Julia Lapina psychologist make an appointment. Julia Lapina Body, food, sex and anxiety: What worries the modern woman
Julia Lapina
Body, Food, Sex and Anxiety: What's Worrying modern woman. Clinical Psychologist Research
Scientific editor Natalia Fadeeva
Editor Elena Averina
Project Manager A. Tarasova
Art Director Y. Buga
Correctors E. Aksenova, O. Smetannikova
Computer layout M. Potashkin
Cover illustration lochthyme / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo
Reproductions of paintings used in the design of the book B. Kustodieva
© Yu. Lapina, 2017
© Alpina non-fiction LLC, 2018
All rights reserved. The work is intended solely for private use. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and in corporate networks, for public or collective use without the written permission of the copyright owner. For copyright infringement, the legislation provides for the payment of compensation to the copyright holder in the amount of up to 5 million rubles (Article 49 of the LOAP), as well as criminal liability in the form of imprisonment for up to 6 years (Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
* * *To my supervisor N. H.,
who taught me to see.
to my clients,
who taught me to listen.
To my students
who taught me how to tell.
To my relatives and friends,
who taught me to believe and love.
And special thanks to you, dear V.,
for being who I was meant to be.
Introduction
Observing the experiences of their clients and discussions in in social networks, reading endless articles about weight loss, I conclude: today the body, diets and sexuality are not just topics of heated debate, but a new religion with all the ensuing consequences: a rigid structure, prohibitions, influence on private and public life. This religion has its saints who promise salvation, and sinners are punished. I named the book you are holding Body, Food, Sex, and Anxiety because these are the topics people have been arguing about on my Facebook page for years. I want to show different facets of today's women's anxieties through the prism of food, body and sexuality. While there are thousands of "anti-diet" books published in the West (yes, diets don't work, of course) and books on accepting your body and rethinking female sexuality, there is a shortage of such literature in Russia. After all, you can’t just translate books by foreign authors, they need to be adapted to our realities: our country has its own, complex relationship to these topics.
My book contains answers to questions that millions of women think about every day. Why am I breaking my diet? What is wrong with my body? How do I stop hating my body and where does this hatred come from? Why am I ashamed of the candy I ate, I didn’t steal it? Why don't tips from glossy magazines like "1001 Ways to Orgasm" work for me? How to be sexy if I don't want sex, and why don't I want it?
These issues do not just concern women, they affect their quality of life, health, relationships in the family and at work. I tell my students that the purpose of my lectures is to help them find answers to some questions and raise dozens of others, because this is how a person learns new things. I hope that after reading this book, women, on the one hand, will feel relieved from understanding that some “strange” things are happening not only to them, but on the other hand, they will ask new questions on a variety of topics, from political to medical . Sometimes even the very fact that painful issues are openly discussed, and problems that are usually hidden in the far corners of the psyche because of fear called “something is wrong with me”, has a serious psychotherapeutic effect, someone voices.
My book is an opportunity to talk openly about topics that cause anxiety. But if you rethink them, look at them from a different perspective, then you will have the strength to solve important problems.
Usually, when I talk about people's excessive obsession with their bodies, they object to me: “Are you suggesting that we give up on ourselves and not take care of our appearance?” To immediately put all the dots over i, I’ll explain: on the contrary, I suggest that you take a very close look at yourself, your body, soul, life - and try to understand what you are afraid of and what you really want when you try to solve problems with the help of food and weight loss.
I hope that my book will help you to better understand yourself and understand your relationship with the body.
body and anxiety
Why do we care what other people look like? Why do we judge them not only by their clothes, but also by what is under it? Why do we have a critical attitude not only to other people's bodies, but also to our own? Where does hatred for the body come from and what is behind it? And where is the boundary between normal and pathological when it comes to not accepting one's appearance? For centuries, man treated the body as a tool for solving certain problems: the body was an instrument of production and a weapon in war, a “vessel” for bearing children. But the 20th century with its revolutions (including mental ones) made mankind rethink many things. People began to think not only about what their body can do, but also about how it looks.
New times have created a new religion from the body and firmly tied morality to it. “What is good and what is bad” is assessed today with an eye to how the body will look later: sugar is bad, it can increase the body, and running is good, it gives the body a chance to decrease, moreover, in society such a hobby treated with approval. The age of consumption brought abundance to people, and in addition to it by-effect- a huge fear of fullness, redundancy of the body. The problem of excess weight has migrated from medicine to the socio-political sphere: every now and then one of the politicians promises us to develop national program fight obesity and defeat it completely on all fronts. Previously, they threatened to defeat the enemy.
As Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin wrote, “nothing is new under the sun,” and the very idea of a material idol has been alive for as long as humanity has existed. According to the wise remark of Anthony of Surozh, “the body could be called the visible image of the invisible,” and I will begin the first chapter of this book with a small religious digression.
The Fall, or How the Body Became a Projection of Shame. Body and shame from the beginning of time
You can treat religion as you like, but it is foolish to deny its influence on people and their relations with the world. Thousands of works have been written about "God in the human head", that is, about some built-in mental processes that are manifested in each of us to one degree or another. Psychologists call it religious archetypes, neuroscientists call it an important evolutionary stage in the history of mankind, and religious people call it "a receiver for God's signals." Depending on your religious and philosophical views, you can answer the question very differently: “Why does this exist in my head?”, But the fact that we have this “ software' is obvious. What follows from this? According to the law of logic, the "built-in program" will work with the available material, even with the most primitive. She will need ideas, goals, meanings. Any belief system can become a new religion: communism with its desire to create public ownership of the means of production, fascism with the idea of creating a superior race. And, no matter how strange it may sound, a dietary culture with its rituals, iconic models, tough taboos and punishment for those who disobeyed: if you ate after six, you will face retribution in the form of extra pounds and you have to redeem them at the gym.
The "dietary" world has much in common with the cult system. For example, rituals - 20 sit-ups, 10 push-ups and 5 twists - about how penance for 50 prostrations change self-awareness and relieve guilt for a while. There are magical objects (food) here that help or hinder the achievement of enlightenment, that is, sacral weight loss. “Girls, do strawberries get fat? Otherwise, you want it so much, ”the participants of Internet forums ask in the hope of indulgence. Authoritative gurus, keepers of the Great Cult of Thinness, are adamant: you can only do it a little, and then if you don’t have sins in the form of folds in different parts of the body.
The list of taboos is endless: do not eat after 18:00, carbohydrates - only for breakfast, only protein is allowed for dinner. If you break the ban, you will become a dirty sinner (the “control weighing” begins several times a day: “Have I sinned a lot?”). The feeling of guilt is transformed into a feeling of being "fat", and trying to get rid of it is an endless ritual of push-ups, sit-ups, running up stairs.
Scientific editor Natalia Fadeeva
Editor Elena Averina
Project Manager A. Tarasova
Art Director Y. Buga
Correctors E. Aksenova, O. Smetannikova
Computer layout M. Potashkin
Cover illustration lochthyme / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo
Reproductions of paintings used in the design of the book B. Kustodieva
© Yu. Lapina, 2017
© Alpina non-fiction LLC, 2018
All rights reserved. The work is intended solely for private use. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and in corporate networks, for public or collective use without the written permission of the copyright owner. For copyright infringement, the legislation provides for the payment of compensation to the copyright holder in the amount of up to 5 million rubles (Article 49 of the LOAP), as well as criminal liability in the form of imprisonment for up to 6 years (Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
To my supervisor N. H.,
who taught me to see.
to my clients,
who taught me to listen.
To my students
who taught me how to tell.
To my relatives and friends,
who taught me to believe and love.
And special thanks to you, dear V.,
for being who I was meant to be.
Introduction
Observing the experiences of my clients and discussions on social networks, reading endless articles about losing weight, I conclude that today the body, diets and sexuality are not just topics of heated debate, but a new religion with all the ensuing consequences: a rigid structure, prohibitions, influence on private and public life. This religion has its saints who promise salvation, and sinners are punished. I named the book you are holding Body, Food, Sex, and Anxiety because these are the topics people have been arguing about on my Facebook page for years. I want to show different facets of today's women's anxieties through the prism of food, body and sexuality. While there are thousands of "anti-diet" books published in the West (yes, diets don't work, of course) and books on accepting your body and rethinking female sexuality, there is a shortage of such literature in Russia. After all, one cannot simply translate books by foreign authors, they must be adapted to our realities: our country has its own, complex attitude to these topics.
My book contains answers to questions that millions of women think about every day. Why am I breaking my diet? What is wrong with my body? How do I stop hating my body and where does this hatred come from? Why am I ashamed of the candy I ate, I didn’t steal it? Why don't tips from glossy magazines like "1001 Ways to Orgasm" work for me? How to be sexy if I don't want sex, and why don't I want it?
These issues do not just concern women, they affect their quality of life, health, relationships in the family and at work. I tell my students that the purpose of my lectures is to help them find answers to some questions and raise dozens of others, because this is how a person learns new things. I hope that after reading this book, women, on the one hand, will feel relieved from understanding that some “strange” things are happening not only to them, but on the other hand, they will ask new questions on a variety of topics, from political to medical . Sometimes even the very fact that painful issues are openly discussed, and problems that are usually hidden in the far corners of the psyche because of fear called “something is wrong with me”, has a serious psychotherapeutic effect, someone voices.
My book is an opportunity to talk openly about topics that cause anxiety. But if you rethink them, look at them from a different perspective, then you will have the strength to solve important problems.
Usually, when I talk about people's excessive obsession with their bodies, they object to me: “Are you suggesting that we give up on ourselves and not take care of our appearance?” To immediately put all the dots over i, I’ll explain: on the contrary, I suggest that you take a very close look at yourself, your body, soul, life - and try to understand what you are afraid of and what you really want when you try to solve problems with the help of food and weight loss.
I hope that my book will help you to better understand yourself and understand your relationship with the body.
body and anxiety
Why do we care what other people look like? Why do we judge them not only by their clothes, but also by what is under it? Why do we have a critical attitude not only to other people's bodies, but also to our own? Where does hatred for the body come from and what is behind it? And where is the boundary between normal and pathological when it comes to not accepting one's appearance? For centuries, man treated the body as a tool for solving certain problems: the body was an instrument of production and a weapon in war, a “vessel” for bearing children. But the 20th century with its revolutions (including mental ones) made mankind rethink many things. People began to think not only about what their body can do, but also about how it looks.
New times have created a new religion from the body and firmly tied morality to it. “What is good and what is bad” is assessed today with an eye to how the body will look later: sugar is bad, it can increase the body, and running is good, it gives the body a chance to decrease, moreover, in society such a hobby treated with approval. The age of consumption brought abundance to people, and in addition its side effect is a huge fear of fullness, excess of the body. The problem of excess weight has migrated from medicine to the socio-political sphere: every now and then one of the politicians promises us to develop a national program to combat obesity and defeat it completely on all fronts. Previously, they threatened to defeat the enemy.
As Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin wrote, “nothing is new under the sun,” and the very idea of a material idol has been alive for as long as humanity has existed. According to the wise remark of Anthony of Surozh, “the body could be called the visible image of the invisible,” and I will begin the first chapter of this book with a small religious digression.
The Fall, or How the Body Became a Projection of Shame. Body and shame from the beginning of time
You can treat religion as you like, but it is foolish to deny its influence on people and their relations with the world. Thousands of works have been written about "God in the human head", that is, about some built-in mental processes that are manifested in each of us to one degree or another. Psychologists call it religious archetypes, neuroscientists call it an important evolutionary stage in the history of mankind, and religious people call it "a receiver for God's signals." Depending on your religious and philosophical views, you can answer the question very differently: “Why does this exist in my head?”, But the fact that we have this “software” is obvious. What follows from this? According to the law of logic, the "built-in program" will work with the available material, even with the most primitive. She will need ideas, goals, meanings. Any belief system can become a new religion: communism with its desire to create public ownership of the means of production, fascism with the idea of creating a superior race. And, no matter how strange it may sound, there is a dietary culture with its rituals, iconic models, tough taboos and punishment for those who disobeyed: if you ate after six, you will be paid back in the form of extra pounds and you must redeem them in the gym.
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