Psychosomatics Of Excess Weight

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

For each of us - women - the topic of excess weight is often a red line throughout our lives. From childhood, being a girl means being beautiful. A fat girl is not about beauty and freedom, because almost every fat girl knows how it is: to feel ashamed, which is not the same as other girls, anger - that you do not fit into a skirt or dress that you like, and fear that classmates will shouting "fatrest" after you again. Such an experience gives rise to the main task associated with weight - to separate it from oneself, not to feel any involvement with it, not to accept oneself with it.

Thus, weight becomes something separate from the person himself - something with which a struggle begins, invisible and visible, and losing it means accepting that you are ugly, and not a beautiful girl, girl, woman. That you cannot be loved, that you cannot be wanted, and you are not worthy to wear beautiful clothes and generally attract attention to yourself. This is how a woman learns to reject her own body, and with it her feelings. And the body and the senses exist in an inextricable connection, and a woman is healthy, first of all, mentally when she is in contact with her feelings, which pass through her body, and with her body, which reflects her sensory experience. This is what I want to emphasize today: the relationship between the acceptance of feelings and your own body.

Why is psychosomatics overweight? I think many of you are quite clearly aware that the kilograms gained on New Year's holidays or on vacation, or in the absence of physical activity and during pregnancy, due to illness and taking certain medications, is an absolutely physiological basis. In general, we understand that if energy expenditure does not correspond to how much and how often I absorb, my weight will grow.

Questions are raised by weight, which appears and grows with a healthy diet, sufficient activity and the absence of diseases. People often call it "hormonal", but weight gain in hormonal disorders is not always a physiological basis, as are hormonal disorders themselves. Often, weight for which there are no objective reasons is psychosomatics. And today I want to consider weight as a psychosomatic symptom.

For those of you who do not know what psychosomatics is, I will try to explain very simply, literally in a nutshell, the essence of this phenomenon: it is something mental, which was not given a place - feelings, experiences, states, emotions, thoughts that are in time the person did not place outside, did not give it a way out - which remain in the body as psychic energy, creating a block or "stagnation", turning into "canned food". In other words, these are accumulated and retained feelings, which, being unable to be expressed and lived through, turn into excess weight. Not always in weight, they can turn into any other disease related to the "happy" psychosomatic 7-ke (now I will not dwell on this) and the list of diseases added to it not so long ago, for example, such as depression and diabetes mellitus.

So, I think the most correct, before we begin to consider the reasons for the appearance of excess weight from the point of view of psychosomatics, is to say that one of the most important ways to gain it is to seize. We are faced with this literally from birth. If a baby cries, what does mom do? Feeds him. An anxious mother will feed this child when he is hungry, and when he is not hungry, and then when she is actually hungry. We literally with mother's milk learn to seize our own experiences, emotions and states. As a rule, these are very basic emotions: fear, pain, anxiety.

As a person gets older, seizing can spread to more complex, social feelings as well: shame and guilt. Why social, because these feelings are suggested to us from the outside. And the first people who have every opportunity to instill in us shame along with guilt are our parents. As a matter of fact, they teach us not to distinguish between fear, anxiety and pain, as soon as possible pushing these feelings inward along with the bun. Here I want to stop and say a few words about food abuse and the body as human boundaries.

I think many of you are familiar with the story from childhood when you were forced to eat disgusting porridge, which is useful, drink nauseous jelly in kindergarten, or be sure to have breakfast before school. It is also very unlikely that you could leave uneaten food on the plate, get up from the table without the approval of an adult and eat only when you wanted, and not when you should.

So this is what I mean: pushing something into a person's body without his consent is violence. A little later, I will talk about excess weight as a reaction of the body to sexual abuse, but now I am talking about the fact that food is no exception. The body is the only tangible boundaries of each of us. To be in your own body is to be within your boundaries. Feeling your body, feeling its needs and requirements, feeling feelings for it, experiencing different sensations thanks to it - this is to be in contact with it. This is something that, unfortunately, very, very few can boast of. We are for the most part we live in split with our feelings primarily because we are split with our own body, and it seems that the only thing we sometimes find out about him is that he wants to go to the toilet, eat, sleep and have sex. While the signals to go to the toilet are perhaps the most obvious of all of the above, there are still many questions left with the rest.

I want to lead you to the idea that splitting with your own body, lack of contact with it, rejection and rejection of it, can cause disturbances in the realization of our even the most basic needs. Eating disorders, sleep disorders, sexual dysfunctions … Therefore, perhaps, let's start with the first step of transforming our attitude to this - with accepting our own body as it is, right now. Your body is you. And you have been doing something for a very long time, unconsciously and consciously, so that today it would be just like that.

Thus, returning to excess weight, we can call first reason, which leads to it - jamming. To be more precise - emotional seizure … We seize when we are anxious, when we are afraid, when we are in pain, when we are ashamed, when we blame ourselves. Moreover, if I am small, and my anxious mother cannot dispose of her anxiety in any way other than to place it in me, then very soon I will also turn into a fat child who does not feel his real boundaries and is just as anxious in unison with his mother. That is, you know, yes? - if the mother is afraid, and she is split with her fear, then he will perfectly fit in the child along with the food, which she will diligently push into him.

I think you could observe whole families of fat people … Where excess weight is not just a psychosomatic symptom, it is a symptom of the whole family system. And we're not talking about Americans eating pounds of trans fats and tons of sugar right now. So - to contain your feelings in a child, worry about him, be afraid about him, be ashamed of him - this is the right way to his excess weight. If you want a fat child with eating disorders and other psychosomatics, you know what to do.

However, what if, as an adult woman who has never had a weight problem, I suddenly find myself getting fat for no apparent reason? What should I do about it? It is important to recognize that your weight is psychosomatic, that is, related to the feelings that you reject. If you admit that you are not very connected with your feelings, then these will be two good steps in moving towards change. In therapy, we work with clients to regain our sensitivity. Recognizing my feelings, investigating what they are connected with, what caused them to arise, how I dealt with these feelings, and then give myself permission to experience them and observe how the body responds in this case.

An especially important part is the observation of the "blind" areas of the body, those parts that are "silent". The body is a living and visible demonstration of what is left or remains inside us, what happens behind the screen of the bodily form. Everything that is held inside and burdens you emotionally, the body will manifest as excess weight that weighs on it. Well, if you do not notice yourself without excess weight, then maybe you will at least notice yourself like that ?!

It is important, getting closer to realizations about the origin of psychosomatic excess weight, to regain responsibility for what you so zealously avoid. If you imagine that you have thrown off everything that weighs you down - what will you have to face? And here feelings come … Anxiety, which we first of all seize and place in our body in the form of gained kilograms, prevents contact with feelings. This is her mental function. Feelings are always hidden behind anxiety. It is important to find out which ones, to meet with them, to live them, to realize the cause of their occurrence, to learn how to deal with them without hiding behind anxiety. Find another way to live with your feelings. And then the excess weight as a psychosomatic symptom will go away. If you do not allow yourself to experience a feeling, it is placed in the body, turning into a symptom. In our case, overweight.

So let's move on to one more reason, by which excess weight can accumulate and be retained is violence against the body. Once experienced, or the very attempts of this violence, is a traumatic experience. Our arsenal of basic needs includes security. I have already said that the body is the only boundaries that we can touch, and when the invasion occurs through the body, we clearly understand that our boundaries are violated. If, for some reason, it was not possible to defend itself during the attack, or the threat was so close, even if it retreated, the body will show the person's need for safety through excess weight.

Very often in client stories, it is sexual violence, or its attempts, that is the cause of excess weight. And due to the fact that these events are directly related to the feeling of shame in the first place, clients do not immediately share these stories, which of course makes it difficult for psychotherapeutic assistance. Therefore, if you went through such an experience, and you realize that excess weight has become its consequence, which prevents you from living happily today, do not ignore the reasons, work with it in psychotherapy.

Living with excess weight, unconsciously defending against violence, from the aggression of the world as a whole, or from the aggression of men, for example, is a choice to keep in a state of fear, to sacrifice your body, because once it seemed to betray you or was spoiled without your consent. It means to continue to disidentify with him, and to punish him. But you don’t have to punish yourself for being abused or carry extra weight so that no one will touch you - you have the right to be yourself. By making the choice to accept your body, in which you have gone through the experience of violence, and forging a coalition with it, when you and your body are allies, you will move towards feeling whole again and find other ways to protect yourself besides being overweight. …

It is important to check your feelings against the reality of your own life: if you continue to be afraid of an attack, "conserving" anger, ashamed, accusing your body of betrayal, depriving yourself of the opportunity to be visible and attracting attention, depriving yourself of healthy relationships, love, sex, sensory experience - and outside there is no danger and prerequisites to be afraid, then you are not present in your own life, and your feelings do not relate to reality, but to past experience. It is very important to work with this in therapy if you really want to regain a sense of your body, your boundaries, and yourself as whole. I want to stop here, since this is a topic for deep study, but it was important for me to say that violation of bodily boundaries is one of the most common causes of overweight psychosomatics. Therefore, mothers who forcibly stuff porridge into their children while they are choking on tears and lose the feeling of security next to a person who personifies the whole world, that is, you - pull yourself together and learn to exercise power in another place. Otherwise, years later, your child runs the risk of sitting in a chair in front of a psychotherapist with a request for an overweight job.

Another psychological reason by which we gain weight is anger and powerlessness in relation to what is happening in our life. We cannot "digest" anything that enters us. In other words, something that happens in life causes resistance, rejection or disgust, but for some reason we force ourselves to deal with it again and again. At the same time, without assimilating what is happening. The toxicity of relationships, events, repetitive situations, their unacceptability - "inedible" - for our psyche, causes a lot of anger and disagreement.

At the same time, the energy of anger is by its nature directed towards action, and if we are not ready or unable to act at the same time, then this anger and powerlessness will probably turn into excess weight as a load of circumstances pressing over us. We swell with anger from within, unable to express it outward in the form of opposition to what does not suit us. Such retroflexed anger, i.e. wrapped on itself, and not shown outward, can help us build up a lot of extra pounds on our body. Sometimes clients who have approached the threshold of being aware of the volume of their held in the body anger in therapy say that they think they will explode, they will be torn apart, it will be like an atomic explosion if they let their anger finally come out. When a person allows this energy to be released, accompanied by a therapist, he gradually begins to feel relief - and the kilograms that seem to melt before our eyes are a confirmation of this.

By the way, powerlessness is a very powerful state, concealing in itself a huge amount of repressed anger, and neurotic depression clearly demonstrates what happens when we choose to be inactive, ignoring our own anger. By action, I mean not only the struggle with external circumstances, and attempts to change something. A person in captivity reveals his powerlessness, and surrenders to circumstances, accepting that he cannot act, since he is limited in freedom, and then there is not a question of responsibility, but a question of accepting what is happening and finding a resource for survival. By action, I mean at least the choice to figure out what exactly causes disagreement, and try to look for ways to extract this from your life without suffering from psychosomatics and becoming overweight.

When we are small, we are not responsible for what gets into our mouth from the table, who invades our body, and how to deal with it, until we ourselves have learned how to deal with it, and of course we do not choose those who surround us, and then in what living conditions we are placed. But when we are adults, we are responsible for all this. Therefore, if a person has psychosomatic excess weight, we can talk about how much of a child's position he takes in relation to his own life, how much responsibility he does not take for himself, and what his excess weight speaks to when addressing an unjust world - perhaps about that he doesn't "digest" it?

You know, it is very important to analyze what your excess weight consists of. True, because we are all are full not only fears and anxieties, shame and self-accusations, but also beliefs, beliefs, attitudes, some fundamental views on which we rely in our own life. All this is a kind of mental and emotional baggage, and sometimes the body very clearly reflects which one. Is it a "lifeline" on the stomach, and curious - from what he saves or should save its owner? Whether it is a "backpack" on the back in the form of a hump, which a person has been dragging along for a long time, without unbending under his load. Either these are thick "elephant-like" legs that seem disproportionate in relation to the rest of the body, but seem to help their owner feel more stable in this life. Or maybe the whole body looks more like a kind of inflated protective suit, from under which only the head is visible, which seems to still control it?..

It is often quite difficult for a person to realize why he is overweight. In general, the authorship of the choice to be overweight is far from immediately available, and when it is available, it causes a lot of resistance. But without appropriating your choice to be overweight, you can't do anything about it. Because in order to get well, you first need to admit that you are sick. And then decide to get well, and take some actions on the way to this, taking responsibility for your own health.

Working with an overweight symptom as psychosomatic also means that you investigate yourself on behalf of your own symptom. I will share this technique with you a little: a psychotherapist helps you to take on the role of your symptom, to become this overweight, and on his behalf, explain how he ended up in your body, why he is in it, how long has he lived in it, in connection with what events, and how long will it stay in your body. Well, and perhaps most importantly, what are you doing to keep your weight in your body? And what do you need to start doing in order for him to leave you? So you can start now by standing in front of the mirror and listening to what your excess weight is telling you.

Well, I really want to complete a number of reasons for the psychosomatics of excess weight. obvious and even poetic reason - giving weight … When weight is about the weight of something. The direct question is - what do you want to give weight in yourself? What needs to gain weight in your personality for others to notice you? For some people, adding weight to their personality by literally being overweight is the only way they can. How does this happen, you ask? Well, in the search for recognition, a person is able to increase his scale even bodily, without realizing it. And if you invite such a person to consider his life strategy, then he will be perplexed for a long time by what other ways he could win the favor of other people, except to grow literally in breadth in their eyes.

Remember, at the beginning I said that the main mechanism that helps to accumulate psychological excess weight is the retention of feelings. When we seek recognition, and desperately need to be noticed, and perhaps even admired, we are in compensation for the inner insignificance that we met in childhood. You couldn't laugh loudly, run, shout, cry, express your feelings through active actions, you couldn't show yourself either with your anger or with your joy. In general, leaning out once again was dangerous: this was followed by punishment or rejection. You were kicked out of the room, so as not to interfere, covered your mouth, beaten with a belt, deprived of warmth and communication, deprived of toys or friends, dismissed you, constantly devalued your achievements at school, compared with other children, forced to behave quietly and peacefully, shamed your endeavors, and so on and so forth. And so you grew up with an eternal sense of your own unrecognition, and you found that becoming fat is the safest thing. At least they will definitely notice you, they will completely reckon with you and are unlikely to be beaten. Being fat = being weighty, that's the whole point.

Unfortunately, the choice to live with excess weight is not a choice of yourself in this case, it is a choice to continue to support your parents' idea that you are nothing and agree with it. After all, excess weight is a problem with clothes, this is shortness of breath, this is problems with the gastrointestinal tract and heart, this is a lack of body aesthetics, this is most likely a lack of high-quality sex, this is somehow a meeting with the disgust of some people contemplating your folds and fats, this is an endless lie convincing yourself that your personality has finally gained weight - you are not just visible, it is impossible not to admit that you are when you occupy two seats on the plane.

I suggest you be honest with yourself. The psychosomatics of being overweight is a reason to think about why you complicate your life by choosing to be in an unhealthy body. Why use old-fashioned ways to cope with your own life. Why deny yourself a sense of the integrity and connectedness of your feelings and thoughts with the body. Why don't you feel your own boundaries, or do you build such extra weight that you never get to yourself? In the end, do you realize that you are finite in this body? The body that YOU create with your daily a choice - to be alive, which means feeling and acting, or to be just a bioorganism, signaling that it is time to go to the toilet.