Talk Yourself Down

I was reminded of this when someone posted about something similar on another blog. They'd seen a report of a study that claimed those who'd been sexually abused were three times more likely to be fat by the age of 27 than those who hadn't. This refers to some kind of PTSD. PTSD is when your nervous system keeps reverberating with a traumatic event, or set of traumatic events causing  replays of said incident/s to continue on a self sustaining loop. It's also used for when the same cause your nervous system to enter into a state of hyper-reactivity which can be ever present or be activated under duress.

The person struggled with the fact that no mention was made of counselling for distress. It was all, how can we prevent this high risk group from becoming 'obese'. She was shocked by this, but it was inevitable. I called this the "nothing's going on but your fat" line of 'obesity'.

This from the emeritus professor of counselling;

(Dalgliesh mentions some research that found a third of obese women had been sexually abused.) "They haven't learned how to self-soothe, how to talk themselves down, 

"Talk yourself down" is interesting. It basically means that to recover from sexual abuse, you need may need to get your nervous system out of a PTSD hyperactive state. 

Only, she doesn't say that. She says fat women have failed to respond correctly to being sexually abused. Here's perhaps another reference to a hyperactive nervous system from a different angle;

“This.....may be due in part to maladaptive stress responses within this group, including heightened low-grade inflammation and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) non-habituation.” 

"Maladaptive stress responses." Now the thing is not all fat people have been sexually abused. Indeed, despite these reports, there's been evidence to the contrary, that fat women are no more sexually abused than their slimmer counterparts.

And this study is too small to make conclusions. Except to say the 'obese' mugging is itself is prone to leaving the nervous system shaken and stirred, it's part of its motivation or perish strategy. You're supposed to escape not being fat, but the treatment you receive whilst being fat- or decline in health under its assault.

It's always been a source of fascination as to how long medical authorities will persist/ get away with in a traumatizing strategy-for health. Right now they seem to be trying to slide into their old tricks attempting to ride two horses at once, by leaving the hate up to the social opprobrium they're still directly winding up. And then posing unconvincingly in their benign authority pose.

Of course, how you respond to sexual assault is not usually deemed a matter of success or failure. Assigning failure and fault to what is not necessarily a consciously led activity just shows how difficult it is to speak properly to a disease. For those lecturing on fatuous notions of 'addiction' how could people whose profession is health have allowed themselves to sink to this level? And this particular women wasn't even trying to hostile!

Whether fat people have or tend to have more reactive nervous systems or not, why isn't that addressed directly anyway? Always this suggestiveness without content. Content can be examined and tested.

Not only could techniques to calm the nervous system help all fat people, it could help all who have experienced sexual assault and many who have PTSD, including ex-military. That might actually make some of this seem almost worthwhile. If some good could come out of this mess.

'Obesity' wallahs continually forget how much we all gain from understanding the care of others, based on a genuinely to help. Something conspiciously missing in action in their case.