Source:
https://scmp.com/article/84901/how-be-frank-about-feelings

How to be frank about feelings

WHEN people meet Susie Orbach they expect her to be fat. She isn't. ''They are terribly disappointed when they discover that,'' says the 47-year-old psychotherapist and author of the 70s feminist bible Fat Is a Feminist Issue.

It was Orbach who told women they didn't have to be slim just because men expected it, because magazines said they should, because models and women in television advertisements were held up as the ideal. Their bodies were their own and what they looked like, what they ate, were part of having control of their own lives.

It sounds fairly run-of-the-mill now - though, sadly, it's a message women are still under pressure to ignore. But in the 70s it was revolutionary stuff. Orbach helped women understand why they weren't in control of their bodies and their lives and to take back that control. There is no doubt, Susie Orbach changed lives.

''It is still a live issue,'' she says from London. ''It unleashed a whole problem out of the cupboard and the problem I wrote about has not disappeared. I think it is very insidious what is happening to attitudes towards girl's bodies. We will be living with that problem for a long time.'' Orbach has done a great deal since the book she calls FIFI was published, though she concedes it is that book for which she is still best known outside her home country, Britain, and some parts of Europe.

She is still helping women - and men - take control. She practises as a therapist from her large home in London's Hampstead four days a week, supervises the work of other therapists, travels throughout Britain and in Europe and the US speaking to ''whoever asks me'' and writes a fortnightly column for the Guardian newspaper.

It is those columns, which aim to ''lift the level of emotional literacy'', that she has compiled for her latest book - her seventh - What's really going on here? Making sense of our emotional lives.

''I am very eager to help us have much more matter-of-fact ways of dealing with our emotional lives,'' she says. ''The only way you can do this is take the normal, everyday problems out of the closet and show what sort of meanings they have.'' Being more straightforward about emotions means they are not so ''bloody troublesome''.

In the introduction to her book she says: ''By upholding the cultural and private values about restricting our emotions that we have assimilated into our codes for living, we relegate an understanding or facility with emotional life to the periphery of conscious experience. We consider feelings to be a stuff-and-nonsense irrelevance, a mystery, or a fearful genie which, once released, will never return to the safe confines of its internal bottle.'' She uses what she calls psychic snapshots to try to show the logic behind acts that on the surface seem irrational or impossible to understand, in sections which deal with the experiences of women, of individuals of either sex, of couples, of children, and in families.

She covers issues as diverse as coping with holidays, envy, fear of homosexuals, maintaining a long distance relationship and, inevitably, preoccupation with food, fatness, thinness and fitness.

Orbach, whose mid-Atlantic accent combines her native British with New York, and who has an American partner, has been back in London for 10 years. While in New York, she founded a local version of the successful Women's Therapy Centre she founded in London in 1976.

Her new book has a section called ''Women Observed'' which looks at the guilt women feel about fulfilling their own needs, at the power of the feminine and men's fear of women, the objectifying of Princess Diana and use of fantasies about such people to lessen alienation, sexual harassment, food and body image, anorexia and life after menopause.

It's a section she introduces with the observation: ''From early life girls absorb the lesson of caution, of restraint, of fear, so that we come to be wary of our bodies. Our bodies are often invested with what appears as a negative strength - men will harm us, other women will envy us.'' The real people in this work, as in all her books and columns, are just that. But they're composites, to protect patient confidentiality: ''I always feel slightly dishonest because you learn all these wonderful things and you have to create fictional characters,'' Orbach says.

But it's common for patients to think she is writing about them when she isn't - partly because of the universality of human problems. ''Also I think there is a longing that your problem is important enough to be written about,'' she says.

The columns are written in a lively, empathetic and opinionated style. Whether or not the reader gains from their insights, they offer an entertainment, but for some readers they offer much more.

''I was quite staggered to realise that people don't just think of the newspaper as ephemeral,'' Orbach says. ''I get lots of letters discussing points in the column or asking me to write about certain things or where to seek help. I feel I am having a dialogue with the reader.'' So she decided to compile them in a more durable form and to reach a wider audience. And she was delighted it was the feminist imprint, Virago, that won the rights to publish it.

Orbach, whose books have been translated into Japanese, speculates that issues such as women's feelings of deprivation face not only women in Western countries.

But although many of her private clients know of her celebrity status and some choose her because of it, it's not something that gets in the way of her work as a therapist.

Most of the men have no idea who she is. ''Sometimes at the end of a long session people ask me things like: 'Do you believe in women's equality?' '' But even when she's known it's not a problem: ''If they feel understood, they are so relieved to get help the fact that you have this label that you are a feminist does not matter.'' Orbach has another motive: ''I want to change the political agenda so it can encompass more about feelings people have, so we are not always responding at the level of, for example, macho initiative or fearful retreat,'' she said.

She uses the example of the death of the British Opposition Leader, John Smith in May: ''There were these eulogies about him and I don't think that was a particularly fine way to deal with the situation. People were upset, but a lot was shock because it was so extraordinary, but nothing addressed that dimension.

''The Fleet Street press hated him but they made him into this wonderful human being.'' Likewise coverage of the inquiry into arms sales to Iran: ''It is being dealt with at the level of all the deceit but no one talks about what deceit in public life does to people.'' What's really going on here? Making sense of our emotional lives by Susie Orbach, Virago, $136, is available in Hong Kong.

From early life girls absorb the lesson of caution. Our bodies are often invested with what appears as a negative strength - men will harm us, other women will envy us Feeling the way forward . . . Susie Orbach wants emotions to be brought out of the closet