Truth and Eating Disorders

Actually, the above is a very simplistic take on a very complex issue, for the truth does matter, or at least - as Spence (1984) argues, narrative truth matters. Narrative truth is for Spence - and other scholars have made similar distinctions - the "truth" of the stories that we tell ourselves (p. 19). Such truth can be dramatically different from what he refers to as "historical truth", which is the kind of Truth-with-a-capital-T that most of us were taught to respect as children. Historical truth is facts-on-the-ground truth - the sun rises in the east, the earth revolves around the sun, stars go nova at the end of their lives, the universe is cooling down as it expands.

Such historical truth has its place, Spence argues, and not only because it informs the private, narrative truths that we each construct for ourselves. Reality matters: It matters whether or not HIV causes AIDS, after all, because the kind of virus that causes a disease determines the type of anti-viral drugs that we have to use to respond to it. But Spence argues that narrative truths are in many ways more important because they limn for each one of us our personal realities. This is especially true with the realm of psychotherapy, because it is the ways in which we translate our experience into words, into stories, that determin

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ng experience into words is one of the key drawbacks to relying (within a therapeutic context) to the centrality of narrative truth: Metaphors organize knowledge by taking what we know very well, often something simple and direct, like telling a story, and applying it to something we know less well, perhaps something elusive and difficult, like living a life. Metaphors, including this one, highlight certain matters, eclipse others, create invisible entailments, and subtly intercept our finding ready access to other means for gaining knowledge. Hence, the narrative metaphor highlights the storying rather than the sensual experiencing of life, the poetics of description rather than the listing of symptoms, the multiplicity of voices that live within a person rather than a single invariant self, and the emphasis on language rather than action or feeling. These are the drawbacks, all major, of the narrativist point of view. There are compensating factors, however (Ingram, 1997). The therapeutic importance of honoring individuals' own narrative truths has applications beyond eating disorders: Indeed all of therapy may be see to some extent to be a negotiation over the legitimacy of the client's narrative truth vis-a-vis either
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Approximate Word count = 1382
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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