Disease and Spiritual Healing in Overeaters Anonymous

1 “Feed Your Faith”: Disease and Spiritual Healing in Overeaters Anonymous Sarah Katherine Brewer Division III Project Dr. Alan H. Goodman, Committee Chair Dr. Pamela K. Stone, Committee Member Hampshire College Spring 2014 2 To Mom, For instilling in me a curiosity about others’ experiences, and to Dad, for teaching me integrity and patience. 3 Acknowledgements I owe an enormous debt to the interview participants in this study. Their willingness to share their life experiences, thoughts and expertise about compulsive overeating and the Overeaters Anonymous program was extremely generous, and I am incredibly privileged to have been permitted to record and write about their experiences in this thesis. I also owe my deepest gratitude to the two Overeaters Anonymous groups who allowed me to observe their meetings and learn the OA program through attendance in meetings. They enriched this ethnography immeasurably, and I cannot thank them enough for their consent and welcoming disposition. I am indebted to my committee, Dr. Alan Goodman and Dr. Pamela Stone, who had an enormous positive impact on the quality and significance of this work. They always asked me to create deeper analyses and patiently guided me to revise my work again and again. I also want to thank Dr. Jennifer Hamilton for supporting my initial efforts in this project and whose scholarship and teaching has been a constant source of inspiration. Thank you also to the Hampshire College Institutional Review Board for their support of this project, in addition to the Harold F. Johnson Library and Events Services at Hampshire College. My friends, family and other mentors, were all supportive and such excellent listeners throughout this project. Thank you Mom and Dad, Addison, Evan, Nanny and Poppa. And thank you to my friends, Emily, Nicole, Ilse, Arslan, Michael, Isaac, and Martin and to my mentors Brown Kennedy and Merle Bruno. One last, large thank you is due to my significant other, Preston Bruno, who always encourages me to take risks and pursue my anthropological questions. I am undeniably lucky to have such a supportive and thoughtful partner. Without any of these folks, this project simply would not have been what it is today. Their inspiration, critiques, questions, and encouragement have meant a great deal to me and have helped shaped me to be the person and academic that I am today. Thank you. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 5 I. Historical and Modern Perspectives: Eating, Body Size and Development of the 12-Step Program 9 II. Overeaters Anonymous: History and Review of Ethnographic Literature 36 III. Guiding Themes: Medicalization, Religion and Spirituality, and Diversity 50 IV. Field Sites and the Research Design 72 V. Compulsive Overeating and the OA Program 86 VI. The Dis-ease 107 VII. The (spi)Ritual 129 VIII. Trauma, Abuse, and Addiction among Compulsive Overeaters 154 XI. “Carrying the Message”: The Politics within Overeaters Anonymous 171 X. Conclusion 196 Works Cited 202 Appendix 210 5 Introduction I originally formulated my project in the spring of 2013 by asking how individuals came to identify as compulsive overeaters, and how this identity connected with their other identities including gender, race, class, religion, and health status. For example, I wondered what it meant to be a female overeater as opposed to a male overeater; what were the associated feelings, the impression of cultural norms, and individual understandings of how these two identities might intersect and affect daily life? I had just spent two years studying topics in medical anthropology, and had garnered a special interest in the cultural interpretations of fat, specifically relating to employment discrimination of overweight and obese persons on the basis of weight. Simultaneously, I had explored the health effects of under eating on maternal and child nutrition. I had questions about what it meant to be a compulsive overeater in a culture that shames obesity. In particular, I wondered if the different identities of compulsive overeaters intersected to create different understandings of what compulsive overeating is and who compulsively overeats. In this Division III project I conducted two months of field research in which I talked to people who were participating in Overeaters Anonymous (OA) about two topics that serve as the basis for my ethnography: disease and spiritual recovery. I began to wonder how OA members construct and use an illness narrative around the idea that compulsive overeating is a disease. Furthermore, what do these narratives look like when intersected with an individual’s life history and experiences? I wanted to know how individuals understood and addressed their compulsive overeating prior to coming to OA, how they applied the disease narrative, told throughout the OA program, to their own lived experiences and what effects, if any, this identification with the disease narrative had on their recovery. In other words, what narrative did participants use? 6 My second area of inquiry involved unpacking the various ways that OA members talk about and conceptualize the Higher Powers framed by the OA program, and what they believed these Higher Powers do for their recovery. While OA, like other anonymous programs, is rife with suggestions to turn one’s will over to a Judeo-Christian God, the OA program is careful to suggest that a “Higher Power” does not need to be this Western, patriarchal version of a God. With this in mind, I was curious about how OA members engaged in rituals and established patterns of eating and behavior (e.g. strict food plans) and what purposes these rituals served in an individual’s recovery. This part of my research was also informed by published scholarship on the intersections of religion, ritual and eating. This literature allowed me to situate the OA program within a longer history of spiritually-significant consumption. While the small sample size I used prevents broad generalizations from being made, the participants responses to interview questions presents modern and unique perspectives on what it means to be a compulsive overeater in a largely biomedical and secular culture. The data were fraught with contradictions and areas of tension that speak both to the flexibility of the OA program and to the diversity of participants’ interpretations about what the program is and what it does for them. Interestingly the OA program was never described in the same way by any of the participants and often appeared simultaneously rigid in some aspects and fluid in others when practiced by the same individual. The flexibility of OA certainly allowed participants to self- diagnose and self-prescribe in ways that could be viewed as empowering and disempowering. In addition, the flexible nature of OA created tensions around appropriate action within the program and appropriate circulation of the program on local and global levels. A large part of my ethnographic work was to tease out these contradictions and tensions in order to better understand where OA as a program struggles and where these struggles are felt by individual 7 participants in their practice of recovery. In sum, this project ties together questions of self, consumption, and group identity, relating these findings to larger discourses concerning Western body politics and cultural values. THE PROJECT AND PERMISSIONS Beginning in May of 2013, with approval from Hampshire College’s IRB (Appendix A; Appendix B) and the participating OA groups (Appendix C), I began observing two to three meetings of Overeater’s Anonymous in Massachusetts on a weekly basis (two of the meetings were in the same location and were usually attended by the same individuals). I observed group meetings and engaged in informal conversation with participants after the meetings. After three months, I began formal interviews with willing participants, asking them about their experiences with the disease of compulsive overeating and their time in OA (see attached questionnaire, Appendix D). Both OA meetings I observed are located in Massachusetts. To keep the anonymity of the meeting sites I will employ pseudonyms: Franklin and Bridgeton. The meeting site in Franklin was in a church with an average of eight participants at each meeting. The Bridgeton site was located in a local building available for community-organized events. The Bridgeton meeting averaged 7.4 attendees each week, with two to three of those individuals also being a part of the Franklin group on a near-weekly basis. For the seven months of my fieldwork I was able to work closely with a few individuals from each group. Different themes and social and cultural dynamics emerged across two groups and from interview to interview. The close proximity and overlap of the two groups in a narrow geography allowed a better understanding of the roles of class and race among the people who 8 participated in this study. Nearly all participants were white, and most (but not all) came from the lower to middle class households; most were middle aged or elderly, although two young adults occasionally appeared at meetings. It is important to frame these interviews and observations into the larger literature that explores medical and feminist understandings of body image and eating; the popularization of methods of coping with compulsive overeating, including the diet and exercise industry; the history of 12-step programs in the US and, of course, Overeater’s Anonymous. An analysis of the ethnographic data collected in my project is presented in Chapters 3 through 9. Chapter 3 presents the major themes for analysis in this ethnography: medicalization, religion and spirituality, and diversity. Chapter 4 details the two field sites where research was conducted and outlines my role as a researcher in those spaces. Chapter 5 describes the structure of the OA program, how it introduces participants to its values and what participants say they feel about the effects of compulsive overeating on their bodies and lives.

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