point where I want to love food. I you know,
Speaker 1: I want to take pleasure and food as much attention
Speaker 1: as there was in my family to you know, pot
Speaker 1: bellies and the size of bodies. There was also a
Speaker 1: ton of pleasure and meaning and food. My grandmother, the matriarch,
Speaker 1: she was, she owned the first Queens and Art ever
Speaker 1: made and had been subscribing to Gourmet since the second issue.
Speaker 1: And she was just, you know, a fantastic cook. And
Speaker 1: you know, I grew up with a mother who made
Speaker 1: baked bread, so there was always a lot of beauty
Speaker 1: and terror in food. And I feel like I'm at
Speaker 1: the point in my recovery where I'm moving towards the
Speaker 1: beauty part, which is a relief. Were you ever fearful
Speaker 1: for your physical safety, for your well being? Were you
Speaker 1: afraid ever that you were going to die? There was
Speaker 1: a moment where one evening my freshman year of college,
Speaker 1: I was up in the stacks and my regular study Carol,
Speaker 1: And usually after a binge, my heart raced, but this
Speaker 1: as a strange feeling where my heart felt like it
Speaker 1: was slow. It felt like something was retarding it, like
Speaker 1: something was in the way, preventing it from from beating
Speaker 1: at its regular speed. Um, I'd eaten a lot. My
Speaker 1: abdomen was extremely distended. I became scared that my stomach
Speaker 1: was going to explode. And at the same time I
Speaker 1: was having this thought, you know, I was telling myself
Speaker 1: that's not something that human body could do. You would
Speaker 1: throw up first. It's going to be okay, It's going
Speaker 1: to be okay. But it's very frightened. And when I
Speaker 1: went back to my room that night, and you know,
Speaker 1: climbed into my top bunk in my dorm room, I
Speaker 1: just prayed that in the morning I would wake still whole.
Speaker 1: It is true that somebody can eat so much. I
Speaker 1: don't think stomach explode is probably the exact thing that
Speaker 1: can happen. I'm not, yeah, I'm not. I'm not a doctor,
Speaker 1: but you know, it could compress, it could compress something,
Speaker 1: or cut up circulation to your intestines. But that was
Speaker 1: a singular incident. For me. I did often fear that
Speaker 1: I was messing with my health. It's not good for
Speaker 1: anybody to eat thousands of calories at once. My thousands
Speaker 1: of calories. You know, people binge on different things, but
Speaker 1: for me, it was sugar. It often felt like the
Speaker 1: injection of a drug that the body isn't designed to process.
Speaker 1: Like it like it. It felt bad. But but I
Speaker 1: don't think I ever thought that I was going to die. Um,
Speaker 1: except for that that one moment where I was scared.
Speaker 1: I did think that I was, you know, driving my
Speaker 1: life into the ground, and that I was not doing
Speaker 1: good work or being a good person, or a good
Speaker 1: friend or a good daughter, or you know, taking advantage
Speaker 1: of the enormous privilege of Yale education. But that night
Speaker 1: was the only night I ever really felt like I
Speaker 1: might tip over into like real, real peril. I mean, anorexia,
Speaker 1: you know is the far more perilous illness, and you
Speaker 1: know has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder.
Speaker 1: And I feel very lucky that I climbed out of
Speaker 1: it before things got really bad. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I keep thinking about the description of addiction from the
Speaker 1: Psychological Bulletin. The language seems so apt, a short term
Speaker 1: escape from an adversive awareness of self. But sometimes the
Speaker 1: short term escape doesn't work, and when that happens, a
Speaker 1: deep and terrible anxiety sets in in the form of
Speaker 1: panic attacks. This happens to Susan halfway through her sophomore
Speaker 1: year at Yale. A hallmark of panic attacks is that
Speaker 1: the person suffering from them doesn't know what they are,
Speaker 1: has no language for what's happening. Panic feels like a
Speaker 1: bottomless chasm. It feels unsurvivable. One evening, when she's home,
Speaker 1: it's so bad that Susan, at the age of nineteen,
Speaker 1: crawls into bed with her mother. I've been experiencing panic attacks.
Speaker 1: It was my sophomore year of college. I didn't know
Speaker 1: what they were until I described them to a psychiatrist.
Speaker 1: I've been I've been seeing on and off at the
Speaker 1: Yale Child Study Center, and I felt so disconnected. I
Speaker 1: mean as one does in a panic attack. I felt
Speaker 1: so disconnected from my surroundings. I felt disconnected from my
Speaker 1: own body. And you know, I think something that is
Speaker 1: common among people who struggle with eating disorders or other
Speaker 1: kinds of addictions is that one thing that is scary
Speaker 1: about uncomfortable feelings, are uncomfortable emotions, is that you think
Speaker 1: they're going to last forever. And that's one thing that
Speaker 1: the substance does. It takes away that uncomfortable feeling that
Speaker 1: you think is going to last forever. So panic attacks
Speaker 1: were especially terrifying for me because I felt like this
Speaker 1: was going to last forever. I was going to feel
Speaker 1: disconnected from my surroundings forever. I was going to feel
Speaker 1: like I was, you know, to use the phrase I
Speaker 1: would have used then, going crazy forever. And one night,
Speaker 1: lying in my bed, I just felt so lost and
Speaker 1: so scared that, you know, I went down the hallway
Speaker 1: to my mother's room. I was nineteen. I knocked on
Speaker 1: her door. Um, I hadn't gone into a room for years.
Speaker 1: She was drinking heavily in those years, and it was
Speaker 1: something I didn't want to see, but I needed her
Speaker 1: so badly that night, and I climbed into bed beside her,
Speaker 1: and you know, there was something so comforting about being
Speaker 1: beside my mother um in that moment, she was the
Speaker 1: one who knew me first and best. And then the
Speaker 1: next day she did something that I really appreciated at
Speaker 1: the time. She gave me a book of essays by
Speaker 1: Oliver Sacks. And you know, those essays were about people,
Speaker 1: most of whom had some neurological injury, but who saw
Speaker 1: the world in ways that were not typical. And I
Speaker 1: just loved that she hadn't tried to say, oh, nothing's
Speaker 1: wrong with you. By giving me this book of essays,
Speaker 1: she had acknowledged that something might really be wrong, and
Speaker 1: and also showed me that there could be beauty and
Speaker 1: meaning in that and that that was a moment of
Speaker 1: real reunion with my mother, with whom I had had
Speaker 1: a contentious relationship with for the several years prior. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you told that story. I think books
Speaker 1: are also where we can so often find ourselves, especially
Speaker 1: those of us who are grappling with secrets, because it's
Speaker 1: impossible to share the secret but in a way it's
Speaker 1: like you're sharing the secret with the book. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: the same way as you were doing your freshman year
Speaker 1: when you were reading the couple of eating disorder memoirs
Speaker 1: that were in the you know, the Yale library right right.
Speaker 1: I would wager that books saved Susan as much as
Speaker 1: anything else, from the memoirs she read in the stacks
Speaker 1: of the library to the copy of Oliver Sacks, to
Speaker 1: her own book, the one she wrote in a blaze
Speaker 1: of truth telling, the kind that takes no prisoners, least
Speaker 1: of all oneself, the kind that sets us free. So often,
Speaker 1: I think, possibly even especially with addiction memoirs as a genre,
Speaker 1: there's a sense of having reached the you know, the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of the mountain on the other side of recovery
Speaker 1: and telling a story from there, and that always really
Speaker 1: drives me crazy and also feels like hubris. There's a
Speaker 1: moment near the end where you write, by writing this book,
Speaker 1: I've moved not from illness to recovery, but from secrecy
Speaker 1: to telling. I am in a liminal stage. This is
Speaker 1: a vulnerable position to write from because I know there's
Speaker 1: a lot I still can't see, and that really struck me, Susan,
Speaker 1: because I feel like that's it's the truth. And in
Speaker 1: a way, I felt like you had in mind the
Speaker 1: person struggling who might pick up empty and see herself.
Speaker 1: When I was struggling and found solace in other people's stories,
Speaker 1: the sections I read and reread were always the parts
Speaker 1: where they were struggling, over the parts where they recovered.
Speaker 1: So these illnesses are so isolating, and I just needed
Speaker 1: to know that, um, that I wasn't alone, and that
Speaker 1: was more important to me in that moment than than
Speaker 1: knowing that somebody had come out of it okay. And
Speaker 1: as far as writing that for myself, I just felt
Speaker 1: like I needed to write this book now, and I
Speaker 1: just wanted to be as plain as possible about my
Speaker 1: position as as a narrator. I keep on thinking about
Speaker 1: shame and the silence that is the legacy of shame.
Speaker 1: You went from being unable to tell even the people
Speaker 1: who asked you direct questions to reaching a point where
Speaker 1: you felt ownership of this experience such that you could
Speaker 1: right this story, tell the story in great detail of
Speaker 1: what it is that you've gone through, and what do
Speaker 1: you think gave you the capacity to do this? At
Speaker 1: this point, I mean, I think a couple of things.
Speaker 1: So first, writing was always the way i'd um tried
Speaker 1: to process this aspect of my experience, this this eating stuff, like,
Speaker 1: writing was always my way of understanding it. So in
Speaker 1: that sense, it was very organic. But as far as
Speaker 1: it being a story that I felt like could be
Speaker 1: a book that could be published, it was really my editor,
Speaker 1: Hillary Redman, who encouraged me to do it. I signed
Speaker 1: this a contract to write this book so long ago
Speaker 1: that I went through three editors, and Hillary was my
Speaker 1: third editor, And when she read the manuscript, which was
Speaker 1: sort of a hybrid of the book I had been
Speaker 1: contracted to write a cultural history of the teenage girl
Speaker 1: and then the stuff about my eating disorders, she was like,
Speaker 1: your this is the story. You need to tell the
Speaker 1: story of your eating disorders. And I I still had
Speaker 1: so much shame that I really needed somebody to give
Speaker 1: me permission to say, I see you, I understand you,
Speaker 1: this is what you need to tell. Do it. And
Speaker 1: I think that until then I had felt I felt
Speaker 1: like I couldn't admit that that was the story I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell that I felt like a story about
Speaker 1: an disorder. Somehow wasn't worthy, or that I needed to
Speaker 1: apologize for wanting to tell it. So that was a
Speaker 1: big step. But then, you know, writing, as you know,
Speaker 1: like writing is a very solitary act, and the most
Speaker 1: important thing that writing did was to get me to
Speaker 1: start talking about it. I didn't start going to therapy
Speaker 1: until I was done with the manuscript. I didn't tell
Speaker 1: my husband, whom I've known since we were seventeen, we've
Speaker 1: been dating since we were we've been together since we
Speaker 1: were twenty. I didn't tell him about the binge eating
Speaker 1: or about kind of the depth of what I struggled
Speaker 1: with m during my adulthood until I was done with
Speaker 1: the manuscript. So the manuscript was kind of the writing
Speaker 1: was my gateway to talking. What has talking I felt
Speaker 1: like because your husband seems and the way that you
Speaker 1: describe him like a very adorn worrying and open and
Speaker 1: wanting to know, really wanting to know you and questioning
Speaker 1: at various points. You know, when you became too sin,
Speaker 1: when you were in aorexic after um, after you stopped
Speaker 1: being cheating, and yet you didn't tell. It's the difference
Speaker 1: between telling, which is this intimacy, and being with oneself
Speaker 1: on the page. What did it feel like when you
Speaker 1: were finally able to do that? I mean, I was
Speaker 1: so scared to tell him because if he had come
Speaker 1: to me and said, you know, after years of knowing you,
Speaker 1: I need to tell you this thing that I've never
Speaker 1: told you before, I mean, I would have a whole
Speaker 1: range of feelings. I might be hurt, I might be scared.
Speaker 1: I hope I would also have compassion and sensitivity. But
Speaker 1: I didn't know how he would react. And I remember
Speaker 1: the night it was um one of my elder son
Speaker 1: was at his first concert. He was at his first
Speaker 1: rock concert, and our younger son was like in the
Speaker 1: bathtub and he had the tub on really loud. So
Speaker 1: I felt like there was privacy in space. And we
Speaker 1: sat down at the table, the dinner table, and I
Speaker 1: told him it wasn't a surprise to him that I
Speaker 1: struggled with. I mean, obviously, like issues around control and
Speaker 1: food and being too thin, like that stuff had totally
Speaker 1: come up during our marriage. But the binging to me
Speaker 1: was this deep secret that revealed, you know, that I
Speaker 1: had so much shame about and that revealed me to be,
Speaker 1: you know, somebody. I didn't want him to see me
Speaker 1: as and and that night when I told him, you know,
Speaker 1: I think initially he was confused. He didn't know what
Speaker 1: binge eating was, and at that point I had very
Speaker 1: little experience talking about it, and I felt sort of
Speaker 1: inept and tripping over my words and speaking in half sentences.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't until he read the manuscript that he understood.
Speaker 1: And I will say, you know, it's going to sound
Speaker 1: like a cliche, but it has been really transformative. Like
Speaker 1: I said, we have known each other for so long,
Speaker 1: but there is just this amazing new vulnerability and a
Speaker 1: desire to tell him more and for him to say
Speaker 1: more to me. I don't recommend keeping a secret from
Speaker 1: your partner for decades, but in its wake, it feels
Speaker 1: like a really special time for us. Now I feel
Speaker 1: really fortunate about that. Family Secrets is an iHeart media production.
Speaker 1: Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Michaluso is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
Speaker 1: thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
Speaker 1: a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
Speaker 1: voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Speaker 1: Our number is one eight secret zero, that's secret and
Speaker 1: then the number zero. You can also find us on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com
Speaker 1: slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pot.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.