Posted by 2beheard on December 3, 2006, at 14:18:09
In reply to Re: Poet's Comments- Trigger, posted by Jost on November 21, 2006, at 21:54:20
I totally agree with your comments on Renfrew staff. Apparently you have to be flat affected and slightly overweight to work there. God forbid they actually "trigger" a patient because then they might have to deal with it out loud. Instead they shield these patients from feeling anything remotely attached to the underlying causes of their illness...and in the meantime, patients are basking in their own and in each others symptoms.
Renfrew's approach to treating EDs is a glorified babysitting group. Therapists sit there and listen to the girls go on and on about how much they hate themselves but fail to challenge them to work through it. These patients need serious hardcore help. Not a bunch of lazy therapists listening to their problems and not doing anything about it except discussing if their weight goes up and and down a pound each day as if that is abnormal. Renfrew should be ashamed of how they represented themselves in this movie.
I do not believe these patients had nurturing relationships with their therapists like Renfrew mentioned in their posts. Those girls were screaming for love. Renfrew was only their place to do it so blatently.
> I saw the film tonight, and my first reaction is that I found it rather baffling.
>
> I felt disconnected from the women and the subject, as if it were one of almost incomprehensible strangeness. It was a bit like an anthropological film, showing a tribe whose rituals and beliefs one couldn't penetrate or capture fully. I had almost no sense of being inside the experience-- or that anyone who worked at Renfrew's was empathically connected to the women. (I'm assuming they were, and it didn't come across to me.) I had to wonder, also at times, as the review points out, because many of the staff were quite overweight-- yet sat there stonefaced as the women talked about how unbearable it would be to be "fat." Or when women were forced to leave because their insurance ran out-- there was no reaction. Everything was treated as utterly banal. That type of stony non-response might be therapeutic, in their view, but it was hard to understand how that sort of mask would be.
>
> Even though EDs are enigmatic or hard to treat, that didn't seem the point. Perhaps it was, I don't know.
>
> One of the therapists said, perhaps somewhat portentously, that one patient felt that she had experienced things that were "unspeakable." This was the only moment when the film seemed to acknowledge that there was any problem, particularly, any emotional or spiritual problem, to be addressed. Yet even that felt somehow flat.
>
> More often, it suggested that there were rules to be followed, or unappetizing meals to be forced down, strictures to followed or avoided.
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> So how the treatment at Renfrew was thought to help--or what the inner world of the women was--almost was not even in question. You just watched; they just went through motions.
>
> It's true, there was a sort of austere angst pervading the film.
>
> But I felt more estranged than disturbing-- everything was made ordinary or overly abstracted. (There were two short disturbing scenes that I personally didn't watch-- but , although that made it a bit more wrenching, it doesn't fundamentally change what I think.)
>
> Jost
>
poster:2beheard
thread:697831
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/eating/20061124/msgs/709975.html