In this special two-hour finale of Ruby, the show centers around Ruby and her friends in their six-day retreat.
Ruby’s counselor Tennie McCarty pretty much hits the nail on the head during the retreat, which she is hosting. Tennie looks at Ruby and Georgia as “little teeny boppers who don’t like to be told what to do.” Their protests and complaints about the retreat are immature.
Their attitudes are almost completely negative. I’m not sure what they expected from a six-day weight loss retreat, but it wasn’t going to be a pampering spa getaway.
More immaturity ensues when Tennie asks Julie to take off her hat during a group meeting, and she refuses. Tennie says it’s because she can’t see her eyes. But, who cares what the reason is, her refusal is just childish, even if you don’t understand the request.
“You will pull the hat from my cold dead hands before I take it off,” says Julie. Can you get more melodramatic than that?
The immaturity of the participants may be due to some of their discomforts with losing control of their eating habits. Tennie alludes to this, saying that people with eating disorders don’t like to follow directions.
And then things came boiling to the surface. Ruby broke down and started crying during an anger-release session. She later said that she just didn’t feel comfortable there. That is probably why they all were resisting everything and acting immature about the process. Not being in total control over their ability to eat what they want, and not being open-minded about how the retreat works is a sign of insecurity related to their eating disorders.
A role-playing game done for one of the participants proved successful. Joan’s father abused her mother when she was a child. Other participants played the parts of the family, while Joan took out her anger by beating a cushion with a bat. And, she felt her negative feeling released from her body.
As the show progresses, Ruby and the other ladies begin to slowly give in to the process. There begins to be some progress in dealing with the emotional issues that surround their eating disorders. Even Georgia, who has been one of the more stand-offish of Ruby’s friends, opened up about some of her emotional baggage in an exercise called “life mapping.”
The group also had another session of “gentle eating,” which we saw in the previous episode. It’s about eating a meal slowly, smelling the food, and no talking.
The last of the “life mapping” was Ruby’s. Needless to say, it was an emotional undertaking as she went over her missing childhood and heartbreaks in romance. The theme in Ruby’s life is that “everybody leaves.”
The women left the six-day intensive retreat with a newfound confidence that they can better control their eating habits. And, the show ends with Ruby meeting a TV pastor who she admires, Paula White. The pastor shares her story of sexual abuse as a child, and gives Ruby advice on how to solve the mystery of her childhood.
The show ends by flashing back to highlights of the season, and it ends abruptly over a shared prayer between Ruby and Pastor White. So, I guess we have to wait until next season to find anything out about Ruby’s childhood.