Overview

The surgery changes the stomach. It does not change the mind. And the gap between the two is where most patients live for the rest of their lives. Bariatric surgery is one of the most effective medical interventions of our era. It restores mobility. It reverses diabetes. It extends life. And for many, it delivers a body they had stopped believing was possible. Yet across nearly three thousand pre-surgical psychological evaluations and fifteen years working alongside bariatric teams, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: the patients who thrive after surgery and the patients who struggle are almost never distinguished by the surgery itself. They are distinguished by what was done, or not done, with the mind. Surgery cannot reach the attachment wounds that made food the primary comfort. It does not dissolve the unconscious contracts the body has carried for decades. It does not update the identity built on size, dismantle the relationships formed around a particular body, or quiet the shadow material the weight has been faithfully holding. Those require different work. Patient, particular, often difficult work that most patients do not undertake before surgery because no one has told them they need to. The Bariatric Brain is the psychological preparation guide that should accompany every surgical referral and almost never does. Across sixteen chapters and four stages - Before the Surgery, Through the Surgery, After the Surgery, and The Life That Follows - Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst Konrad van Staden walks the reader through the psychological terrain the medical pathway leaves unaddressed: the five stages of post-surgical integration, the compliment trap, the body that arrives instead of the one that was imagined, the relationships that shift, the identity crisis nobody screens for, and the long work of becoming the person who can keep what the surgery gave. For the patient considering surgery. The patient already scheduled. The patient months or years out who suspects that the work was never finished. And the clinician who has watched too many transformations falter at exactly the point this book begins. The body changes on the operating table. The mind changes here. Part of the Psychology of Weight Loss Series.

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9781991529091

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