Psychotherapy in Oakland
  • INTRODUCTION
  • About
  • Individual Therapy
  • Group Therapy
  • Fees & Insurance
  • Living Improv℠
  • Article Corner
  • Contact & Office
  • INTRODUCTION
  • About
  • Individual Therapy
  • Group Therapy
  • Fees & Insurance
  • Living Improv℠
  • Article Corner
  • Contact & Office
  Psychotherapy in Oakland

article corn​er

New Year, No Shame

12/31/2015

0 Comments

 
It’s New Year's and if you are a human being with a pulse this means that you’re probably being bombarded with “New Year, New You” messages. You know the ones — glossy magazine headlines telling us to make resolutions to repent for the holiday glut, advertisements for gym membership discounts, and co-workers talking about their diets. Here’s what I think about all that - it’s bullshit. Don’t read those glossy magazine covers, don’t fall for those gym membership ads, and if your coworker starts telling you about their diet, just start humming really loudly. All that New Year diet resolution business is toxic. The message is meant to make you feel bad about yourself and besides there is plenty of research out there to prove that diets don’t work. To counter all the body-shaming New Year diet crap out there, I’ve decided to post Lindy West’s article from this past summer “My Wedding Was Perfect And I Was Fat As Hell The Whole Time.” West is a Seattle-based fat rights activist, writer extroardinaire, editor and performer. I recently read this article and I found it inspiring and beautiful.

If you are a person who lives in a fat body, or a body that is not defined as beautiful by mainstream culture, or if you have ever felt like you were not enough in some way (or that you had to be different in order to be happy) I think Lindy West’s words will resonate with you. West’s message is a vital one. It counters the mainstream fat-shaming world that says women have to be thin to be brides and that people need to lose weight for their wedding. I’ve heard so many people (some are individuals I know and like and think have good lefty politics) make comments about wanting to lose weight for a wedding or other event. Fuck. That. Shit. Be yourself, live in the body that is yours. Don’t wait ’til you are thinner to live your life. If you do, your life will pass you by and you will hate yourself in the process. 

Also— being fat or “overweight” does not mean someone is unhealthy. It’s high time we uncouple the notion of what it means to be healthy from body size. Studies now show that being “overweight” (having a BMI between 25 and 30) is less associated with mortality than being “underweight” or even a “normal” weight. Read this article for the proof!  (And here’s the Journal of American Medical Association article if you’re in the mood for something a little more academic). Also— so much more goes into being “healthy” than just diet, exercise, and body shape. That’s just one small sliver of health. What about social and emotional health? Having a strong social support network? Getting enough sleep and rest? Playing? Making art? These all factor into one’s overall health, but the world we live in puts way too much of an emphasis on body size, eating and exercise habits when determining what it means to be “healthy.”

This is my favorite quotation in West’s article:

“When I think back on my teenage self, what I really needed to hear wasn’t that someone might love me one day if I lost enough weight to qualify as human – it was that I was worthy of love now, just as I was.”

I think this is a message that we all need to hear again and again and again: You are worthy of love right now, just as you are, and you are enough. You don't need to change in order to be happy, you don't need to make six figures, or get married, or be in a relationship, or "get your shit together,” or meet all your New Year’s resolutions, and you certainly don't need to lose weight or change your appearance. You are beautiful just the way you are. Happy 2016! 
0 Comments

disenfranchised grief

12/18/2015

0 Comments

 
Last month in a Modern Love column entitled “The Five Stages of Ghosting Grief," Rachel Fields wrote about the grief that comes from not hearing back from a date.“Ghosting” (if you haven’t heard of the term) refers to the experience when a date (or someone with whom you’ve had a romantic and/or sexual encounter) simply never responds to your call or text. The original “Five Stages of Grief” were formulated by Swiss Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The five stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. I found Fields’s article about ghosting grief to be witty and humorous. She writes about how when the man she was dating did not respond to her text, she went through a period of denial in which she imagined he had failed to write back because he was asleep, had dropped his phone in the toilet, or had died. She says that “any of these options were comforting.” Kübler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” were originally meant to be about the experience of bereavement over the death of a loved one. Grief, however, can be experienced in relation to many types of loss (not just the physical death of someone we are close to). We experience grief, for example, over friends moving away, the loss of a job, a change in identity or role, or the loss of a home. Seemingly positive life changes may even elicit feelings of grief, such as graduating from college and experiencing a loss of community. We may also feel grief over the death of a person we are not close with, such as a celebrity. When grief is non-traditional in nature (ie. not over the death of a loved one) it is sometimes referred to as disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief can sometimes be more painful because in addition to the grief feelings, our pain is not validated by those around us because our loss is not seen as something traditionally worth mourning. Ghosting grief is a great example of disenfranchised grief. Who feels sad when a date bows out of our lives by not responding to our text? Well plenty of people do, but it’s not the kind of grief that the people around us may readily understand. I also love Fields’s article because implicit in her experience of ghosting grief is another kind of disenfranchised experience— that of having what she calls a “two-week relationship” with the man who ghosted her. In our society, long-term relationships are often the only relationships that are seen as real and valid. A relationship with someone for two weeks (or even two dates) is rarely taken seriously. Even supportive friends may just not understand how someone could feel sadness over the loss of a two-week relationship. By expressing her despair over the loss of this guy, Fields is also saying “I really liked this person that I’d only been on a couple dates with.” In a world that holds up marriage and long-term unions as the only meaningful romances, this feels like a radical and courageous statement.
0 Comments

    ARTICLE CORNER

    Articles I find interesting that you might like too :)

    ​​AUTHOR
    ​Elizabeth Ehrenberg, LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Oakland, CA.

    Archives

    March 2017
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

2955 Shattuck Ave
​Berkeley, CA 94705

510-473-2320
[email protected]
Copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Ehrenberg, LCSW