It explains something that I've always known in my gut (literally, ha ha), but could never quite translate into 'logical' language that I could articulate out loud: When your parents/family/culture deprive you of what you need most in terms of emotional food, the body tries desperately to compensate. Thus develop these apparently bizarre food-related behaviors that are the symptom of deep emotional needs leaking out sideways. The thing about humans is we will do anything to get our needs met. We're that creative, or as Alice Miller called it, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the 'Gifted' meaning that we are all incredibly creative at getting our needs met, including contorting our emotional/psychic beings into complete knots to try to cope with emotional starvation/deprivation.
Now this is MY recognition, which this author seems to have failed to ever reach*: That when the people who are supposed to perceive and recognize your needs fail to do so, it teaches the growing child something: My needs don't matter. Therefore I don't matter. That's how the growing child brain copes with the absence of that which it needs most: By rationalizing (even though it doesn't sound rational).
We are literally hard-wired to be dependent on our parents; our brains require that we trust them so that we may live long enough to survive and pass on our genetic material. It appears that forming strong, close-knit social groups was a survival trait in our distant past, so nature selected for those of us who bonded most closely with others (limbic brain stuff).
Therefore this emotional bonding is a need at a deep, cellular level: It is not optional. It is as essential as food, air, water. When this need goes unmet, a process is set off inside our bodies where we try to cope by substituting anything that appears to work for what we actually need. (Feel that I'm losing lucidity and coherence here, but will keep going in attempt to continue to untangle this particular psychic knot.)
There's a well-known phenomenon in the shrink world (the name of which I'm currently forgetting) where people attribute what happens to them to their own behavior. It's something to do with locus of control; it's a way to feel like we have some power over what happens to us.
Same is true with kids: We could literally die from having neglectful, inattentive parents; our very body chemistry is wired to react to this as an actual, genuine survival threat on the level of death. No pansy bullshit about 'over-reacting' here: The limbic (connective, bonding) brain genuinely doesn't know the difference, and floods the body with the same fear chemicals that come from being attacked by a charging rhino.
To cope with inattentive parents who don't meet our emotional needs, we cook up some - often subconscious - rationalization/explanation for their behavior: It's our fault, we did it, we're the bad one, we deserve this 'punishment', somehow. Because this explanation allows us to continue to believe that our parents care, that we haven't somehow, in the crap shoot of the genetic lottery, ended up with caregivers who don't really give a shit whether we make it or not. That's just too terrifying a prospect, one that we must dissociate ourselves from at all costs so that we may continue to live.
In the end we deny that we even have needs, because this is easier (less painful?) than the constant awareness of slow starvation by continual emotional deprivation.
And for those who think I'm 'blaming the parents'? Well, yes, I am. As far as I'm concerned, parents who fail to meet the most basic emotional needs of all their children have forfeited the right to be called 'parents'. My definition of 'parent' is somewhat similar to 'gardener': One who takes deep pride in the health of her charges, keeping a careful eye on all of them to make sure they get what they need. Parents who fail to do this do not deserve the title of parent. Call them something else, something like 'owner', if you like (which, to my mind, better represents the typical Western attitude toward children and child-rearing in any case.)
The idea that they 'don't know better' is no excuse. Since when did 'ignorance' become an acceptable defense? It's not defensible in legal terms, nor in most social situations such as a job or other position of responsibility. Why, then, are these people who have the most influence, the most power in the shaping of new human life, let off the hook for this ultimate of responsibilities?
They're let off the hook because that's the way their parents did it. Tradition. Habit. Same as it ever was...
Losing the thread here.
My point is that we need to have someone care about our needs. This is not optional. In fact, without having someone to show us how to care for our needs, we never learn to care for them ourselves. This is how the human brain is wired to learn: By experience. That which we don't experience (in emotional terms), we don't learn. It's like some old saying I vaguely remember about, How can you crave a cookie if you've never seen one?
The idea that 'everything we need comes from inside us' is bullshit.
The best analogy I have for this is again from the garden: Think of a seed. It contains all the genetic information within itself to become - whatever, a tree, a flower, etc. But it does not contain the necessary environmental elements that allow it to grow. All seeds need the proper environmental conditions to grow and bear fruit: The right soil, the right amount of water, the right amount of sun. As the needs of plants vary so that a weed may thrive in barren soil while a delicate perennial perishes without lavish attention, so does the same hold true for humans. If you plant five sunflower seeds and give them the same soil, sunlight and water, yet one appears to be drowning while another appears to be dying of thirst, do you insist on giving them all the same treatment, regardless of the effects on the health of the plant? I sure hope not, else you don't deserve the name 'gardener'. A true gardener pays attention. A true gardener cares about the health of her plants. For a real gardener, a sick plant is a source of great pain, something she wants to tend to, to fix, to repair, to make better.
The problem for humans is that, unlike plants, we can pretend not to need what we actually need. So the equivalent of our leaves turning brown, which is what tells the gardener her plants need water, gets shut off in us because of our limbic brain's need for the relational connection.
(You know how sometimes the answer, the solution, sits there plain as day in your head, crystal clear? And yet you can't seem to find your way through the thicket of social denial, rationalizations, etc. etc. blah blah blah that pollute/permeate your 'thinking' and keep you from seeing how to get there. Something like the Emperor's New Clothes, a kind of group-think, selective social blindness. Weird. May not be able to untangle this one just yet.)
Maybe we're really not any better than lemmings, whose 'survival' wiring went a bit haywire to generate a maladaptive behavior. I mean, if we're all in this destructive behavior cycle together, wouldn't it behoove us to figure it the fuck out? Why can we not see it? It's like a kind of madness, a perversity that prefers the (apparent) safety of the pain it knows to the unknown, which might contain pains yet unimagined (and unimaginable).
Or, heck, it just might contain salvation (and I don't mean that in any kind of religious sense).
Self-awareness: Bullshit self-absorption, or path toward sanity, health and (ooh, let's not get carried away here) maybe even something resembling happiness???
*I draw my conclusion that the author still 'blames' herself for her own deep unmet childhood needs (which she, like most of our culture, has failed yet to recognize) from passages like this one:
The emptiness, for me, comes from inside: It has to do with not knowing what it is I need in order to feel contented or secure, safe in my own skin. If I listen closely, that running commentary in my head asks big, scary questions: Who is this person, making coffee and washing a dish? What gives her pleasure in life, joy and delight? What might turn a frightening, empty stretch of time into a comforting, satisfied stretch of time?I contend that the 'not knowing' comes from having parents who 'didn't know' and thus failed to teach the growing child how to meet her own needs. Children are taught how to meet their own needs by having them met during the proper periods of their development by the people designed to meet said needs, namely the parents and other adults in their lives.
We discover who we are by seeing our reflections in the eyes of others: Do they smile or frown at us? Do they say kind things or mean ones? Thus is the nascent personality formed, in the mirror of our parents' eyes.
And don't get me wrong, I think her writing is beautiful, brilliant. She writes with great clarity and insight, almost painful acuity. She seems highly intelligent. In fact, this may be her downfall: Her ability to think through things so well makes it feel like she must solve these problems alone. Like it's her own damn fault if she doesn't figure it out on her own. (Not sure about that one, or if I've really said what I'm trying to say.)
(ooh, another bell ringing for self here: Smart child often doesn't get emotional needs met because she seems so self-sufficient that the parents fail to recognize her other needs.)
And my answer to the "What might turn a frightening, empty stretch of time into a comforting, satisfied stretch of time": Human connection. Connection at that deep, limbic level that well-connected children take for granted, that unconnected children forever feel as a deep, insatiable hunger.
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