Susie Orbach Quotes

No one leaves a long-term relationship scot-free or without conflict.

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

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

The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.

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.

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

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

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

From a child's point of view, there is rarely a great time for parents to separate, even if there has been a lot of commotion and fighting.

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.

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

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.

Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were.

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.

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

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.

There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.

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

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.

'Skinny' is only one body type.

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.

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

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

If I were afraid of wrinkles, I'd probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them.

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

For a young woman today, developing femininity successfully requires meeting three basic demands. The first of these is that she must defer to others, the second that she must anticipate and meet the needs of others, and the third, that she must seek self-definition through connection with another. The consequences of these requirements frequently mean that in denying themselves, women are unable to develop an authentic sense of their needs or a feeling of entitlement for their desires. Preoccupied with others' experience and unfamiliar with their own needs, women come to depend on the approval of those to whom they give. The imperative of affiliation, the culture demand that a woman must define herself through association with another, means that many aspects of self are under-developed, producing insecurity and a shaky sense of self. Under the competent carer who gives to the world lives a hungry, deprived and needy little girl who is unsure and ashamed of her desires and wants.

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.

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

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.

Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.