So, I'm pretty close to my three-year anniversary in therapy. It has been incredibly useful for me, and I am very satisfied with the course it has taken. Recently, I had a profound 'a-ha!' moment, and wondered if others could relate.
So, here's the story: I saw a video of my partner that I hadn't seen before, and as soon as I saw M's face, I felt a pain in my chest and my eyes were watery. This isn't a usual response when I see pictures of M, or even when I see M for the first time after a long absence (we are a long-distance couple). I recognized that my response was one of love, and is one I've had with M before, but those moments have been in person, and have been in situations where emotional openness and intensity were to be expected.
So, this was utterly new to me, and it so happened it happend a couple of hours before I went to see my therapist. We've talked before about how I intellectualize things and live in my head, but I must have never quite got what he meant, because part of me thought that everyone else does this, too, I just do it more than others. So, he was pointing out that this is what emotions are, they are things we feel, primarily, and not things we think. We don't say "I think sad," we say, "I feel sad."
I though the thinking of the feeling was the feeling itself, and only in rare moments of intensity do we actually have a bodily response to feelings. It was like being shown a different world from the one I lived in, where people have emotional lives completely different from my own, and it has altered my understanding of a fundamental aspect of my own self.
So now, my therapist is pointing out other ways in which I live disconnected from my internal self-how I am so other directed that I don't know how to access my own needs and wants and goals independent of external cues, and how this is all related to 'living in my head.'
I mention this here because I wonder how much of this relates to my size. I've heard other fat people talk about 'living from the neck up' as a response to our fat-hating culture, a place where, at most, some of us get "You have such a pretty face...." implying (or out right saying) the only attractive part of us is above the fat body we live in.
Am I 'living in my head' as a direct result of growing up fat in a culture that tells us to be fat is a fate worse than death? Did I become so disconnected from my body as a survival mechanism to be able to live in a body society denies as legitimate? How fundamentally estranged from my own body do I have to be to not recognize until I'm almost 40 that I don't really know what things like 'love' feel like?
It makes me think I will need to re-learn how to use a critical part of my body, as if I'd been born without one of my senses and now I'm getting it back, and trying to adjust to a whole new window on the world.
Does anyone relate? Any advice, suggestions, or thoughts? I hope I'm not the only one with such a mind/body split.
So, here's the story: I saw a video of my partner that I hadn't seen before, and as soon as I saw M's face, I felt a pain in my chest and my eyes were watery. This isn't a usual response when I see pictures of M, or even when I see M for the first time after a long absence (we are a long-distance couple). I recognized that my response was one of love, and is one I've had with M before, but those moments have been in person, and have been in situations where emotional openness and intensity were to be expected.
So, this was utterly new to me, and it so happened it happend a couple of hours before I went to see my therapist. We've talked before about how I intellectualize things and live in my head, but I must have never quite got what he meant, because part of me thought that everyone else does this, too, I just do it more than others. So, he was pointing out that this is what emotions are, they are things we feel, primarily, and not things we think. We don't say "I think sad," we say, "I feel sad."
I though the thinking of the feeling was the feeling itself, and only in rare moments of intensity do we actually have a bodily response to feelings. It was like being shown a different world from the one I lived in, where people have emotional lives completely different from my own, and it has altered my understanding of a fundamental aspect of my own self.
So now, my therapist is pointing out other ways in which I live disconnected from my internal self-how I am so other directed that I don't know how to access my own needs and wants and goals independent of external cues, and how this is all related to 'living in my head.'
I mention this here because I wonder how much of this relates to my size. I've heard other fat people talk about 'living from the neck up' as a response to our fat-hating culture, a place where, at most, some of us get "You have such a pretty face...." implying (or out right saying) the only attractive part of us is above the fat body we live in.
Am I 'living in my head' as a direct result of growing up fat in a culture that tells us to be fat is a fate worse than death? Did I become so disconnected from my body as a survival mechanism to be able to live in a body society denies as legitimate? How fundamentally estranged from my own body do I have to be to not recognize until I'm almost 40 that I don't really know what things like 'love' feel like?
It makes me think I will need to re-learn how to use a critical part of my body, as if I'd been born without one of my senses and now I'm getting it back, and trying to adjust to a whole new window on the world.
Does anyone relate? Any advice, suggestions, or thoughts? I hope I'm not the only one with such a mind/body split.
