I’m a Taurus. I’m a man of big appetites. If I have a weakness or an imbalance in my system regarding my appetites, it’s that I have a tendency to over-indulge. When I find the good, I want more of it. More good food. More good drink. More good sex. More good company. With my temperament, I need to keep an eye out for the sin or weakness of gluttony.
The sin or weakness that is more puzzling for someone of my temperament to grasp and comprehend is a sin that is perhaps mentioned less in the wisdom traditions — and that’s the sin of self-starvation; it’s the sin of starving others who are looking to us for nourishment.
A phrase comes to mind when I encounter this pattern in someone, ‘Starving at the Banquet Table!’
Imagine a person looking tired and parched, their lips are chapped, their energy is low, their demeanor worn out. You see this person standing in front of you and plaintively saying over and over, ‘I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty. I’m so, so very thirsty.’
You see this person in their plight, and you run and fetch them a tall glass of cool water and you enthusiastically present it to them thinking you are about to do some good, that you are about to quench someone’s terrible thirst. But as you offer the glass of water to this person, they don’t even look your way, but their hand does come up and knock the glass of water out of your hand, spilling it all over the ground. And the person continues same as before, ‘I’m thirsty. Lord, I’m so very thirsty.’ You can try again with a second and third glass of water, but they keep repeating the same action.
What do you do with such a person? How do you nourish them? How do you figure them out? How to you ‘crack’ their system and get through to them? And what if you love this person? What if seeing them suffer this way creates tremendous suffering in you? What if their inability to take in nourishment and their resulting misery and starved state feels like a failure on your part?
I see this pattern everywhere. People have what people need. Each person in a relationship has nourishment that the other needs. And yet, in a great many pairings, I see over and over people who are starving while standing over the banquet table. Two people who are capable of nourishing each other, two people who in the past have nourished each other tremendously, two people who were drawn to each other precisely because of the high quality nourishment they felt they could get from each other and give to each other, now in a starved state. Sometimes the engine of giving and receiving has stopped in both of them. But more often than not, I see one person in the dynamic going on a hunger strike + feeding strike and deciding to starve out both of them.
Why do people do this? What’s the upside of this starvation? And why enroll a partner into your starvation scheme? And why have such levels of deception and misdirection in the whole affair? To outright say, ‘I am fasting right now.’, would be clean. Why keep lamenting that you are hungry and then keep rejecting the food? All the while making the other chase you and struggle to give to you? What’s underneath this pattern?
I don’t have a single, comprehensive diagram for outlining the entirety of this pattern, but these are some common elements I’ve observed:
HUNGER IS A LONELY AFFAIR
A person of my temperament is likely to eat more when I’m feeling lonely. Loneliness is painful. If indulging in food and drink or something else lessens my pain of loneliness, I may seek to over-indulge as a form of analgesic.
In the anorexics, I observe their systems REACHING for loneliness. They reach for separation. They go the extra mile to render themselves (and their partner) lonely while in the midst of a marriage or a relationship.
What’s the pay off in rendering oneself lonely and famished?
It camouflages the fact that the anorexic’s system has very little capacity to TAKE IN nourishment. Being able to receive Love is its own kind of mastery. It is nothing to be taken for granted. Being able to receive Love, Affection, Approval, and Appreciation actually requires a high degree of integration and functionality in our soul.
Until this integration happens, our capacity to HOLD these frequencies of nourishment is feeble. Our container is full of holes. What is poured in, doesn’t stay in for long. Starvation and deprivation seem to be the more natural state of such a system.
Learning to be alone requires a level of internal integration. And so does being in Love.
To the anorexic, the hunger state is a bigger part of their identity. It’s what they know. Receiving and Having often creates downright panic in their system. If you ask them to explain their resistance to Receiving and Having, they may say things like, ‘I’m terrified that the good will be taken away after it has been give to me.’ Apparently, being in a state of hunger is easier for them than fearing that the state of satiation may not last.
DESERVING HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH IT
Loving someone more than they love themselves is a painful affair. Giving to someone more than they feel they deserve to receive often ends up being a failed and ungracious attempt.
You may think your partner is amazing. You may feel they deserve the world. You may be doing your best to bring them the moon. But if their esteem center is full of pits, it’s once again like trying to fill a bucket that is full of holes. You can keep pouring riches into their bucket. All that ends up happening is that you are exhausted in the end and your partner is still empty and hungry.
Can’t fix somebody else’s sense of Deserving. Can’t fix anybody’s esteem issues for them. This one is a crucible of the soul. We all have to tackle it for ourselves. To grapple with, ‘Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? What is my worth? Do I belong here? What do I deserve?’ Nobody gets a free ride on this inquiry.
RAGE BOILS UNDER THE STARVATION
Whether in a relationship or not, I often perceive rage and resentment seething under this starvation. At one level, the starvation seems self-inflicted to create a sense of separation from others. But in that very inclination to create loneliness, there is often a tremendous judgment and hatred of others who seem to be able to nourish themselves. Others who actually are enjoying the feast. Others who actually do seem to be relishing the things that the starving person cannot ingest.
Within relationships, this rage and resentment is used to punish the partner, and to starve them as well. ‘Why should you be able to have what I cannot?’.
The darkness in this pattern can run many levels deep. Often times, the anorexic operates almost like a drug dealer. The anorexic is skilled at blasting their partners with great love and sex in the beginning of the relationship. They in fact lay out the banquet for their partner. But once the seduction is complete, the banquet is served less and less often. And the hungry partner begins to live in the memory and hope of returning to the banquet days of before.
SELF-STARVATION IS ABOUT CONTROL
Control is a poor substitute for Worthiness. But it is a standard go-to substitute. Control is needed to keep avoiding one’s sense of unworthiness. Control looks good, so you can use it to hide how ugly and undeserving you feel inside. Control is functional, so you use it to gloss over how chaotic and discombobulated you feel inside. Control helps you keep your partner on a leash — the partner you feel you don’t deserve to have anyway. Control renders you lonely, and you can use it in a desperate attempt to avoid even further loneliness.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
I find the wisdom of the chakra system very useful in understanding the various aspects of our journey. One of the characteristics of the 5th center / throat chakra is the wheel of Giving and Receiving.
I think the initial wound for people who suffer from this pattern is probably in the 5th center. Even Freud’s concept of the ‘Oral Stage’ of the infant’s development is parallel to the tantric wisdom regarding the throat chakra. Freud would say our mouth and throat are our first vehicles for taking in nourishment from this world into our bodies in order to stay alive. A child is born, and first and foremost it sucks in air into its mouth and throat. If the child is unable to do this, it would perish.
Second, the child sucks nourishment from the mother’s body and receives that life-giving warmth and nutrition into its mouth and throat. If this initial intake of life-essential nourishment does not go well, then a deep panic and mistrust can be set in the system regarding how nourishing existence itself is.
And in that malnourishment is also a deep resentment of the other on whom we are dependent for our nourishment. And from there begins our struggle of how we can get the other to fulfill our needs. And how terrible it is to have needs in the first place, especially the need for other human beings.
So, two dollars worth of therapy would say, if you feel you have challenges receiving love and nourishment, chances are it has something to do with the very early relation with maternal nourishment.
If this integration of the Mastery Of Giving & Receiving sits in the 5th center, we can see how incompleteness at any of the 4 lower centers might impact it.
At the 1st Center: Do you feel you belong in this world? Do you feel this is a benevolent universe and planet? Do you feel at home here, able to absorb nourishment from the world into yourself?
At the 2nd Center: Are you embodied in your body and sex? Are you able to stay present in sensation? Are you able to take in the nourishment through touch and the full experience of having a body and being a sexual being? Do you delight in pouring into your lover?
At the 3rd Center: Do you feel worthy? Do you know who you are? Are you capable of being alone and knowing yourself separate from others? Are you capable of holding your own as well as being in friendship with others?
At the 4th Center: Have you built your capacity to give and receive Love? Are you able to hold the Love others give you? Do you feel the Love you give has great potency?
DISTRACTION & MISDIRECTIONS
This pattern is a shadow pattern. It’s a Racket. Nobody comes out and says, ‘I’m going to love bomb you in the first 2 months of our relationship and then steadily starve you for love, sex and affection because I have a deep fear of receiving and needing others, but I want to hold on to you anyway while running my survival pattern because I have deep, early issues with my mother.’ If only they did!
And oftentimes, the misdirection is so clever that the anorexics don’t even know themselves what they are doing or why they are doing it. They merely suffer a series of relationship failures from the pattern repeating itself over and over, for the same handful of reasons — Exiting lovers will refer to their hot-cold nature. Their Withholding and Withdrawal. Their absence. Their coolness. Their indifference.
Of course the anorexic person feels anything but Cool and Indifferent on their insides, but until they reach some kind of rock-bottom in their pattern, change is hard to come by. Until then, a lot of distractions and misdirection prevails. These are some common ones:
BUSY-NESS: Lots to do. Lots to get accomplished. Everything is higher on the priority list except eating and taking in nourishment. Everything is first in queue compared to the lover and their needs for love, affection, connection and sex.
SELF-PITY: How can you not pity someone so hungry? Poor me! Starving me! This self-pity is a racket that reinforces their separation identity. The self-pity is actually a crucial brick in the edifice of their pattern.
BLAME: ‘I’m hungry, because there is no nourishment for me to be had’ — spoken while standing at the banquet table.
GIVING TO GET: Only giving to people who are not capable of giving back to them. Or refusing and sabotaging when people do attempt to reciprocate.
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES: Starving out their lovers to confirm the narrative that they are alone and unnourished, and that there is nobody interested in feeding them.
I feel for the people stuck in this pattern. They evoke sadness and pity in me. But overtime, I find that the darkness of their pattern can also be a tremendous energy-suck on the people who are trying to love and nourish them. Being with such a person can create deep frustration and stagnation in your life. It’s like being stuck in the middle of the road with a broken down vehicle. You start living in the hope of someday returning to days of motion and nourishment. And months and years can pass by as you cling to this hope.
— Om
