Susie Orbach Quotes

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

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

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.

I’ve always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.

The parents’ job is to be there for their kids, not the other way round. Troubles between parents need to be talked through with friends and not visited on the children.

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.

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

The analyst’s psyche operates as a kind of… something to hold on to while somebody’s going through therapy, if they’re deconstructing their own psyche, if that’s cracking up in some way, or dissolving.

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.

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.

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.

Not that it was Twiggy’s fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.