It is well-established that experiences in childhood can impact your life as an adult. While literature on the subject continues to grow, a recent study encapsulates this phenomenon for me:
Childhood experiences affect family health in adulthood in the expected direction. Even in the presence of early adversity, positive experiences in childhood can provide a foundation for creating better family health in adulthood.
Daines, C.L., Hansen, D., Novilla, M.L.B. et al. Effects of positive and negative childhood experiences on adult family health. BMC Public Health 21, 651 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10732-w
Let me illustrate this with a story about how a few simple interactions have influenced my shame about my body throughout the years.
As I’ve established, I have had a weight problem since I was 6 or 7. One day, I declared to my mom that I wanted to lose weight and therefore would eat nothing that day or the next. She said, “That’s not a reasonable way to lose weight.” I couldn’t do it anyway, I was little and liked food.
Every year during my childhood, my parents would take me to an asthma and allergy clinic to get a physical and check any new symptoms. I hated this annual appointment with a fevered passion. Yes, the allergy tests – those dreaded scratch tests – hurt like hell, but what hurt more was the doctor’s inevitable statement that “Jessica would do better if she lost some weight.”
I knew that statement was coming every year. I was on the high end of the recommended weight for my height, never really over and beyond that, but the doctor didn’t like my weight for medical reasons, he said. In the summers of my pre-teen and teenage years during the few weeks before this annual appointment, I’d try to lose weight, having the scale reading from the year before imprinted in my mind. But crash diets didn’t work for me and I liked food too much. My only triumphant year was in high school when I weighed one pound less than the year before. But it wasn’t enough for the doctor.
So, my history with food and weight loss and disordered eating didn’t just begin in 2000 when I started purging as a 19-year-old at a family dinner in a steakhouse. And it certainly didn’t end after I returned home from getting treatment for bulimia. I slowed my purging, cutting down until I absolutely needed to do so – to expunge all the weight and heaviness from my body. But, my weight is a constant theme in my life, covered in a thick sauce of anxiety and depression.
Bookish Brain 