Beyond the diagnosis of “eating disorder”, who am “I”?– An autoethnography of the lived experience of eating and suffering.

• Main Authors: Te-An Liao, 廖得安
• Other Authors: Shy-Herng Wong
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6gx22b

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 諮商與臨床心理學系 === 102 === Being labelled as an “eating disorder” sufferer, I am always confused by the identification of ‘who “I” am’. Since most studies of eating disorders focused on abnormal personal traits, thoughts, and behaviors of eating disorders, researchers actually have ignored to understand the lived experience of suffering. Therefore I always feel lost in the way of being a clinical psychologist. In this autoethnographic study, I, as the researcher, have explored my own lived experience of eating and suffering. The research data was composed of my life stories, and accounted by a critical, analytical, interpretive perspective in order to represent social restriction. Then, I have conducted a discourse analysis of suffering, in which my private lived experience was taken account in “divided selves” originated by my situated social structure. As a female restricted by social rules relative to “thinness”, when I am striving to fill the requirement (by purging) for keeping this gender role, my body does not actually belong to me at all. By an authentic reflection and reflexive representation, I shows the understanding that I want to take back my body will, binge eating is a strong way and could not be deprived. Binge eating and purging behaviors are not clinical symptoms for a patient like me, but the ways of the protection for myself as a human being. Through this writing, I hold the right and power to talk about myself and make my own interpretation, and then gain the further understanding beyond my experience of suffering. As a clinical psychologist, as facing to a face of a human being with eating struggles, in this study, I have recognized the equal right for us, so as to be close to the lived experience of suffering, by the cored basis of mutual understanding.