Being Overweight is a Great Form of Punishment

The Need for Self Punishment

The process of living one's life is guaranteed to eventually provide any normal person with plenty about which to feel guilty. None of us leads a perfect life, and we don't always do the right thing in every situation. Add to this the guilt foisted upon us by religious institutions, parents, or even society in general, and the real wonder of it all is that more of us don't just bash in our brains and be done with it.

So guilt happens. For whatever reasons, every healthy adult has some guilt feelings about things that he or she probably should not feel guilty about. And, as you might guess, some people manage to make a subconscious connection between their guilt and the shape of their bodies. When this happens they make themselves overweight to get society to punish them for their guilt.

That a subconscious mind could do this to itself sounds perfectly loony. "Hell, Edith, that don't make no sense a'tall!" And Archie is right: It does not make conscioussense. (Have you taken the Common Sense Test?) But we are not really dealing with the conscious part of the mind here. It is the subconscious mind that is in the driver's seat and that part of the mind has some serious logical limitations. That is, the subconscious uses only deductive logic.

The punishee-motivated person (one who needs to be punished) is frequently referred to as a masochist. (If more people had access to a good sadist, maybe fewer people would have to resort to being overweight as a way of getting society to punish them. When I was a practicing therapist I was always amazed by the fact that there were so many more masochists than sadists. There were never enough sadists to go around.)

The Need to Punish

Some people are on the sadistic end of this dimension and have a subconscious need to punish others by being overweight. This seems absurd, of course (it's that conscious/subconscious logic issue again). But it is indeed a fact that some people make themselves overweight to punish one or more people other than themselves.

Primary targets for this kind of punishment are parents and spouses. Sometimes the targets are other authority figures, such as teachers or priests. I have known of at least a few cases in which the punishment target was society in general. For one of these cases society was a stand-in for a never-known parent who had "abandoned" the person as a young child (the parent had actually been killed in an industrial accident, but that did not mitigate the sense of abandonment for the person's subconscious mind).

The punisher-motivated person(one who needs to punish) often also has some punishee needs (need to be punished). It is for this reason that ideomotor questioning are sometimes confusing and seem to be misleading. Be aware of this in your questioning; it is possible to get affirmative answers to both needs.

Suggestion formulation can usually be lumped into the category of punishment. It is usually not necessary to formulate separate groups of suggestions for punishee and punisher dysfunctions.