The Connection Between Touch-Deprivation and Body Image
“Fatty, fatty two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door.” Nursery Rhyme I was a pretty skinny kid until around the age of 12 or 13. It was then that my sugar craving really kicked-in as a means of medicating away the emotional pain that I wasn’t willing to face. Lots of sugar and chips and little exercise, aside from walking to and from school, meant that my slim figure began to expand. And expand it did. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right at the age when you are becoming self-conscious about your body, which is already changing in multiple other ways with the onset of puberty. All I heard from family was razzing over having become the fat member of the family. And of course, we know how merciless other kids at school can be. My family was so emotionally unavailable that we never hugged, kissed or touch, and so I already was suffering from touch-deprivation—and feeling completely untouchable and unlovable. Now that I was fat, I saw myself as a c...