Sensing the Self: Women's recovery from Bulimia

By Sheila M. Reindl

Okay, I reviewed this before I deleted everything from my blog and started afresh, but this time I will try and summarise it with less waffle.

It is a very long-winded read, but, if you collected together all the good bits that are scattered eveywhere, and made the book a fraction of the size, then it would be very useful.

A comment it makes on Bruch, who wrote 'The Golden Cage' (reviewed the other week):

‘(Bruch) relied upon what she called “the constructive use of ignorance” – that is, her willingness to learn from and with patients...’

‘Susan Sands points out that “many bulimic patients are expert at dissociation” and that bulimics “portray their bingeing episodes as one might describe a trance state, drug trip, or delirium...”

A patient - ‘”It is pretty angry... an angry thing to do, to make yourself vomit, or with force expel things that are inside your body...”’

To recover, Reindl states that the person must come to a point where she accepts that:

'...she was sick enough...had suffered long enough... had tried hard enough to recover alone, and that she mattered enough to be worthy of care.’