Ellen a bad, bad girl, anorexic
and bulimic with delicate men

As one of the many popular therapists in New York City, I treat a lot of clients with complex issues. Ellen drinks gin and does lines of coke whenever she's alone. She likes to listen to a Fiona Apple CD for hours on end. Her favorite song is "Criminal." The coke and gin help her hold on to the feeling of the lyrics: "I've been a bad, bad girl, careless with a delicate man. Don't tell me to deny it. I've done wrong and want to suffer for my sins cause I'm feelin' like a criminal."

Ellen doesn't look like a criminal. She's a beauty in her mid-twenties, with a heart of gold. And she's good at her job. The problem is she has to go to client dinners that terrify her. She copes by slipping away to the ladies' room for a few lines of coke, then goes back to her clients - all married men in their forties - and performs like a cross between Barbra Streisand and Lili Tomlin. She's a scream they tell her, very smart, never misses a beat. Then one of them pinches her ass under the table. Last week Ellen's boss - also married in his forties - surprised her with two tickets to Paris. "A bonus for the great work you've been doing," he said, "and to show you how much I care for you." Back in her apartment he told her he'd love to be the one she decides to take to Paris. Then he hugged her and started to touch her. Ellen ran to the bathroom and did more lines of coke. The next day she called in sick and came to her therapy session in tears, mumbling over and over, "I'm bad, bad, bad!"

That weekend Ellen's father came to visit. He's a nice clutz of a man, a nervous wreck who believes he loves Ellen but is totally out to lunch on who she is and what she's going through. It would never occur to him to get curious about what’s going on in her life right now, let alone ask himself if he really loves her. No matter how hard Ellen tries, she can never make him happy. She winds up feeling like a criminal when she sees him suffer. On this visit he came with his 25 year-old girlfriend. Ellen gave them her bedroom to sleep in while she took the couch.

Ellen hasn't spoken to her mother since her early teens when she divorced her father. Back then, her mother used to scream at her over and over again that she was a bad, hateful girl. In her better moments, she pressured Ellen ceaselessly to do everything her way. When Ellen was little, she made her comb her hair in exactly the right style, floss her teeth every day and eat the right vegetables. Ellen has a memory that’s always stayed with her of her mother circling around her like a vulture when she was a toddler doing her potty training. All through her teens, her mother screened her friends obsessively, especially boys. Ellen never had a real boyfriend either in high school or college. Though she’s had lots of sexual experiences, she remembers them mostly as hit and runs.  

About a year ago Ellen met Brad, a nice handsome guy who's patient and tender with her. He moved in about three months after they started dating. Brad works as a bartender and does part-time modeling. Ellen pays for almost everything which is easy because she makes a ton of money. She pays for romantic weekend trips at bed and breakfasts, elaborate dinners at restaurants like the River Café and Capsuto Frères, and she recently bought Brad an expensive camera for his birthday. But lately she’s started to resent him. It bugs her when she comes home from work depleted and wounded by her sleazoid boss and finds a note from Brad telling her he's off watching football in a sports bar with his friends. She works herself into a panic whenever Brad talks to or sees any of his ex-girlfriends. She's terrified he'll leave her and works herself into a rage whenever he tries to hide things from her which she takes as proof that he’s lying, when he’s just trying to avoid an argument. A few days ago she found the password to Brad's computer and started reading his e-mails. In one, he reminisced about old times to a girl he’d had a brief romance with in college. Ellen was ready to throw him out.

About a month after Brad moved in, Ellen fell into an old habit she’d picked up in college. She started gorging in between meals and throwing up twice a day. She vomits in restaurant bathrooms right after big business lunches. Sometimes she does it back at the office. In the evening after dinner with Brad, she locks herself in the bathroom while he’s either watching television or in bed. Ellen freaked out when she discovered that she’d gained seven pounds. Right after that she started working out and jogging daily including weekends. The way she talks about her weight gain it might as well be 70 pounds. In the past few weeks, her exercise regimen has become the center of her life. Yesterday she told me about her fantasy of attaining a perfect body and how much it excites her. She’s turned off to Brad sexually. Now when they make love, his tenderness, hunger and passion for her body never give her anything like the high she gets from the fantasy.

About the same time Ellen started binging and throwing up, she began taking Prozac and Ativan which she bought on the Internet. The drugs make her perfect body fantasy more intense. On her way to work she glides down Madison Avenue and sees her gorgeous figure mirrored in the boutique shop windows, except on bad days after she’s tried to get off the drugs. Ellen is five feet, eight inches tall. When she went bulimic again she weighed 121 pounds. In the past month she’s dropped to 103 pounds, missed two periods and her beautiful breasts have shriveled to almost nothing. She looks like a skeleton but feels like a fashion model.

What is Ellen reliving in her relationship with Brad? What does it mean when she screams at him for minor screw-ups that virtually always serve as triggers for feeling betrayed? She blows up at Brad the way her mother did at her from the time she was a toddler through her teens, more than half her life. She mistrusts Brad the way she mistrusts her mother, her father, her boss, almost everyone. When Brad threatened to get too close to her, she shut him out with the same defensive wall she first built in college: A compulsive regimen of gorging, vomiting and excessive exercise driven by an obsessive fantasy of attaining the one perfect body, now fortified with Prozac and Ativan. If Ellen ever tries to give up her Anorexia and Bulimia along with the fantasy that drives them, she’ll have to let Brad get close, really close, emotionally. Then she’ll be faced with the terror of letting him into her heart as she once tried to do with her mother. In the best of circumstances, new lovers are frightened of opening their hearts to one other. But Ellen is terrified of opening her heart to Brad, of opening her heart to anyone.

Ellen has gone through the same emotional roller coaster in all her romantic relationships before Brad. First, she idealizes them in a honeymoon stage. Then they disappoint her and she feels betrayed. With Brad, she first dealt with the feeling of betrayal by trying to control everything. She bribed him with gifts, got him job interviews, obsessively planned their daily schedules and insisted on knowing where he was every moment of the day. Eventually, Brad convinced her that he was being faithful. But his fidelity was never the real issue. He got much too close for comfort, closer than any of her previous lovers and this terrified Ellen. So she built an intimidating, bulimic-anorexic wall to cut him off, a wall so strong it makes ancient Roman ramparts look like garden hedges. Today, Ellen has retreated almost completely from Brad and sought refuge in her perfect body fantasy. And he’s growing more and more frustrated with her. Eventually she’ll force him to leave her or she’ll wind up wanting to kill him.

Ellen has never wanted to kill me in the three years we've worked together. Most of the time she feels safe. The problem is she never hangs on to the good things I tell her about herself, like her prodigious intelligence, generosity, sensitivity and her wonderful sense of humor. Her playfulness and sense of humor often make her fun to work with. But she takes in my enjoyment and appreciation of her like cotton candy. She never fully absorbs and metabolizes them. And in spite of her perfect body fantasy, she falls into lingering despair from feeling alone and unloved. Yet Ellen keeps coming back. On some days I sense a few glimmers of hope. But the one certainty I have about her is that it’ll take a very, very long time to encourage the terrified little girl buried deep inside her to open her heart again, the way she tried long ago to do with her mother.

In his book Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about people like Ellen, Vinny, Susan, Bill and Michelle. He'd say they're caught up in unbearable thoughts, feelings and horrible unconscious images of themselves that got lodged in them as they grew up as their true selves were pushed into hiding. Most of us can only catch glimpses of our true selves in dreams or in conscious projections like the picture on the Psychotherapy Group in the Village home page of  Roses in Monet's garden at Giverny. This picture is what Jung called an anima projection. It comes from someone touched deeply by the beauty of the roses who had to take that picture.

Will Ellen always be too desperate, terrified and filled with self-loathing to ever feel the beauty of Monet's roses, beauty that might help her glimpse her own beauty lost to her herself. Will she ever be able to savor the roses with a man like Brad, or better, someone stronger and more accomplished than Brad?

A Psychotherapy Group in the Village 
160 Bleecker Street, 9C East, New York

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