Slowly, Slowly Catch a Monkey

When Mouse was 16 or 17 she already had Anorexia, but only went to hospital when she was about to die. Apparently the doctors at the hospital only expected her to live for a few days when she was admitted. Her treatment was, from what I am told, a little archaic. She was put on drips and fed copious amounts of food for three weeks and released. The early days of her Anorexia are a bit vague and I will not delve into them, as nobody talks about it. I will also not express my opinion on the reason for her illness as all I know is hearsay.

Mouse April 2004

Slowly, Slowly catch a monkey!

This was something that I repeated to myself a thousand times a day because, although I am patient and compassionate, I tend to be impulsive and don’t always think before my lips part and thoughtless words sprout forth. I would say something like; “Hey you’re looking pretty today” and the normal retaliation would be; “Am I getting fat? That’s it, I am not eating anymore” I would then have to choose my words very carefully to convince her that what she perceived was not my meaning. It was at times like these that I realized that I was dealing with two different people. We decided to call the Anorectic person “Monique” which is her real name. Monique is a very self-centered, nasty antagonistic person for whom it is difficult to feel affection, whereas Mouse is the complete opposite. Mouse has a heart of gold, willing to please, hardworking and lovable. It is very difficult to imagine those two personalities living in and sharing one body and one brain.

I learned that anorexia is not always only about losing weight, it is about having control of something. Often girls who have lived in an extremely dominated environment become anorexic because their eating is something that nobody else can control. I started giving Mouse more responsibilities around the home and allowed her to carry them out at her leisure and in whichever way she felt fit. Even if things were not done in the conventional manner, it did not matter; she just needed to feel that whatever she did was totally under her control. Sadly, this obsession for control results in the anorectic becoming very focused on the control and will not deviate from their perceived idea of control. As in the case of “controlling” their eating, they do not see that they actually have no control, but are being controlled by anorexia. Because of this distorted perception of control it was necessary for me to implement guidelines in the shopping as gently as possible without her feeling that the ‘control’ was being taken away from her but still leaving the decision-making to her. That little exercise took all of about two years which gives one an idea of how long it will take to change an anorectic’s perception of ‘controlling their eating’.

Eating is just one aspect of an anorectic’s need of control. Another aspect is the need to exercise. Monique needed to burn up any calories that she consumed. Unfortunately she confuses calories with Kilojoules and tried to burn 3 to 4 times more calories than she consumed. In an effort to monitor her amount of exercise I started exercising with her. We would take the dogs for a 5 to 6 Km walk everyday with which she coped with very well. Slowly she tried to manipulate me into doing more and eventually I invested in 2 bicycles and we started cycling. Only about 1 Km a day initially and slowly progressing to about 7Km. In the meanwhile we reduced the dog-walks by the same amount which we cycled.
If you want to learn more about anorexia sufferers