How the experience of anorexia nourishes social work

This paper draws on the auto/biographical experience of the two authors' anorexia and, in particular, on some of the passages that shaped their course of care, in order to reflect critically on professional educational work, the two authors' field of work. The underlying hypothesis is that biographical and family roots nurture the motivations behind the choice to undertake educational work but often remain unconscious (West, 1996). The educator's competence to draw on their experience of fragility, including physical fragility, can become a resource for recognizing the invisible spaces of the possible in complex and painful life stories (West, 2016). The research methodology is duo-ethnography (Sawyer, Norris, 2013; Norris, Sawyer, Lund, 2012), characterized by a critical, dialogic and multivocal tension (Formenti & West, 2018) in which the differences in meanings that the two researchers bring are entangled in narratives that try to open new windows on experience. The experience of care took two different paths in the two life histories: the light institutionalization in day hospital in Author 2 and the beginning of the university path and the first falling in love in Author 1. Although in different ways, the act of caring took the form of new words and images that accompanied both of them to nourish their bodies with new sensations and to feel differently. In both stories, the theme of gravity is present in its embodied (the weight of the body, Bainbridge Cohen 1993), medical (the diagnosis and the semantic polarities of the psychopathology, Ugazio 2013) and socio-relational (the catalyzing effect of anorexia on the gaze of others) dimensions. This condition of gravity, although it has lost the distinct boundaries of the anorexic syndrome today, is still present in the embodied experience of the authors, particularly in the feeling of "standing precariously balanced" on the edge of a black hole. This sensitivity, however, is not only witness to stories of suffering but also carries a different professional awareness. Beyond the hybris of omnipotence of the social worker, who thinks they have to change the other or solve the other's complex and multilevel problems, there is the possibility of standing in the fluidity of change with confidence in the invisible potentialities of life.