Reading eating disorder life stories through body narrative analysis

This study seeks to understand the role of the body in eating disorders, the recovery process, and in the context of women’s lives after recovery by employing an embodiment perspective. From this viewpoint, the body is seen as central in explanations of all aspects of human thoughts and actions and as such is integral to identity formation. Cultural factors are understood as being imbibed by the embodied person rather than as being separate entities. Using an embodiment perspective requires that questions be posed differently. Rather than focusing on how societal factors act upon women and create body dissatisfaction, this study addresses the lived experience of being in a particular body within the sociocultural context and how this impacts women’s understandings of the process from the time they initiated their eating disorder, through recovery, and into their present day lives.
The method of the study is body narrative analysis. This approach draws from concepts in the literature on body narratives as well as from the more general narrative identity literature. The analysis was based on multiple interviews over a two-three year period with three women who are in recovery from an eating disorder. It involved the identification of nuclear episodes in these interviews and the evaluation of the episodes according to four concepts from the narrative literature-- body-self, illness narrative, body imago, and ideological setting. The primary questions addressed in the study were: (a) How do the four analytic concepts come together in providing a picture of the connections between body and eating disorders, with emphasis on recovery?; (b) What are the across time differences in configurations of these concepts as indicated by the analysis of episodes within the life story? and (c) How are individual differences and similarities revealed in these configurations? Women’s narratives differ dramatically from the initiation of their eating disorder behaviors to their impetus for recovery and even how their life transpires after recovery. The women have a very different presentation to their bodies and follow different body narratives through recovery. It is important that women be allowed to tell their body narrative in their own voice to truly address their needs in initial and longer term recovery from an eating disorder. Women’s voices must be heard in the design of research and in treatment approaches.