by Geneen Roth
If there was a Cabal, or if the patriarchy was entrancing women into silence (about the destruction of the environment, the plethora of guns and mass shootings, and waging war as an answer to everything), the $60 billion weight-loss industry would be proof that they were winning. The fact that we are frightened of our hungers and our strength would be proof. And the way our energy gets trapped in dieting over and over and over again would seal the deal. (If your doctor said, “I have a cure for you but there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it won’t work, and I know you’ve tried it five or twenty times, and it saps your energy, makes you feel worthless, and keeps you stuck in the rest of your life,” would you do it again? And again? And every year for as long as you live?)
When you tell the truth—when you see that as much as you say you want to lose weight, you are keeping it on so you don’t have to engage in those parts of being alive that seem more challenging than losing weight—you can begin making different decisions about the way you spend your energy. Caroline Myss, the author of Why People Don’t Heal, once said to me, “Imagine you have a buck of life energy to spend every day. How would you spend it?”
If your doctor said, “I have a cure for you but there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it won’t work, and I know you’ve tried it five or twenty times, and it saps your energy, makes you feel worthless, and keeps you stuck in the rest of your life,” would you do it again? And again? And every year for as long as you live?
Start spending that buck differently. Start today, even for fifteen minutes. Start living as if you are already free. Skip the middleman of losing weight. Do something, anything, that brings you joy and makes you feel as if you belong here. Even for half an hour, even for fifteen minutes. If there was a Cabal or if the patriarchy was entrancing women into silence by making them feel awful about their bodies, joy and fearlessness, passion and illuminated hearts would defeat them. And the miraculous thing is that we already have those tools; we just aren’t using them.
There isn’t a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now. And if you continually put your life on hold for what your life will be like tomorrow, or next year, or when you finally lose that weight, you won’t recognize that you already have what you want because you will have spent years training yourself to want, not have.
“Imagine what you could do,” I often ask a group of women, “if you stop turning your energy against yourself and use it instead to question what you’ve been hypnotized into believing about the size of your body, and to speak up for what matters to you and your children.”
“What would happen if one woman spoke the truth?” asked the poet Muriel Rukeyser. “The world would split open,” she said.
Let that one be you.
I’d spent most of my life confused about boundaries and bodies and ownership of both.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
The Red String Project
The first day of my final stint in therapy, my therapist asked me to stand across the room from her. Then she started walking toward me and asked me to say “Stop!” when she got too close. When she was a few inches away, I said, “Well, maybe you could stop now.”
“Are you paying attention to your body? Your center?” she asked.
“I don’t have a center the way you’re talking about it, and if I do, it’s not talking.”
She told me to think of myself as having energetic boundaries. I rolled my eyes and said that I wasn’t sure people had “energetic boundaries.”
“Everyone has them,” she said. “When someone is talking to you and gets uncomfortably close, the discomfort is a sign that your boundary or ‘personal space’ has been crossed.” I nodded my head, still wary but less cynical.
A few sessions later, she handed me a small ball of red string. “Sit on the floor and use the string to make a circle around yourself. Close the ends together and think of the perimeter as a boundary that no one can cross without your permission. It’s your body,” she said, “your personal space.”
“Yeah right,” I thought . . . and proceeded to cry, which, uh, burst my cynicism. “It’s not really mine,” I said without knowing what I was saying, and burbled on about my father and how he grabbed my butt, kissed me on the lips, treated my body as if it belonged to him. Although I’d talked about the grabbing and kissing in other therapeutic situations, my visceral reaction this time convinced me that I’d spent most of my life confused about boundaries and bodies and ownership of both. In my refusal to close the end of the circle, it was immediately clear to me that I believed the consequence of “owning” this body was losing the love on which my life depended.
“My body isn’t mine,” I repeated. “That’s not how I think of it.”
Like many men who fought in World War II, my father called women “broads.” He thought of us as good-looking, mildly dumb, and utterly incapable of greatness. When I brought a friend from Santa Cruz to New York for Thanksgiving, he pinched her butt as we were waiting for our luggage to arrive. “As a way to say hello,” he murmured with a satisfied grin, as if he’d just won a trophy for being as suave as Frank Sinatra.
Each time I put the string around myself in the following sessions, it was as if an iceberg had turned upside down and what held it in place was suddenly revealed. I’d say things like: People won’t like it; I’ll get in trouble; Saying no is not allowed. My past experience with my father and a variety of men over the years taught me that my body was a lure to catch their attention. If I used my body or allowed it to be used in ways that were uncomfortable, well, that was the price I needed to pay for intimacy, for connection, for belonging to the tribe. And nothing I saw or heard as I was growing up taught me otherwise. Strange men in subways sometimes masturbated when they looked at me. Other men leered and grabbed me. In my twenties and thirties, I often had sex with men before I really wanted to because I was afraid that if I didn’t, they’d go away.
It took a few months and a few boxes of Kleenex before I was able to unwind the constellation of beliefs I’d inherited about my body and the feelings associated with them. To sit down in the middle of the circle, close the ends together, and say to my therapist, as she was inching her way across the floor with her string, “Don’t come closer.” Or “I don’t want to.”
Power is not a function of what we do, say, or achieve if it is not also connected to how we live in our physical selves.
A few years after my therapist introduced me to what I call The Red String Project I decide to try it at my next retreat. On the morning of the third day of our six-day program, a Wednesday, I hand each woman a six-foot piece of red string; I tell them to make a circle around their bodies and to join the ends of the string together. I tell them they are allowed to take up space, that it is their birthright to occupy their own bodies. Before I can finish the instructions, half the room is sobbing.
“You’re wrong,” Diana says. “I’m not allowed.” I turn to look at her. She is tall—at least six feet—with a long auburn ponytail, freckled skin, deep-set green eyes, perhaps fifty pounds over her natural weight. She has wrapped her string so tightly around her body that it is practically under her legs. “I’ll get in trouble if I close the ends,” she blurts. As I am about to speak to her, I hear a nearby whisper, “I’ll get in trouble if I even have a string.” From the back of the room, Laurie Ann, a curly-haired, stick-thin blond woman says, “Can I have another string? One isn’t enough. I need to go out in the hall, join the two strings together, and make my circle so big no one can come near.”
Heads are nodding. Tears are flowing. Wads of Kleenex are being handed out.
Delilah from Australia has pink and purple cropped hair, winged black rhinestone glasses, and is wearing a gray T-shirt that says CHOCOLATE FOR PRESIDENT. She raises her hand and says, “I can’t remember my father ever putting a part of him in a part of me, but then, again, he didn’t have to because his hands were al
l over the outside of my body all the time. And he was the good parent. My mother was addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers and spent days in her nightgown, unable to function. If I’d ever told my father to stop touching me, I would have lost the only love I had.”
They come to the retreat because they have self-identified challenges with food. They are varying degrees of overweight, normal (whatever that is), and underweight. They are capable stay-at-home mothers, psychiatrists, surgeons, CEOs, therapists, singers, actors, television personalities. But give them a red string and the skyscrapers of their lives crumble like Christmas cookies. Give them a red string and it becomes obvious that the issue has never been food, but the ways other people have talked about, touched, and used their bodies, which in turn affects how they talk about and use their own bodies. All that happened in the moment is that (like me) they’ve been handed a piece of string; nothing more. But it becomes immediately apparent that most of them (and us) have unconsciously swallowed the rampant misogyny of the culture along with our mashed potatoes. This isn’t a problem that only affects a small, self-selected group of retreat-going women. During the November 2016 election, Kelly Oxford requested that women use Twitter to tell stories of their first sexual assaults. Twenty-seven million women responded within twenty-four hours.
Reversing the misogyny . . . happens first by naming the fact that we’ve internalized it and now treat ourselves with the same lack of respect as the man who grabbed us on the subway.
We can’t leapfrog into being free, unencumbered, powerful women just because we want to. Power is not a function of what we do, say, or achieve if it is not also connected to how we live in our physical selves. We can’t skip the step of naming what hurt us and questioning how it distorted the ways we treat our bodies. For power to be authentic, the obstacles to it must be named. In this very moment, this means using our senses. Feeling our hands, our legs. Noticing where there is heat or coolness, pulsing or pressure. Hearing the sounds of the room. A person breathing. Bringing ourselves back to the present moment so that we have a ground upon which to notice that we are caught in the past.
True power lies in our willingness to question the beliefs we swallowed along with allowing ourselves to feel the rage at those who grabbed or touched us without permission while staying present and not acting on the desire for revenge. It’s possible to feel the full range of our feelings, even hatred; we can see where they are lodged in our chests or throats or faces and we can allow them to get so big that we are towering with them and breathing fire. If then we keep sensing, feeling, allowing the effects of the past to unfold in us now, we can take ourselves back.
If we feel rather than repress or act out our rage or hatred, the undigested feelings in our chests dissolve like a night-monster when you turn on the light. That which we could never invite into our awareness because it was too big or too furious or too horrible becomes the source of our power and the guide to effective, authentic action.
Hatred is a scary word, a scary feeling for most people and so we repress it. Or we imagine what would happen if we acted it out: we’d go on a killing rampage; we’d play high-speed bumper cars with the driver who just cut us off; we’d slice off someone’s head without blinking; we’d wring the neck of the neighbor’s dog that whined all night. At its core, hatred is the desire to annihilate that which is causing us pain, in the misguided belief that if we could only incinerate what seems to be causing the pain, we would finally be at peace. All feuds, all wars, all acts of revenge are built on this principle, including our inner war with food and weight.
On diets, we are still relying on the big powerful other to know what’s best and to save us. And whether it’s a good daddy or a good diet that rescues us, we remain victims and food our perpetrator.
At my last retreat, many people were furious at my suggestion that they could question the link between the beliefs that resulted from being touched inappropriately and their compulsive eating. One woman said, “I don’t like this approach of questioning stories and beliefs. It feels mean and lacking in compassion. My uncle raped me for three years and although I’ve been working on this in therapy for twenty years, I’m not over it yet—I feel as if you’re telling me it’s time to let go of something I’m not ready to let go of.”
A slippery slope indeed. To be clear: I am not asking anyone to let go of anything, least of all fury or hatred. It’s impossible to will yourself to let go of such huge and sticky feelings. I am asking that we feel what we feel instead of think what we feel. Reversing the misogyny of our culture is an inside job. It happens first by naming the fact that we’ve internalized it and now treat ourselves with the same lack of respect as the man who grabbed us on the subway.
Because it’s a lifeless strand and not a present-day situation, because we are acting as if our mothers or fathers or teachers or random men are in the room when many of them are dead and the rest aren’t in the room, the red string allows people to see that the immediate reactions they are wedded to are from the past. Which means that embedded in the extra weight we carry around is an unconscious attitude about women’s bodies we’ve inherited. Freeing ourselves from this body-hatred means naming the misogyny we’ve internalized.
The most challenging part of respecting our bodies and healing compulsive eating is the conscious decision to question what keeps us bound and silenced. Until we can sit in our own skin and fully occupy the physical space we’ve been given, we will be apologetic about our bodies. And even when we lose weight because we stuck to a diet, we will remain frightened of ourselves because we know that it’s the diet that’s keeping us thin, not our own capacity to stay true to what we know or want. On diets, we are still relying on the big powerful other to know what’s best and to save us. And whether it’s a good daddy or a good diet that rescues us, we remain victims and food our perpetrator.
For a few months after we complete The Red String Project (which takes repeated practice), some of my students carry their strings in their pockets and imagine putting it around them when they talk to their mothers, fathers, bosses. Many of them make bracelets out of a narrow strand of red leather so they have a visual touchstone of what they’ve learned. Both are concrete reminders that they can take back their body from the beliefs and people who snatched it, and reclaim the capacity to say no, or yes, or not now. They become centered in their power. Their actions in the world become effective, not reactive. Some students have become political leaders in their hometowns. One works with battered women. Almost all of them realize that although their own mothers did not have the needed understanding to stop rampant body-abuse, they do—and they can teach their daughters what they themselves never learned. First there is one of us, then fifty, then a hundred and fifty. Soon we will be a crowd, two hundred thousand, twenty-seven million. We are saying no and we are saying yes, and whether we whisper or shout, we are saying it together. I can hear you.
In the world you cannot see, touch, eat, losing weight and joy are unrelated.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
In the End
In the end, the point of losing weight is not to lose weight. It’s not to get into a pair of size six jeans, eat chocolate every day, or have cantaloupe buns. Which isn’t to say that any or all of these aren’t sublime here on the physical plane where we muddle around day after day: they are. But in the world you cannot see, touch, eat, losing weight and joy are unrelated.
Everyone who has lost weight knows this, but we keep forgetting it when we gain weight so that we can once again look forward to an imaginary happy future. Also, participating in the cycle of judging and shaming ourselves followed by feeling accomplished and elated gives us something to do and talk about, a way to pass the time. There’s nothing wrong with this pattern; it’s how our minds work. We intuitively understand that we want something we cannot see or touch, but we don’t know how to name or access it. And so we fall back into believing that being thinner will right everything that is wrong. The
only problem is that it’s based on a lie.
The first time I caught on to the lie, I was twenty-eight. I’d just gained eighty pounds in two months, effectively doubling my weight after having spent a few years as an eighty-two-pound anorexic. The fattest I’d ever been, I finally realized I’d been thin many times and it had never fulfilled its promise—and that the emphasis on body size was a hoax. The next morning, I started on a two-week regimen of eating raw chocolate chip cookies punctuated with daily doses of Polar Bear pumpkin ice cream. I figured that if being thinner wasn’t going to make me happy, and if depriving and shaming myself had no benefit, why do it? Why not eat cookie dough instead? This is how many of us spend our lives. Eating the equivalent of cookie dough, then dieting, then eating cookie dough, then dieting. We understand in a remote part of ourselves that we want something we cannot see or touch, but we don’t know how to name or access it. And so we fall back into believing that being thinner will right everything that is wrong.
Modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham wrote, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” Since that uniqueness needs a vehicle of expression, and since the vehicle we’ve been given is our body, we do what we can to keep the channel open. When you stuff or starve it, your body shuts down. It cannot reveal its purpose or creativity or wisdom to you. Also, no one wants to listen to a burping, farting channel.
