Bodyweight Quotes

“Eating disorders are a silent form of destruction: a destruction of vitality and the hope for a meaningful existence. They create the illusion of time stopping. Past, present, and future collapse: the insidious negative self-talk is too loud, and/ or the aftermath of trauma too pervasive and/or the affects too overwhelming. The body itself becomes the theater of war (McDougall, 1989) wherein the feelings, memories, longings, and stories that have led to the symptoms feel so dangerous that they are dissociated from the behaviors themselves.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“The focus on one's own body as an object inhibits self-awareness and leads to stultifying self-consciousness.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“A person struggling with an eating disorder keeps their rituals and disordered behaviors secret - it is a double life of sorts - and the behaviors themselves could be thought of as a maladaptive attempt at a solution. The symptoms are used to maintain a state of mind, full of fantasies of the possibilities of a 'moment' or a 'life', without what 'feels' unbearable. The person, in the eating disorder (ED) 'body-state,' truly believes that there is no other way.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Sadly, fierce in-group/out-group biases live within the eating disorder complex, generating and sustaining an ethical code of the culture as girls and women project their shadow upon one another. Individuals with anorexia secretly scorn those who struggle with bulimia or binge eating, those with bulimia and binge eating feel gross, often “wishing to be anorexic,” yet detesting their slim sisters with vicious jealousy. A callous hierarchy is formed, with anorexia as the ideal; bulimia, as a very distant underworld second; and binge eating, clearly at the bottom of acceptability.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak

“In other words, a complex resides in the unconscious. Which means it possesses autonomy, exerting force upon the individual regardless of his/her conscious intent.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Complexes and their associated archetypes are the building blocks or blueprints of earliest human experience.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders