About Excess Weight

Video: About Excess Weight

Video: About Excess Weight
Video: Overweight woman body-shamed, charged extra during pedicure | What Would You Do? | WWYD 2024, March
About Excess Weight
About Excess Weight
Anonim

In some clinical approaches, excess weight is considered as a consequence of food addiction - putting it on a par with alcohol, gambling, drug addiction, and workaholism. But psychoanalysts often associate excess weight with difficulty setting boundaries.

Boundaries are a broad concept, and psychologists love it terribly. It includes a comfortable physical distance from other people for you, and the ability to protect it from intrusions, and the place in society that you think you have the right to occupy. And the ability not to allow unpleasant people too close, and the ability not to sacrifice their interests unless absolutely necessary. No one is born with these skills, they are formed gradually, from a very early age. The only boundary we were born with is the contour of our own body, our skin, and it is very permeable. In what cases will the ability to defend oneself and one's space turn out to be "full of holes"?

If the child has not had personal space since childhood. No one ever considered his desires, they were simply not heard, they were brushed aside. "Don't make it up, no one will cook for you separately." "Eat when everyone is eating." "Until you finish, you will not leave the table." These are examples about food, but they can be about anything. For example, a mother reading a child's personal diary or his correspondence. The door to "your" room, which must always be open. Parents' beatings and any physical abuse. A screaming teacher at school, when no one will say to a child frozen in horror: no, you cannot be treated like that.

If loved ones constantly violate the boundaries of the child (psychological and physical), the child will eventually accept it as a norm of life. The water is wet, the sky is blue, the parents are like that. But at a very deep level, he will continue to experience the pain of insecurity, of boundaries that are too fragile and sagging. Imagine walking in shoes with very thin soles over very sharp stones. And you will not walk like that for a kilometer, not two, but for about your whole life.

Then the body can begin to act on its own. To build up a layer of fat that will protect - from too close contact, from pain that loved ones can cause us. Protect our tenderness and sensitivity with extra fat, hide behind it. The line of the border separating us from the world becomes wide, as if it were drawn with a paint roller. A swollen body is not considered "beautiful" in our society, but the ancient programs that run in our body do not operate with aesthetic categories at all. They don't care - beautiful or ugly. It is safer for a large body to meet other objects. And with other people too.

Nobody will offend a big man.

An added bonus is the good fat layer, like a shock cushion, works both ways. It helps not only to endure pain more easily, but also to extinguish impulses of irritation, anger, anger coming from within. Perhaps this is the origin of the belief that "fat people are always kind." It's just that their anger and anger - often quite fair and natural - are extinguished before they have time to manifest. They go inside unprocessed. Lead to psychosomatic illnesses. But this is a broad topic.

Let's return to the child who did not recognize the boundaries of his body and his place in life.

The reason for this may also be inconsistency in the family - today what was allowed was forbidden yesterday (it’s not scary when grandmother permits what daddy forbids, it’s scary when the same person changes the rules). Or, when mom and dad had a scandal, the child became the main person for mom, his importance seemed to be inflated, and when they made up or mom was busy, they might not notice him at all. Or the parents divorced, each arranged his own personal life, and the child literally lost his place in the family and in the world. Such a child has many emotions, but it is very difficult to attach them to a weak body. Feelings are literally bursting from within. And the body, again, expands, swells, gains weight.

Some psychoanalysts believe that being overweight is a consequence of how difficult it is for a person to withstand their own emotions. It is not clear where the boundaries of our bodily "vessel" are and how strong it is. A weighty body is easier to find in space. Although its boundaries are still blurred - it is no coincidence that many overweight people either get better or lose weight, all the time as if passing from one state of aggregation to another.

As a rule, we don’t really trust bodily messages - how does the body feel, is it cold, hot, tired, tense, does it hurt where. And under the weight of fullness, the body freezes, its signals are barely audible, and we generally cease to notice them. So we live separately: head and body. Of course, it would be nice to connect them. Hear your body - But often the first thing we have to ourselves is to learn to defend ourselves. From insults and insults, from internal accusatory voices. From violence, physical and emotional.

Because when pain leaves space, all sorts of miracles begin to happen in it.

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