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Alexithymia — from the Greek for “without words for feelings” — is the difficulty identifying what one is feeling, distinguishing between emotions and bodily sensations, and putting emotional experience into words. It is not the absence of feeling. It is the absence of access to feeling.
Anorexia nervosa is a serious and potentially life-threatening eating disorder characterised by restricted food intake, intense fear of weight gain, and a profoundly distorted relationship with the body. But the symptom — the restriction, the weight — is not the disorder. It is the surface of something that runs considerably deeper.
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a condition in which the person is preoccupied — sometimes obsessively — with a perceived flaw in their physical appearance. The flaw is either absent or minimal to outside observers. To the person experiencing it, it is consuming.
Body image is the internal picture a person holds of their own body — not the body itself, but the mental and emotional representation of it. What it looks like. What it means. Whether it is acceptable. Whether it belongs to the person who inhabits it.
Eating disorder recovery is frequently misunderstood — by the person experiencing it, by families, and sometimes by clinicians. It is not simply the restoration of normal eating. It is not the cessation of a behaviour. It is the construction of a different relationship with the self — one in which the eating disorder is no longer needed.
Perfectionism is not the same as having high standards. High standards allow for failure, for learning, for effort that falls short of the goal and still has value. Perfectionism does not. It operates on a binary: perfect or worthless. There is no middle ground.
Philippe Jacquet holds a master’s degree in art psychotherapy. It is a discipline he returns to consistently in clinical practice — not as a separate modality, but as a way of reaching what language alone cannot access.
We all lie with words. There is no moral judgment in this — it is simply human. We soften, we edit, we choose what to present and what to hold back. Language is the tool the conscious mind controls most completely.
Philippe Jacquet is not a critic of cognitive behavioural therapy from the outside. He trained in rational emotive behaviour therapy in the early 2000s, and spent time in a Buddhist monastery where mindfulness practice — central to the third wave of CBT — was woven into daily life. He has worked within the CBT tradition and retains genuine respect for it.
Philippe Jacquet has worked with men with eating disorders across private practice, hospital settings, and residential rehabilitation. One observation comes back, again and again, with a consistency that makes it impossible to ignore.
A man returns from a period in treatment. He describes the group sessions — the conversations about feelings, the invitations to share. He says: they kept asking me how I felt. And I didn’t know what to say.
The most fundamental task of a parent is not protection or provision alone — it is transmitting the desire to grow up. The child needs to see, in the adults around them, that adulthood contains something worth moving towards. This cannot be taught. It must be lived in front of them.
For many people who struggle with their body image, the gym does not function as a place of health but as an arena of comparison and self-criticism — systematically reinforcing the feeling of not being enough.
Walk into any gym. You will see people in carefully chosen clothes that display and compete. Men watching themselves in the mirror between sets, assessing. Then someone walks in — more muscular, more lean. Watch what happens to the faces. The eyes go down. The next set begins with more fury and less joy.
An eating disorder is a complex psychological condition in which a person’s relationship with food becomes a primary mechanism for managing emotional pain. The behaviour is not the problem. It is the solution the person found.
Anorexia nervosa — A refusal to take in: food, nourishment, sometimes intimacy. As BMI falls, neurochemistry deteriorates and the brain becomes rigid, locked onto weight loss. The disorder creates the neurological conditions for its own continuation.