Susie Orbach - Body distress or troubled bodies

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Nowadays, I would say almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body en passant, as though it is not something to be dealt with because it is just something you have to live with.

About Susie Orbach
"I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer, and the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York.

I look at how the issues of society are structured into the individual, and constitute how we become who we are, but holding on to the notion that we live in a society and that every relation that exists is imbued with the power relations, the unconscious desires, the longings, and the struggle for subjectivity that exists between people."

Key Points

• As a psychotherapist, I have noticed an increase in what I would call body distress, or troubled bodies. Nowadays, almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body as though they have accepted it’s something they have to live with.
• I would say the vast majority are people who have body distress in the form of thinking they’re much too big. The second issue is age: the young ones want to be older and the women in their 40s all want to be younger-looking.
• Girls are producing a kind of sexuality that has to do with performance rather than the expression of their own sexual desire. The huge prevalence of pornography means that both girls and boys end up confused about what an erotic is and what sex is.
• When we come to the issue of trans, the idea of being able to get out of your body and into another body, and reconstruct a body, has a certain attraction because you have a desire to end up in a different place than the distressed body you're in.

Accepting our body distress?

As a psychotherapist, I have noticed an increase in what I would call body distress, or troubled bodies. When I started to practise, people with body difficulties would say, I have an eating problem – I throw up all the time, or I can’t eat, or I’m eating too much. They might have said they were too fat no matter what their size. They were very interested in working on that as a problem, as a manifestation of having a troubled body. Nowadays, I would say almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body en passant, as though it is not something to be dealt with because it is just something you have to live with.

There is a deep acceptance now of being perhaps frightened of food, preoccupied with how you look, worried about whether you’re physically active or not, preoccupied with whether you should have cosmetic surgery, or involved in behaviours such as cutting oneself. At first these seem inexplicable to the individual, but they come to understand that these behaviours are a means to try to deal with their pain. People can be very reluctant to think that anything can be done in the therapy because they’ve been trying to solve the body problem for themselves for a very long time and they’ve either given up or they’ve sought commercial solutions.

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