Susan Sands - The Inside Story: The Surprising Pleasures of Living in an Aging Body

Praise for The Inside Story

Rejoice! Susan Sands has crafted an exquisitely written, indispensable antidote to the inexorable fear and revulsion attendant to the aging process, especially with respect to body image. Eschewing the typical self-help promise of triumph over aging, Sands deftly provides an integrated guide to navigating and enriching the aging process, utilizing a groundbreaking weaving of neuroscience and psychology that upends our fraught expectations about living in an aging body. With depth and grace, she turns our thinking about women aging on its head, challenging us to think about aging not as a problem or disorder but as a fresh and novel way to live in a stable older body. Sands invigorates our minds with the hope of finding solace and fertile ground through remaking and reexperiencing our relationship to our bodies so that we can live in and from them, in their glory or not, as is.

Jean Petrucelli, PhD, CEDS

editor of Body-States and director of EDCAS at The William Alanson White Institute

We might wish to scorn our aging, but Susan Sands invites us to understand andyes!even relish our embodiments many surprises and gifts. This is a work of love to women.

Susie Orbach

author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies

A delicious brew of new knowledge and fresh ideas, seasoned with a feminism that spans a long, rich life. What a treat!

Valory Mitchell, PhD

coauthor of the 50-year study Women on the River of Life

Now more than ever, we want to inhabit our bodies comfortably, honor our cycles, and consciously evolve. As we grow older, Susans book makes the neurological and psychological case for tending to the most vital relationship of allwith ourselves.

Elena Brower

author of Being You

Every woman over 50 must read this book; it will transform their lives. Dr. Sandss core message is that women do not just have a body, they are a body, and being able to know and feel their bodies from the inside is the gateway to contentment and full acceptance of their aging. Supported by the latest neuroscience research and full of gripping first-person accounts of women struggling to come to terms with growing older, The Inside Story offers many practical methodsfrom mindfulness to touch, movement and yogafor women to know themselves not for what others say they are, but for who they truly are, inside and out.

Lewis Richmond

author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice

Susan Sands, PhD

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

2022 Susan Sands, Ph.D.

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.

Published 2022

Cover design by Jennifer Miles

Book design by Meredith March

BK06232

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sands, Susan (Psychologist), author.

Title: The inside story : the surprising pleasures of living in an aging body / by Susan Sands, PhD.

Description: Boulder, CO : Sounds True, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021036480 (print) | LCCN 2021036481 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683648093 (hardback) | ISBN 9781683648109 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: AgingPsychological aspects. | AgingPhysiological aspects. | Older womenPsychology. | Body image. | Self-esteem in old age.

Classification: LCC BF724.8 .S26 2022 (print) | LCC BF724.8 (ebook) | DDC 155.67dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036480

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036481

I woke this morning to balmy air, a clear sky, and a burning desire to head out with the dog to the eucalyptus-shaded trail near my home in the Berkeley hills. As I always do these days, I first stretch the kinks out of my knees, ankles, and back. Then I carefully make my way down the dusty, rutted hill at the start of the trail, placing each foot firmly. The light is filtering through the cathedral of trees in a particularly glorious way this morning, and as I look up and lock into that beauty, my foot hits a small rock and I lurch. Watch your footing! I hiss to myself under my breath. This sense of cautiousness is with me more these days. Im in pretty good shape, but at seventy-four I know I have to watch it. Im not the invincible forty-five-year-old I used to be. I can feel age creeping slowly through my bodynothing major, but a bit slower on the uptake, a tad weaker, an ankle that acts up if I dont keep it strong, a bit less sure of my balance.

T he facts are incontrovertible. I was born and will age and die like every other human being and every other living thing on the planet. No exceptions. I have no choice about this. How I age, however, is where I have some choice, although there will also be plenty of surprises and no say whatsoever about the outcome. As I gaze up at the eucalyptus trees, which, like me, are aging by living, I know that my sanest choice is not to protest or deny the inevitable but to get to know and make friends with my aging body. I need to develop a new, healthier relationship with my older body; or, more accurately, I need to develop a relationship with my new body, my new aging body.

When not on the hiking trail, I have, for the past thirty-five years, been thinking deeply about womens bodies. As a clinical psychologist, Ive been teaching, training, publishing articles, and doing psychotherapy centered on body-based difficulties, like eating disorders, as well as aging. The body sense is what Im most interested inthe body we feel and experience from within. Im particularly interested in promoting the integration of mind and body, which allows us to have the invigorating sense of actually living in the body, what we call embodiment. Western civilization has been, until very recently, so strangely focused on the mind to the exclusion of the body, when, in truth, the body is the foundation of all of our experience from birth until death.

It is now scientifically established that our minds are rooted in our bodies. Our minds are formed through sensing and feeling our moving bodies as they interact with the environment, especially the important people around us. Our emotional awareness, our sense of well-being, our very sense of self is created from our inner body sensations! In other words, the future of you depends on how well you attend to and process all the crucial information streaming from within your body.

Yet, hardly any scientists or scholars are asking how our body experience affects how we ageeven though the body is the visible evidence, bellwether, and messenger of aging! The aging female body, as women experience itwhether comfortably or uncomfortably, positively or negativelyis still routinely ignored, rendering it irrelevant or unthinkable. I passionately believe that our inner body experience is of utmost importance as we age, and I will urge you to develop your body awareness as the best way to get to know, accept, and enjoy your older body.

In this book, we will look at aging through a focus on the body, based on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, which will transform your view of your aging body and your later years. How do we know we have a body? How does the body sense develop? How do we create our emotions out of body sensations? How do we develop body awareness? How does our body sense change as we age? What happens to our sense of self when we dont feel comfortable in our body, especially as we age?