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| Who it affects The typical person vulnerable to anorexia is perfectionistic and a people pleaser. They care very much about what other people think of them, whether those people be their parents or their friends or even strangers. Caring so much about pleasing others and wanting to be liked usually ends up being the gateway to someone vulnerable developing anorexia. why it happens Society has models grace the covers of "Vogue" and just about every TV show out there, so the impression is made that to be liked and respected, you should be thin or have "the perfect body." To be thin is to be in control, to be worthy of attention and to be beautiful. The person vulnerable to developing anorexia sees all of this very clearly and begins to dislike themselves. People with anorexia are generally what is known as all-or-nothing people, it is hard for them to do anything inbetween or average. This is why the dislike towards themselves and the dieting doesn't stop and becomes extreme. Besides society, there are other factors that can trigger a full-blown case of anorexia. Family is definitely one. Often emotions and problems are kept under cover and are not dealt with in the family of an anorexic. When this happens it makes it even harder for someone who is battling the disorder to ask for help. Asking for help takes tremendous strength and courage as it is, but when the family of someone who has come forward with their problems jrefuses to acknowledge that they need help, it just makes getting treatment even harder. Along with this, the care takers of the person with anorexia may be perfectionistic themselves, and as a result, the person may have grown up believing that nothing they do is good enough and that to be worthy of love they must get all A's and nothing less. The restricting may also be a form of control, as well. To be abused or live in a chaotic environment is to not be in control of yourself or your surroundings for a period of time, so the person with anorexia takes everything in life and measures it by one thing - their bodies. To be in control of this one object, this thing called a body, ensures that things will be "ok" if they can just lose more weight and so on. Many times someone with anorexia has had their personal boundaries invaded, meaning that someone hurt them physically or sexually at some point in their lives. The abuse may not have come from someone in the family, but it none-the-less triggers feelings of unworthiness, causing the person to starve themselves out of self-hatred. Another thing that can fuel the self-destruction is verbal and mental abuse, not just from family members, but also from people at school or significant others. |