Embodied Liminality Inhabiting Selves: Reflections On Papers By Sheehy and Wooldridge

Patients with eating disorders struggle with the ability to regulate amounts, concretely and symbolically, and we, as therapists, witness and are always subject to the too much-ness and the not enough-ness as they are played out in continuous enactments in the analytic dyad. Wooldridge and Sheehy’s contributions highlight our challenges in looking at the ways in which such difficulties in regulation evoke relationships to important attachment figures that are then enacted in the interpersonal field. I reflect on these papers through a relational perspective that places more emphasis on the therapist’s integrated participation and curiosity about their participation in enactments. A two-person theoretical model of patient’s problems and of therapeutic action can expand the exploration of how self-regulation is rooted in mutual regulation and dysregulation, and how such exploration can be ultimately transformative in the interpersonal field.