In order to be good, I have to feel bad…

 Anyone who looks at me can see that I am fat, yet even calling myself fat and not being embarrassed or ashamed of that simple fact is less ordinary than we might think. Stigma is attached to being fat. Everywhere every day we encounter messages about weight and dieting and by implication the undesirability of fat. So, fat activists some years ago began to talk about and write about “coming out” —

“Unlike the gay body, the fat body is always already out. The fat body is of course hypervisible in terms of its mass in relation to the thinner bodies that surround it. As Moon suggests, the fat body displays ‘‘a stigma that could never be hidden because it simply is the stigma of visibility’’, and asks the question ‘‘What kind of secret can the body of the fat woman keep?’” — Samantha Murray

To come out as fat means to own it without apology or defense. It means owning my body as my own. It means surrendering the idea that the “real” me is thin and one day I will find the right diet or pill or potion that will release me and make me that “real” me. It means confronting inside myself the internalized fatism and stop hating my body. It means resting quietly within myself. 

Coming out as fat is not the same as coming out in the LGBT world. Because fat is visible and it is no secret to anyone who sees me that I am fat. In the case of fat, it is not a statement to the world, to my world, so much as a statement to myself, reflecting acceptance in myself of my body. 

But as a fat woman, in order to be good, I have to feel bad. In order to feel good, I have to be bad.

If I want to be perceived as good, I, and fat people in general, must present myself as the Good Fatty, the fat person who accepts the socially dominant viewpoint that my number one goal in life is losing weight. All I have to do is talk about trying to lose weight, about my desire to be thin. I can say I have lost 10 or 15 or 30 pounds and I will be praised for my efforts, even if it is a lie. The Good Fatty is apologetic for being fat and is in a perpetual state of trying to become thin. The Good Fatty doesn’t’t threaten thin people because she tells them she is engaged in the same struggle to subdue her body that they are. The Good Fatty is apologetic for her fat, as if she must ask forgiveness for committing an aesthetic crime with her too-muchness or must do penance for taking up too much space. She doesn’t complain that very few stores carry clothing in her size. She accepts as just that she pays more for her clothing, health care, and seats on airplanes. Because she knows she deserves it. She accepts without protest the “helpful” advice and criticism she receives from others because she is trying to become better, to become thin. She swallows her anger because she knows it is all her fault, that she has failed, and is getting what she deserves. She manages her fat identity by covering, by accepting that she should not be fat. She tries to cover her failure by always being in the process of trying to change, a perpetual state of atonement for the sin of being too big and too much.  She can be good so long as she feels bad.

But suppose I want to feel good, not bad. What then? Suppose I call myself fat. Not curvy. Not Rubenesque. Not zaftig or plump. Fat. I call myself fat. Just by calling myself fat, using that word unselfconsciously and without shame or apology, is to move away from being the Good Fatty. Just by calling myself fat, I break a taboo.

But what else? Embracing myself as I am. Coming out as myself, a fat woman who is simply who she is, what she is.

I made the decision over 40 years ago to stop dieting, I never talked about it with friends. I wasn’t dieting but I wasn’t willing to be public with having stepped out of being good, of forever being on the way to being thin. Being the Good Fatty is acting as if I embrace body hatred, dieting, guilt and shame so that I can at least be on the fringes of membership in the “normal” world. I can be good only by feeling bad. By feeling bad I can in a way be normal, be like other women. So stopping dieting is not coming out. It is an act of rebellion, to be sure, but the rebel is always defined by that against which she rebels. 

Coming out means being willing to be bad. It means letting go of the fantasy that there is a thin person inside waiting to get out and that she, not this fat me, is the real one. Coming out is to stop pretending to be trying to lose weight when I am not. Coming out means stopping defending how I eat or my health. Coming out is letting go of shame and embracing the body I have. Coming out is accepting myself, all of myself, fat and all. I can’t be good, be the way I am expected to be and do all of these things.

Perhaps the hardest thing, the most difficult part of coming out as fat, of leaving being good behind, is to really inhabit my fat body. Unconditionally. To love myself, my body exactly as it is, and not withhold that until I lose the 50 or 100 or however many pounds stand between me and being “normal”. No more apologies. No more mute acceptance of dieting advice. No more feeling bad because I take up space. That is the path to feeling good. It leads through a mountain of unexpressed rage and anger at having tried so hard for so long to be good, at having felt guilty and ashamed and bad for being too much. 

Therapy with a therapist who does not equate health with weight can be invaluable in the journey away from self-hatred to self-acceptance and love. 

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Please Tell Me What To Do

Often people say they left therapy because “the therapist wasn’t helping” with an expectation that the therapist should DO something — assign homework, give an exercise, something that feels like “doing”.

Now if I go to the dentist because I have pain in my mouth and the dentist doesn’t help, leaving to seek help elsewhere seems reasonable. But I look to the dentist to *do* something to make me feel better. The dentist does not usually, at least in acute situations, require of me that I do more than be cooperative and hold my mouth open. But psychotherapy is a different thing altogether. Therapists do not perform procedures upon patients in order to relieve their suffering. We might sometimes wish we could and certainly patients wish we would, but it just isn’t that way.

In any depth psychotherapy, the therapist does not tell the patient how to solve problems. The focus of treatment is exploration of the patient’s psyche and habitual thought patterns. The goal of treatment is increased understanding of the sources of inner conflicts and emotional problems. This understanding is what we call insight. Now insight without action is pretty useless. But the therapist doesn’t say to do this or that but instead might ask how this new understanding might be put into action in the patient’s life.

In order to accomplish this work of therapy, the patient and therapist must have a good working relationship, or therapeutic alliance. The patient needs to feel that the therapist is on her side, so to speak, allied with her in her desire to have a better, happier life. And in turn, the therapist needs from the patient a willingness to do the work of therapy, to put feelings into words, to talk about what she is thinking and feeling. And that includes being willing to talk about feelings of anger, disappointment or frustration about the therapy or therapist.

Most often when I hear people saying that therapy isn’t helping, I am also hearing an expectation that the therapist will tell the person what to do in order to feel better. And  to a very limited degree, we can do some of that — like take a walk or write in a journal or try painting or some other creative outlet when having difficulty between sessions. But on the big things — like whether or not to stay in a marriage or change careers or leave home or any of many many other important life decisions, we cannot tell a patient what to do. We, as human beings ourselves, have enough trouble finding our way through the complexities of our own lives and not only cannot, but really should not presume to be in a position to make decisions for others in their lives. No matter how much the patient may want it. But talking about wanting that, being angry that therapist won’t do it — that is the stuff of therapy. Because it is the relationship with the therapist that facilitates change.

Ultimately we behave with the therapist the way we do with most important people in our lives, with the same kinds of assumptions about the therapist and about ourselves. And we do so unquestioningly. 

It is also true that it is difficult for the therapist to respond to feelings and issues that the patient does not talk about. All rumors to the contrary, we are not mind readers! This underlies the basic therapeutic dictum that the patient should say whatever comes to mind.

Now of course, this is difficult for most of us, conditioned as we are by social norms, by rules we have learned from our parents. Remember Thumper in Bambi:”If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”? Most of us operate on some version of that in our relationships and avoid saying things to another person that we think might make them uncomfortable or angry with us. But therapy is a place where Thumper’s Rule needs to be suspended. So, if you don’t tell the therapist you don’t feel cared about, there isn’t much the therapist can do to help you with that. Similarly if you are angry with the therapist, have sexual feelings toward him or her, or any of the myriad of other feelings and thoughts about the therapist you might have. It all belongs in therapy. Putting those feelings into words is a key  part of what therapy is about, after all, because that opens the doorway to understanding where they come from and how to deal with them in ways that are helpful rather than destructive in life.

For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering. The rapport consists, after all, in a constant comparison and mutual comprehension, in the dialectical confrontation of two opposing psychic realities. If for some reason these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced. Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found. C.G.Jung 

Now is a good time…

As more of us are becoming vaccinated and we begin to believe that the end of this very difficult time is in sight, oddly many of us are experiencing mildly-moderately distressing effects from having our lives constrained for the past year. Yesterday I read this very thoughtful article in the Atlantic:

Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain

We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.

One provocative thought:

“We’re trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.”

I haven’t driven more than a few miles this whole confined year. And though, as an introvert I haven’t found being just with myself and my husband unbearable, even I am chafing at the pace of return to whatever will be normal.

If you are finding this time difficult, that the forgetting that seems to come with living through this pandemic and its attendant confinement, now is a good time to consider therapy. To have a place  and time to talk about what has happened with your life this past year, about your fears, about the discoveries you have made about yourself.

I have openings. Contact me using the contact form on the Home page. I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Fat Patient, Thin Therapist

It is usually assumed that in a room with a slender therapist and a fat patient, it is the patient who has a weight problem. That therapist, benefitting from thin privilege may well assume that the way she eats, what she eats and how she exercises are what make her different from her patient, what make her thin and her patient fat. She may believe that because she carefully monitors what she eats and faithfully exercises, that she has control over her body, control that the fat woman could have if only she tried harder and did as she does. There is nothing in the media or even the professional literature to contradict her assumptions.

There are powerful transference/countertransference forces operating in therapy when fat enters the picture. As a fat patient I came to work with slender analysts with a full set of baggage and expectations based solely on my fears and projections about how my fat body would be experienced and regarded. Nothing in my experience with others contradicted these fears. And more often than not, my fears were borne out as valid. The language used to describe obesity – words like “grotesque”, “gargantuan”, “repulsive” – betray much about feelings toward fat people. It is important for the slender therapist to look within about her own attitudes and responses to fat.

A fat patient who wants to talk about weight exclusively, as if it were all that matters in life, is as much avoidant as is the fat patient who ignores weight entirely. And in either case, the therapist needs to be aware of how her own biases and/or discomfort play a role in this. There are very fine lines here. Weight and appearance and being outside the established norms are touchy things. It is difficult to become accepting of one’s own deviant(in the sense of differing from whatever is considered ‘normal’) body, to be at home with being different. The ambivalence is massive. The longing to fit in is right there next to defiance and anger about not being accepted. The therapist needs to walk that line without falling to either side, either by urging and cajoling weight loss or by denying the difficulties of being different from the expected norm. These are tricky waters for a therapist with thin privilege to try to navigate.

Just as we now know white analysts need to learn about African American culture, our fictional slender analyst needs to learn about the life her fat patient leads, about fat experience, about the experience of being reviled, judged, shunned, pathologized on a daily basis. And consider what her own unresolved body issues might be, because as Barbara Miller writes:

the experience of the analyst may…have to do with his or her own neurotic blind spots. And the analyst needs to consider such a possibility. Concerning neurosis Jung writes, ‘Behind a neurosis there is often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear’… And we can say that the analyst’s own not suffered pain can all too easily be disowned and then ‘found’ as the pain of the analysand: the neurotic countertransference. 

A female therapist, regardless of her weight, has had to deal with the expectations that women should be slender and attractive. Most likely she has dieted or thought about  dieting, fretted about any fluctuation in her weight, and experienced some anxiety about whether or not she is pretty enough, slender enough to attract a partner. In this sense she and her fat patient have shared experience, but her patient’s anxiety and fretting have not resulted in the slender body that the therapist has. And this can well become a source for a blind spot in the therapist – if she has been able through diet and exercise to be thin, then why wouldn’t that also be the answer for her fat patient?

That slender therapist needs to consider where her ideas about fat and fat people come from, what supports those ideas. The one article in Quadrant, a Jungian journal, in which obesity is even addressed carries bias right in the keywords given for the article: obesity, gorging, overeating, gluttony, hunger. 

Outside of the realm of fat studies, the Health At Every Size movement, and fat acceptance circles, the fat person is not seen as trustworthy or reliable about her own lived experience because it is assumed she is always defensive and denying the reality of her condition. If she says she eats moderately, often it will be asserted that she is in denial about how much she actually eats or some comment will be made about the unreliability of self-report. The fat woman is simply not trustworthy. 

Wilfred Bion’s dictum is to approach each session without memory or desire. If the therapist has in mind that her fat patient needs to lose weight in order to heal, whatever that means, then she is in fact imposing her agenda without determining if that is what the patient wants or needs. When the therapist holds this desire for her patient to change in particular ways, when she asserts her own agenda for the patient, Barbara Stevens Sullivan suggests that desire “reflects a yearning to be helped. “If I can put all the woundedness I sense in the room into the patient, and if I can fix it in him, I will be fixed, too”

The assumption, for both therapist and patient, most often is that if the patient loses weight and becomes slender, she will become more the person she is meant to be, that she will be healthier and happier. For any fat woman, her fat identity will remain no matter her weight — her memories of being fat, of her longings and pain alongside secret delight in her big body — are part of the fabric of her being and need to be heard, witnessed, and accepted. For the thin therapist this may mean receiving anger toward her as a representative of thin privilege, as one of the oppressors her fat patient has lived with. I think of my own rage when my first analyst blithely suggested I could lose a few pounds no matter my goals. A paradox for the therapist of a fat patient is that as Sullivan says,  “the analyst must let go of desire, even the desire to help, at the same time as she remains involved and concerned, desiring the best for her patient” and, I would add, accept that the best for her patient may not be what she herself would want or choose.

Even Good Guys…

This week there was a thread on Twitter about Irvin Yalom and how kind he is. I have read many of his books and have no doubt that in general he is indeed a kind person. 

I have been thinking and writing about the essay, “Fat Lady” in Irvin Yalom’s book, Love’s Executioner, which I read soon after it was published in 1989, for years. I was horrified by what he wrote:

The day Betty entered my office, the instant I saw her steering her ponderous two-hundred-fifty-pound, five-foot-two-inch frame toward my trim, high-tech office chair, I knew that a great trial of countertransference was in store for me.  

I have always been repelled by fat women. I find them disgusting: their absurd sidewise waddle, their absence of body contour‚ breasts, laps, buttocks, shoulders, jawlines, cheekbones, everything, everything I like to see in a woman, obscured in an avalanche of flesh. And I hate their clothes‚ the shapeless, baggy dresses or, worse, the stiff elephantine blue jeans with the barrel thighs. How dare they impose that body on the rest of us? (Yalom, 1989, pp. 94-95)

Yalom has been much praised for openly admitting such strong prejudice, such clear negative countertransference. And indeed it takes some courage to openly admit such feelings.  But in most of what I have read about that essay, no one questions that his revulsion in fact dominates the entire therapy. Nor are questions raised that he could think and feel this: “How dare they impose that body on the rest of us?” as if any of his patients owe it to him to be pleasing to his eye. Then again, it is acceptable to hate fat and to think ill of fat people so there was little chance of serious criticism except from the fat acceptance community whose opinions could be dismissed as defensive. Nevertheless, he does deserve credit for daring to say what no doubt many therapists think. But it is not enough to do that nor to feel bad about having done so. To fully understand how bad this kind of countertransference is, change “fat” to “Black” or “African American” — there would be a huge outcry over expression of such prejudice, even when admitted. But Betty was fat so many people felt and feel the way Yalom did.

In the course of the treatment described in Yalom’s essay, Betty loses 100 pounds. Of course, because weight is seen as the cause of her depression, because she loses so much weight, the therapy is deemed spectacularly successful.  Another story is revealed in the end of the essay when Yalom says:

“It’s the same with me, Betty. I’ll miss our meetings. But I’m changed as a result of knowing you .”  

She had been crying, her eyes downcast, but at my words she stopped sobbing and looked toward me, expectantly.  

“And, even though we won’t meet again, I’ll still retain that change.”  

“What change?”  

“Well, as I mentioned to you, I hadn’t had much professional experience with the problem of obesity.” I noted Betty’s eyes drop with disappointment and silently berated myself for being so impersonal.  

“Well, what I mean is that I hadn’t worked before with heavy patients, and I’ve gotten a new appreciation for the problems of… “ I could see from her expression that she was sinking even deeper into disappointment. “What I mean is that my attitude about obesity has changed a lot. When we started I personally didn’t feel comfortable with obese people.” 

In unusually feisty terms, Betty interrupted me. “Ho! ho! ho! Didn’t feel comfortable. That’s putting it mildly. Do you know that for the first six months you hardly ever looked at me? And in a whole year and a half you’ve never, not once, touched me? Not even for a handshake!”  

My heart sank. My God, she’s right! I have never touched her. I simply hadn’t realized it. And I guess I didn’t look at her very often either. I hadn’t expected her to notice!” (Yalom, 1989, p. 123)

Yalom was naïve to think that his distaste for Betty’s body had not been evident to her. She lived in a world that reviled her body and likely she, like many fat people, expected to encounter judgement. A more interesting question is why, given that she knew all along of his distaste, did she continue to work with him? The answer? She herself carries and directs those same feelings of disgust at herself.

We don’t know how Betty is now, more than thirty years later. Statistically she most likely has regained all of the weight lost and probably gained more. That is what happens when we try to tame the body through dieting. She may have had bariatric surgery and be among the minority who have not experienced complications from the surgery. Or perhaps she is in that tiny minority who succeeded in maintaining that weight loss. But in the years since the essay was published, no one questioned what losing weight was about for her and how working with a therapist filled with contempt and disgust for her body effected her feelings about herself. About what happens in a patient if even the therapist finds one’s body repulsive, even if the repulsion is not expressed.

It is all but impossible for a fat person, no matter the reasons for being fat, not to have a host of emotional issues about her size and her body. Every day the culture is telling her that she is too big, too much, not acceptable. Finding the courage to talk about those feelings in the presence of someone who finds her as disgusting as she herself often does is quite a feat. How does she find her voice about her anger at what she encounters? How is she to lovingly care about her body and for herself  if her therapist sees her body with the contempt and hatred she so often feels? And what if she is tired of having to devote herself to losing all that weight? The operative assumption is that in a room with a normal weight therapist and a fat patient, it is the patient who has a weight problem. What is it at work that makes it so difficult for the fat patient to be perceived as a whole person who might not share much less welcome the therapist’s agenda about her weight? 

One Voice of the Dark Goddess

I often hear people apologize for complaining about things in their lives, as if complaints are invalid and unnecessary. I carry in mind something I remember from a book I read  years ago, Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess. Here is one very memorable quote:

  Complaining is one voice of the dark goddess.  It is a way of expressing life, valid and deep in the feminine soul. It does not, first and foremost, seek alleviation, but simply to state the existence of things as they are felt to be to a sensitive and vulnerable being.  It is one of the bases of the feeling function, not to be seen and judged from the stoic-heroic superego perspective as foolish and passive whining, but just as autonomous fact — ‘that’s the way it is.’  Enki’s wisdom teaches us that  suffering is part of reverencing.

This sentiment feels really appropriate now that we have reached the one year mark of life being altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a way this past year feels like a lost year — I don’t know about you but I find it hard to remember many specifics about the last year, except for a pervasive anxiety and a desire for something resembling normal to return. We all number losses, some in our families, among our friends, and overall a number of dead too big to really comprehend. That hope is now available as we become vaccinated and greater freedom of movement has lightened the collective mood a bit and whatever will be our new “normal” begins to seem possible again, so too do we begin to hear complaints — about masks, about waiting, about lines. Anxiety about the vaccines — I had my second dose this past week with no ill effects, but many people are fearful and rumors abound in some media sectors. The anxiety of last March and April when even finding supplies of toilet paper was confounding is lessened to be replaced by chafing to get out, to do things and see people. For myself, I can hardly wait to be able to hug my children, touch my grandchildren, to be in their physical presence. And I know I have much company in this. Somehow I and the people I know and work with have to reach down inside and find just a bit more patience and continue to exercise caution.

We can complain to our heart’s content — that is a way to express the feelings of this last year. Complain and weep and feel anger and look forward. Because it will be better soon.

Entering Old Age

This past week several patients fretted about their fears of looking old and unattractive if they stopped coloring their hair. This has provoked for me a lot of thought about later life and what it means for us and how we respond to it. Midlife has gotten lots of press. Midlife crisis is so widely known it is all but a cliche. As with many life issues, as the Baby Boomers turned 40, we began to write about midlife. And as we Boomer women reached menopause, we began to write about it. And now, we , those of us like me on the leading edge of our generation, have moved firmly into what is the last quarter of life. And apart from a lot of articles about how to live to be really old and pieces about retirement, there doesn’t seem to be much yet about entering the last chapters. Some of us may live longer, but this period, from 60-85, seems to be the place of late life issues.

Let’s look at this quote from Jung:

In the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and Waning make one curve. 

The goal of all life, the end point, death is what lies in front of us all. And in this last quarter, it looms larger than it has before and is much more a part of consciousness. To be fully alive is to know that death lies ahead.

Between here and death, there is a lot of territory. Work to be done to deal with things left undone, to reconcile ourselves to our past, to seriously consider the story we have been living with an eye especially toward any changes we want to make in the remaining years.

For those of us near or past our 60s or 70s, the issues of midlife no longer seem so relevant. We wrestle with the conflict between the desire to do and the body that no longer wants to. With the bubbling up of creative possibilities that we do not know we can bring to fruition. We have to prioritize in a new way. If there is something I want to do, want to create, I must come to terms with the certain knowledge that I have to get down to work now because time is passing swiftly.

How do we to wrestle with these issues without succumbing to despair or melancholy and regret is a major concern. What does it mean to become old? How to come to terms with a body, a face that is not the face or body I carry in my mind’s eye of myself? Finding a new rhythm. Finding people willing to wrestle with me. These are the issues I see right off. 

Old age is difficult to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. As people age, they tend to move the goalposts that mark out major life stages: a 2009 survey of American attitudes toward old age found that young adults (those between eighteen and twenty-nine) said that old age begins at sixty; middle-aged respondents said seventy; and those above the age of sixty-five put the threshold at seventy-four. We tend to feel younger as we get older: almost half the respondents aged fiffy or more reported feeling at least ten years younger than their actual age, while a third of respondents aged sixty-five or more said that they felt up to nineteen years younger. 

Researchers have found a sizable difference between the expectations that young and middle-aged folks have about old age and the actual experiences reported by older Americans themselves. Young and middle-aged adults anticipate the negative aspects associated with aging such as memory loss, illness, or an end to sexual activity at much higher levels than the old report experiencing them.

One of the things that I find irritating is that those of us who are no longer young are now lumped together as “the elderly” or,  what to me is worse, “seniors” — I really hate that term. Or strangers feel comfortable calling me “Dear” and may speak to me in that slightly sing-song tone used with those assumed to be less than. 

Of COURSE, our bodies slow down. Some body parts stop working properly. Others give out. Mysterious aches and pains show up. It’s what bodies do. The key in old age is to adapt but that’s for another day. But it helps – a lot sometimes – to learn that other people are struggling through the same things you are. It doesn’t mean we don’t also laugh, read books, go to the movies and whatever else engages us that is still possible. But letting off steam together kind of clears the air. To be willing to be publicly old in our time is a bold act. We have a president who is 78 — that is old — but he is not at all free to be old. He must present as younger than he is. Nancy Pelosi is 80, which is definitely old, but she too must present as younger lest she be forced out by virtue of her age. I sometimes feel almost the rebel for having silvery white hair at a time when I have patients fearful of stopping coloring theirs.

Watch this space for an announcement in early spring for a group for women over 60 who want to take a deep dive into the issues and struggles of growing old.

Finding Home

My dad was in the Army when I was growing up. My brothers, who were much older than me, spent their childhoods among extended family in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I grew up moving every two to three years, first to Japan then to Kentucky then to New Mexico then to Germany then to Pennsylvania. 

Where was home? Was it where my grandmother lived? But she died when I was not yet 14. Or was it where I was born? But we moved away from there when I was 5 and never lived there again. People would ask me where I was from, what place I called home and I would freeze with uncertainty — because I didn’t know. For me, home had become where my stuff and I lived; my stuff made home for me.

So I have thought a lot about home over the years — what it means, what makes home.

In December I was asked if I would like to offer a program at the Maine Jung Center. I immediately jumped at the chance and told them I wanted to present on “What is Home?”. And so on 3 Sundays in March I will meet with folks to talk about and write about Home (follow the link if you’d like to attend — it will be on Zoom).

I have lived in Maine since 1972 — it just hit me that is almost 50 years! If home is to be had in my life, then it is Maine. I lived in and not far from Portland for almost 30 years. I loved Portland and especially loved the duplex I lived in there my last 7 years — in fact when a fire destroyed it around 5 years ago, I felt its destruction keenly. In 2005 my husband and I moved to Belfast, Maine. For the last 16 years we have rented a house with perhaps the best view in Belfast, though the house itself is, to be charitable, a bit funky. The view of the bay has been enough for all this time to make the quirks of the house tolerable. But things became a bit difficult when the steep stairs began to pose problems for me. Then came the knowledge that the owners hope to sell it. Through the network of friends we have here we learned of first one possibility then another. And so it has come to be that in a couple of moths we will move to another house, less than a mile from where I am writing this today. We will lose the view but gain a house that is less quirky and easier for us to live in. The sixteen years I have lived in this house has been the longest I have lived anywhere. I’ll miss the view — the house not so much. 

After all these years it seems home is still in large measure where I live with my stuff, so long as my stuff and I are in Maine.

Seeking Normal

I love amaryllises. Most years I order a new one. I watch as those from previous years bloom and re-bloom. One year when my new one arrived, I got distracted and didn’t plant it right away. When I finally remembered and rescued it from the paper bag it had been in, it had started to grow but clearly had suffered from my neglect.The stem and bud were almost white. And as you can see the stem was bent almost over on itself. It had done everything it could to realize itself within the confines of the small paper bag. 

I felt terrible about what had happened and decided to see if it could recover. So I potted it in some nice fresh soil. And put it on my plant shelf where it would be blessed by the morning sun, hoping that the sun and the plant’s tendency to bend toward it would help it recover at least a bit.

In the days after I potted it, the sun did done its work, or as much as it could. The stem and bud became green and the stem straightened some. The bud began to swell. And the flower appeared.

In Natalie Borero’s Killer Fat, she relates

“most of the people to whom I spoke talked about a desire to lose weight to be normal, to be able to wear a smaller size, to blend in, and to avoid the stigma and discrimination faced by fat people. This pattern held not only for people like Tina, who had undergone surgery in order to lose weight, but also for people engaged in less invasive weight-loss attempts.”

The multi-billion dollar diet industry is built on this desire to achieve the ever elusive “normal”, a size or weight or look that remains just out of reach.

In psychotherapy,

“Patients typically seek a “cure” for their wounds, their anxiety, their obsessions and addictions. Jung denies that “perfection” – which may be thought of as a synonym for “cure” – is possible. My own experience, on both sides of the couch, suggests that even “healing” may be a problematic word. In some sense, a person is her wounds. A sapling, planted beside a supportive stake that the gardener neglects to remove, will grow around the stake. The stake’s presence will injure the growing tree; the tree will adapt by distorting its “natural” shape to accommodate the stake. But the mature tree will be the shape it has taken; it cannot be “cured” of the injury, the injury is an intrinsic aspect of its nature.” Barbara Stevens Sullivan

I think of the futility in both instances. That amaryllis once deformed by neglect could not be as it might have been under ideal conditions. But that did not keep it from being an amaryllis. There is no way to become the person I might have been had the circumstances of my life not led to the wounds I carry. I can become freer of their negative effects. I can become conscious of the wounds, how they came to be and how I might respond differently going forward. But I cannot be “cured” because I am my wounds, just as the tree in Sullivan’s example cannot become other than the way it is. Normal for me is who and how I am. 

Now consider the fat person who wants to be “normal”. Her chances of reaching that mythic place are something like 5%. She may lose weight, lose a lot of weight even but she is quite likely to regain it and there goes that chance at “normal”. If the tree in Sullivan’s example is its own normal, because it is the shape it has taken and that shape reflects the conditions of its growth, then is that not also true of the fat person. There are so many causes for and reasons for being fat. But in essence do they not all come down to the conditions in which that fat body has grown and developed? A complex stew of genetic, biologic, emotional, social, familial factors that as the container in which that person develops shape that body. How is we cannot, collectively, acknowledge that there is no cure for this body, that the fat body is its own normal? 

The person with significant emotional wounds often does need help to come to terms with those wounds and the shape they have given to her life. What therapy can do for the fat person is help her come to terms with her normal, to find her way through the pain of stigma and being different. We all are our wounds, no matter the form they take or shape they give us.