Susie Orbach Quotes

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.

Today, 'fat' has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

Many young girls are constantly consumed by controlling and managing their body image to the extent that they are much more involved in the production of the self than in living.

Emotional Literacy means being able to recognise what you are feeling, so that it doesn't interfere with thinking. It becomes another dimension to draw upon when making decisions or encountering situations. Emotional expression by contrast can mean being driven by emotions, so that it isn't possible to think. These two things are often confused, because we are still uncomfortable with the idea of the validity of feelings.

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.

A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one's previous imaginings.

Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.

Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.

Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.

Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue.

I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: 'It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found'.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don't really inhabit their lives or their bodies.

I'm a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.

We know that ever woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.

When they took TV to Fiji they found that after 3 years nearly 12 girls out of 100 were over the toilet bowls with bulimia because they felt inferior.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.

Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

In my mum's day, you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn't start at six and go on until you're 75, right?