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“We all need to feel safe, that the world is predicable, that obstacles can be overcome, and conflicts resolved -in short, to maintain narcissistic equilibrium. When such conditions are met, infants can pleasurably engage with their environments. When faced with overwhelming experience, internal or external, they must find a way to restore their fragile self-esteem. Some infants, especially when faced with overwhelm that cannot be overcome, turn away from reality and toward omnipotent solution. This learned response feels dependable and, over time, takes on an addictive quality, restricting her access to other solutions and pathways to further growth.”

Quote by Tom Wooldridge

Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

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Tom Wooldridge

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“Mourning is the vehicle of transformation through which traumatic themes can be acknowledged, disillusioned wishes for an ideal object relinquished and painful early relationships transformed into aspects of the subject’s character that are carried forward in constructive ways.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“In her article, Williams (1997) describes a class of "psychically porous” patients who suffer from eating disorders, most frequently bulimia nervosa, and suggests that they had parents who themselves suffered extensive traumas and as a result were either frightening or frightened or both in relation to the child.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Patients with eating disorders contend with an emotional landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. Help with these struggles will never be found in a pill or a set of therapeutic exercises, in spite of the potential usefulness of both. It is only through a meaningful emotional connection that we can help patients begin to "bear the unbearable and to say the unsayable".”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Modern obstetrics still preaches that birth is a battle between mother and child and worries that babies grow too large to safely exit the bodies that built them. However, obstetricians cannot accurately discern a baby's size in utero toward the end of a pregnancy, according to recent studies. When ultrasounds predict big babies, they are wrong about half the time, far too frequently to be relied upon. This fact has not stopped doctors from inducing or scheduling surgery for pregnant people, essentially claiming they cannot birth their own babies, that their babies won't fit through the birth canal before they have even tried. Despite obstetric alarm sounding, what we know hardly suggests that women routinely build babies too large to birth.”

WomenBirthMedicineObstetrics
Book:Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood
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“....birthing a larger-than-average baby is far less risky to a pregnant person than her doctor thinking she is carrying one. One study compared women whose doctors suspected they were carrying large babies (babies bigger than eight pounds, thirteen ounces) with women who gave birth to large babies that doctors hadn't anticipated. The group predicted to have big babies was three times more likely to be induced, more than three times as likely to have C-sections, and four times as likely to have birth complications. Far more problematic than a big baby is the need to intervene.”

WomenBirthMedicineObstetrics
Book:Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood
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“Squishy, stretchy babies adapted big brains but also soft, mobile heads to fit through their mothers' birth canals. Mom's hormones encourage pliability in the ligaments that hold her bones together—pelvises widen during the fertile years and, of course, during pregnancy and birth. [...] These adaptations seem to disprove the argument that birthing pelvises are the wrong size and shape to birth, that they lack compatibility with their babies. Labor is like two bodies dancing, not fighting.”

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Book:Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood
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“Ultimately, why we birth the way we do transcends the boundaries of our bones. Physiologic labor is a complex process involving, yes, bones, but also tissues, muscles, organs, cells, hormones, an exchange of signals between two people, mechanical changes, emotions. Bones are easier to see and study, so bone shape and size are what obstetricians, historians, and anthropologists have historically prioritized.”

WomenBirthMedicineObstetrics
Book:Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood
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