I will not be someone who comments on someone’s body in a way that reinforces control of the body.
I spent two decades controlling my body. Though this pattern was established from a place of needing to build confidence in my self and find discipline in a life that mind that had grown out-of-control, it very quickly became needing to be the most disciplined person in any given room, and to feel not only confident but above flaw, and the result was continually bypassing what it actually is to be human: messy, flawed, and certainly at times, heavy and lacking power over things.
The first book I read that I felt really captured my experience of disordered eating was Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection. She describes the following central themes in her understanding of anorexia:
Perfectionism as a rejection of human limitation
Woodman distinguishes perfection from wholeness. Perfection demands a state in which nothing is flawed, dependent, or out of control. Wholeness, on the other hand, is about accepting the contradictory and imperfect realities of being human.
Through a Jungian lens, the pursuit of bodily perfection can become an attempt to escape ordinary human existence. Hunger, physical needs and vulnerability may feel like threats to an idealized self. The body becomes something to conquer rather than inhabit. Restriction can offer a sense of mastery, purity, or exceptional discipline, even as it progressively narrows our life, and takes possession over so much mental energy.
The split between spirit and body
A major theme in Woodman's work is the division between spirit and matter, mind and body, and will and instinct. In her conceptualization, the anorexic may identify with the spiritual, transcendent, or idealized self while experiencing the physical body as burdensome, unruly, or threatening. The body’s ordinary needs become obstacles to an idea of freedom.
This produces a paradox: the person seeks freedom through increasingly rigid control, but that control can become another form of imprisonment. It is not simply that the person wants to be thin; it is that the pursuit of thinness may become entangled with a desire to rise above the limitations of embodiment itself.
The negative mother complex
Woodman gives considerable attention to the mother-imago: the inner psychological image of the mother. In her model, a person may internalize a maternal presence experienced as critical, controlling, rejecting, or demanding of perfection. The person then carries an internal standard that condemns ordinary needs and desires.
Food becomes symbolically complicated because it represents nourishment, receiving, dependency, and relationship. Accepting nourishment may evoke conflict between the longing to be cared for and the fear of being controlled, invaded, or diminished by another.
Refusing food can represent a refusal of the internalized negative mother, while also revealing how deeply the person's relationship with nourishment has become entangled with that inner figure.
Important: Woodman is discussing an unconscious psychological image, not asserting that every person with anorexia has a controlling mother or a particular childhood history. Her interpretation is symbolic and case-based, not a universal explanation of the disorder.
The addiction to control and the illusion of omnipotence
The title “Addiction to Perfection” points toward a central paradox: perfectionism can become addictive because it provides a temporary sense of power, certainty, and relief from vulnerability. Food restriction can become a ritual through which a person repeatedly experiences the ability to override the body. The capacity to resist hunger may feel like evidence of autonomy or superiority over the body.
But that achievement is not sustainable- the person must continually repeat the ritual to preserve the sense of control, and the ritual increasingly organizes psychological life around itself.
Woodman interprets this as a struggle with omnipotence: the ego attempts to establish complete authority over the body and unconscious life. Psychological development requires relinquishing that impossible mastery and recognizing that one is a human being in relationships, with needs, and a part of the natural world.
Anorexia as a distorted spiritual hunger
Woodman suggests that compulsive relationships with food can carry a hunger that is not for food alone. The longing may involve love, sweetness, belonging, meaning, vitality, or a connection with the sacred.
Therefore, anorexia is not simply the absence of hunger. It can symbolize a conflict in which the desire for spiritual purity or transcendence becomes detached from the nourishment of actual life. The person seeks fulfillment through an increasingly narrow ritual, but the ritual cannot meet the underlying need. What is longed for psychologically is continually displaced onto the body and food.
Healing as a movement toward incarnation and wholeness
Woodman’s answer is not simply to abandon perfectionism or replace one ideal with another. It is to restore a relationship with the body, instinct, feeling, and what it means to be alive.
Her Jungian language points toward several movements:
From perfection to wholeness: accepting contradiction, limitation, imperfection, and vulnerability.
From control to relationship: developing a more responsive relationship with the body rather than treating it as an object to discipline.
From transcendence to incarnation*: allowing spiritual meaning to be experienced through embodied life rather than pursued by escaping it.
From the negative mother to the Great Mother: symbolically transforming an inner experience of criticism and deprivation into one of nourishment, containment, and life-giving connection
From compulsive ritual to meaningful ritual: finding forms of connection, creativity, relationship, and spirituality that genuinely nourish rather than perpetuate deprivation.
*The term incarnation is particularly important here: Woodman is interested in the psychological task of allowing spirit and matter to coexist- to accept that a meaningful life is not one that escapes the body, but one that is lived through it.
My Own Movement Toward Wholeness
My pattern of restricted eating softened through Jungian psychoanalysis. I first became aware of my own negative inner mother: an incessantly shaming voice. Despite being an IFS therapist, practicing in a model that emphasizes compassion and acceptance of all parts, I learned that some parts required something different. Sometimes, I needed to give that inner shaming voice an assertive, “No, not today.”
I also came to understand that the heaviness in my body I was seeking to avoid was not really about my weight. It was about emotional heaviness I had neglected to face and process.
Finally, something shifted when I went to an iboga retreat and asked, “What is the truthful way to relate to food?”
The answer was simple: Get and make beautiful foods. Feed yourself and others.
It was a simple truth, but one that landed deeply in the context of the gratitude to be who I am that was cultivated during that ceremony.
And this truth extends beyond food. Our relationship with food maps onto our relationship with life. Create a beautiful life for others. Consume beautiful life.
Perhaps this is what I had been seeking all along: not a way to become so disciplined that I could rise above the messiness of being human, but a way to participate more fully in it. To let myself be nourished, to receive what life offers, and to make something beautiful of what I have to give.
This is also why I will not comment on another person’s body in a way that reinforces the idea that it is something to control. I know how easily the pursuit of perfection can disguise itself as discipline, health, or even virtue. I know how much of a life can be lost to the effort of becoming above reproach.
I want to practice something different: a relationship with the body, and with one another, that makes room for our humanity. One that values nourishment over deprivation, wholeness over perfection, and the beauty of a life fully lived over the illusion of a life perfectly controlled.
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