Her photos resemble my mother when they were the same age. They could be bobbsey twins.

Both look like their skin is draped over a skeletal frame.

My niece has young children to raise. I wonder if said niece knows how unhealthy she looks?

I won't say anything, but I hope she isn't suffering from the disease of anorexia nervosa or something else as serious.

My mom suffered from anorexia nervosa. My niece is a perfectionist to the nth degree. I know from being a past TBM how dangerous a combination that can be.

in b 4 ~ utah people have bad genetics because polygamy ~

ziller Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> in b 4 ~ utah people have bad genetics because
> polygamy ~

You're right about that, notably in the Short Creek area. It's been documented.

"A polygamous, Mormon community in Utah is facing what has been labelled a “genetic disaster”.

Children born into the remote Utah community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) are a million times more likely than the average person to develop a rare, debilitating genetic disorder, the BBC reports.

Doctors claim they have discovered 20 cases of the disorder – which can cause seizures, facial deformities, and severe brain damage – in the Utah FLDS community. Previously, they knew of just 13 cases in the world....

Faith Bistline, a former Short Creek resident, told the BBC that five of her cousins have the disease. All five are severely physically and mentally disabled, and only one can walk. They all live on feeding tubes and require round-the-clock care....

The disease is extremely rare because it is recessive, meaning both parents need to carry faulty copies of the gene for their child to inherit it. Scientists put the odds of inheriting fumarase deficiency at one in 400 million.

But in a community like FLDS – where most people are polygamous, and the majority are related – the chance of inheriting two faulty genes is much higher. Researchers estimate that thousands of people living in Short Creek currently carry the gene."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mormon-polygamists-utah-genetic-disorder-fumarase-deficiency-fundamentalist-church-of-jesus-christ-a7875671.html

If Amyjo needs to vent, I say let her vent.

I came from a controlling, perfectionist household and am an anorexia survivor. So is my sister. It would have meant a lot to know that someone saw through my coping mechanism. No one seemed to, but my disordered eating wasn’t as bad as my sister’s.

megthegreekling Wrote:
------------------------------------------------------
>
> I came from a controlling, perfectionist household
> and am an anorexia survivor. So is my sister. It
> would have meant a lot to know that someone saw
> through my coping mechanism. No one seemed to, but
> my disordered eating wasn’t as bad as my
> sister’s.

Niece's TBM husband seems overly controlling that she's married to. It makes me wonder who is exerting more pressure on her to keep thin, him or her?

She doesn't look healthy. I do hope she's getting proper medical attention because she has children who depend on her.

My mom was overly controlling, same as her father was. I suffered some with eating disorder as an older teenager and into my early 20s. By time I went to college there was actually a support group for men and women who suffered from anorexia &/or bulimia. That was what helped me over the hurdle. I was in college when Karen Carpenter died from the effects of anorexia nervosa. It was a wake-up call for me to get help.

I'm glad to hear you're a survivor.

Anorexia had become an epidemic for grade schoolers where my children were attending in NYC by the 80s and 90s. It was something parents were very aware of. Children as young as primary grades were developing it. A lot of that was related to peer pressure.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2019 04:29AM by Amyjo.

Sadly, they can starve to death.

But there isn't much to do about it unless someone has a close connection with the person. Writing a note of concern might be a good idea though.

Is this related to mormonism. It is if the person is a perfectionist who is affected by mormon doctrine about being perfect.

She's very much a perfectionist. She is the only child in her family who graduated college, got her master's. Went on a mission (another sibling did the same there.) And is married with children knocking herself out with a two-fold career. Trying to have it all.

I see her with one foot on the edge of a precipice waiting for it to collapse and go over the edge. She can't have it all but will die trying. She tries hard keeping up the image of the perfect wife with the perfect marriage, perfect family, perfect career, yada yada. It's all a facade. Her tension and stress shows through the veneer. The pretense, so much pretense of the Mormon myth as well. The cognitive dissonance there the whole time.

The expectations of being a Mormon mother/wife/career woman to must look good all the time to keep hubby happy etc. maintaining appearances. She looks more strained, stressed, raggedy, and worn down from the toll it is taking on her body. She's one beat away from a nervous breakdown or sheer exhaustion.

She's hard on others like she is on herself. Very demanding and difficult to be around. Her children are growing up with the same unrealistic expectations she has for herself to be overachievers and perfectionists. Instead of just letting them be children and decide for themselves what they want to be on their own. Children are like flowers and bloom in their own unique way. Setting the same expectations for her children may be setting them up for disappointment and failure. Like her siblings for example. No one in her family compares to her 'achievements.' Or supposed achievements if you count a couple of degrees, a mission, temple marriage, and having several children etc. Then hubby sent her to work after her work-at-home career didn't pan out as she'd hoped. So her SAHM life isn't the SAHM life she'd envisioned for herself.

Still a perfectionist in every sense of the word. And perfectionists can be difficult to live with, without an eating disorder.

I doubt her husband would address it with her if he is the one who doesn't want her gaining weight and insists she be thin for him. That might be a reason why she has developed one. I don't recall her as having one before to my knowledge.

Maybe she has some other illness she may not even be aware of. That thought occurred to me also, heaven forbid.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2019 04:26PM by Amyjo.

FACT: Intervention may save her life.
-

Say nothing. Look the other way.

Get busy with other worthwhile tasks, but by no means help her through swift, sure intervention.

Avoid thoughts that lead only to discomfort, due to inaction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj5Y6OxdWGI

You might consider bringing it up with either her or her mom, mentioning that your own mother suffered from it.

Having said that, some people are just naturally very thin -- size 00 thin. This past week I saw a colleague that I hadn't seen in person in more than ten years. She used to be painfully thin. Now in mid-life she is just a bit plump.

I'd like to say something, but for the fact she was the one who took some slight at my brother's funeral and we haven't spoken since.

She's very narcissistic in her own right (takes after my mother that way herself.)

My SIL went to great lengths to keep our families separated while these kids were growing up. So my niece didn't get to bond with my mother at all. Yet she takes after my mother much more than she realizes. She also looks the most Jewish in that family.

My mother didn't get intervention for her health problems either. My brother married my mother basically when he married my SIL. Both women were/are hypochondriacs. Only with my mother it caught up with her in the end, and she died young for her age (67.) From poor health care, and the effects of anorexia among other things wrong with her including smoking. Her health had deteriorated to such a degree she wasn't the person we once knew. .

My niece like her mother would take offense if I did say something. Her mom is plump, overweight, and in poor overall health herself. They would say niece is just slender. But she is skin and bones like my mother was. Niece also has a hereditary genetic mutation from my brother that will shorten her life. He was the first one in our family to get it. My mom told me when I was in my 20's he wasn't supposed to live to be 35. She didn't tell him that because she didn't want him to worry and she wanted him to live as full a life as possible while he could. He lived to his early 60's. He found out eventually, but was in a form of denial about it. Much like he was about Mormonism.

If I could say something I would. It just isn't possible given the current non-existent family dynamics. My SIL has gone to great lengths to scrub my brother's side of the family from her children's memory. She is very insecure, maybe because her father left her mother when she was a teenager for another woman from their ward. I don't think she ever got over that.

They didn't even know where brother was born for his obituary. Or his birth order in the line of siblings. That's how little they knew about his life. I found that rather shocking to go a lifetime and not know the little details of their husband and father. But that's because to them those little details were of little significance. It mattered to me enough to make a change in the guest book comments noting where he was born, and that he was the oldest of the siblings. That may be why niece took offense. Otherwise I'm at a loss to know what on earth was the matter. If that was the reason, what a petty thing to get upset about.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2019 01:48PM by Amyjo.

As someone who suffered with an eating disorder / bullemia for years, I understand the complexities.

I don't know what to say, other than I feel for you and your niece and I'm sending good thoughts your way.

Maybe intervention works??? I know when I was deeply in it, there wasn't anything anyone could have said that would have changed my mindset. I was doing the "right" thing, I believed. I don't know. It's so complicated.

Hugs to you and niece.

Ah, thank you so much.

I was sent by Family Search.org last night my baby sister's obituary from Salt Lake City, I had never seen before from its church record index files. I matched it to her name on our family tree, and it brought back memories of her birth and death. She was only five days old when she died.

She was born on the day it was sent. So it's no "accident" that Family Search sends out feelers to family I suppose on anniversaries of loved ones events with bits and pieces of vital information we didn't know existed up to now.

It told me where our family lived, for example, in Salt Lake City when I was five years old. I googled that address, and I see it is now in the Holladay suburb which is a high end suburb of SLC today. Back then it wasn't. It was just a modest working class neighborhood where people of modest means could afford to live.

Now you have to have a lot of money to be able to buy into that area it's become so darned expensive to own property there.

Aside of all that, another thing I've learned since my baby sister died was that an aunt of mine on my father's side told me years ago when I was around 40, that my mother starved my baby sister before she was born. That is why she died.

I'd always believed she was born premature until my aunt told me this. But auntie said, No, Amyjo, your mother starved herself through each of her pregnancies. With your little sister (it was her last pregnancy she would have in fact,) my little sister was a full term baby that only looked premature because she was severely undernourished.

I had not known that before. My mother never owned up to it. My sister died in the Cottonwood Hospital. I don't know if it's still a fixture or not in the Cottonwood Heights area or Holladay, but that is where we lived then before we moved on where dad followed construction jobs from one state to another back then.

I was heartbroken to learn my sister died from malnutrition because my mother didn't take care of her body when she was expecting her. Such a simple thing to do. And yet Anorexia Nervosa is not a simple disease of mind over body. My mom must have been consumed with a poor self-image of herself or she wouldn't have gone to such an extreme self-abuse which was what basically led to the death of her last full-term infant child.

Grieving for my little sister was totally different at age five than it was again at age 40sh. But I went through it a second time once my aunt had told me about my mother starving her to death.

Anorexia doesn't just effect the person obviously, but those in their sphere of influence. In a LDS family such as my niece, her children are on the receiving end of her toxic perfectionism. I really worry for them even more than I do for her by the harmful messages she's sending them. Not just about that, but about family and the way her mother has poisoned her against our side of the family. She will never really get to fully know and appreciate her father's rich heritage because they've cut themselves off from his paternal side. Through their mother they've learned to be snobs and arrogant on top of their toxic behavior. Communicating with them is next to impossible now that my brother is deceased. He was the compassionate voice in that family. Now that he is gone, the empathy if it was ever there is non-existent for the others.

If their children grow up like them, they won't take after their grandfather. They'll all be self-centered spoiled narcissistic brats. Because that's how my SIL has treated them and let them get away with things their whole life. She's been their enabler.

My brother was the glue that held that family together, and with the extended family. With him gone, they've pretty much splintered. And gone deeper into seclusion/isolation from the real world. Their cognitive dissonance runs deep.

SIL parents were conspiracy theorists/doomsday types who lived with them preaching the world was ending and they were building a fortress to keep out the world. Then they died in their house one by one. Next my brother died in their house. Next in line who knows? That house is going to be full of spooky ghosts (a 6,000 sq ft home that they can't even sell on the market,) and may end up an abandoned property if she can't keep up the taxes on it.

When my dad stayed with them while he was convalescing with a back injury many years back, they were just leaving him to die even though he wasn't terminally ill. One of my cousins came and rescued him from their home to care for him at her home. She treated dad like a king. She told me he was her last living uncle (her dad's brother,) and she wasn't going to let anyone treat him like that. My TBM RM nephew went to bring my dad a glass of water one day in the computer room since he couldn't move to go get it himself. My dad asked him what took him so long? He took like an hour to bring him the water. He stood in the doorway staring at his grandpa, holding the glass with water in it, and jerked his hand back saying, "If you don't want it, I won't give it to you," as rudely as he could muster.

No humility at all, just rudeness and disrespect toward his grandfather who was in dire need of a drink of water. That was how their other grandparents had died there. From starvation and dehydration when they were dying from cancer. They were doing the same to my dad, and like I said before, he wasn't even terminally ill.

So that's the environment my niece grew up in. Whacko.

I worry about her knowing there isn't a darn thing I can do about it. My dad was a worrier too. That must run in my genes. I get that from my dad. But moreso for their little children. They don't stand a chance given that environment they're growing up in. It's sad watching their sweet little faces becoming hardened and distorted as they grow up.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/07/2019 10:33AM by Amyjo.