《Unbearable Lightness》经典读后感10篇
《Unbearable Lightness》是一本由Portia de Rossi著作，Atria出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 25.99，页数：320，文章吧小编精心整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(一)：Comfy in One’s Own Skin A Case Study of Unbearable Lightness
1 Case History
1.1 Background Information
ortia De Rossispent a major part of her youth, from the age of 12 to 25 years old, on “yo-yo diets,” which consisted of bingeeatingand purging. She lived a life filled with low self-esteem and self-hatred. In addition to that, she suffered from the corrosive effects of constant doubts about her appearance as well as struggled over her sexuality.
During her early modeling days, Portia had basedher happiness on how much she weighedand lived a life as a closet gay woman that was filled with nothing but confusion. When she was around 25-26 years old, she ended her first marriage in Los Angeles, where her husband had an affair with her brother’s wife while Portia herself had a crush on the neighbor Kali. After that, she struggled with her eating disorders while filming Ally McBeal associated with herworthless feelings.
ortia’s problems can be traced back to the time when sherealized she was gay and that was during her childhood. Her mom advised her not to tell others about her heterosexuality. This was similar to the times in which Portiagot the less-than-A grades. Her motherwould not tell anyone that she had even competed. These precedenciesset off her intense feelings of fear, shame, guilty and a decades-long eating disorder. She thought of her father as the obvious culpritand a major cause of her suffering, but in reality, her mother might also be at fault.
I would like to start working with her during her adolescence, around her sixteen or seventeen. It is at thistime that she got a grip on the binge eating, came out to her mom about her sexuality, and began the chronic process of being an anorexic. Also, at the age of 15, she adopted the name Portia de Rossi to reinvent herself.
1.2 Deｓｃｒｉｐｔion of the Presenting Problem
ortia’s father died when she was 9years old. As the child of a single parent, shespent her lonely and insecure girlhoodin Australia. Attheageof8 years old, she played the husband rolein her named “husband and wife”game, which foreshadowsherfuturesexual orientation. During her childhood, she wasused to gettinghonorsin her classes in orderto make her mom proud and to avoid the embarrassment of losing. She memorized answers to mathematicproblems in order to be undefeated, and won the honors for her ballet exam through dedication and long hours of practice.
With a desire to be special and attainable, she began modeling at the age 12, and at the same time, she walked into the battle with the perception of her body being imperfect. Starving, bingeeating and then purging washer only way to lose weight.When she was 14, she started smoking to win over the cool peers and to suppress her appetite. By 15, she had been taught by her older colleagues the methods of fasting and purging in order to control weight. At the age 16, Portia came out to her mother, but kept her sexuality a secret from other members of her family,like her brother and her grandmother.
ortia’s views on body image can be traced back to her mother’s views on body image. Portia’s mother told her that, “healthy”was a euphemism for “fat”and she equated being thin and skinny with being attractive, powerful and disciplinary. In contrast, being healthy weight meant being normal and mediocre which would disappoint her mom. She barely liked any single part of her body. Her weight was the determining factor of her self-esteem. The purging and the laxatives had become part of her everyday life.
2 Theory Interpretation
ortiawas a highly sensitive and insecure girl. She yearned for her mom’s approval and was obsessed with food and calorie counting. She hid from her own sexuality out of fear of being exposed by others and becoming an outcast.According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, her emotional safety needs and belongingness and love needs had not been satisfied, which resulted in her low self-esteem and poor self-confidence. Her mom was good at dieting, and it’s possible that Portia might have been trying to bond with her mother by trying to diet like her mother. In Portia’s mind, she was only accepted by her mom when she was perfect and when she got all the A grades. She was unable to find the unconditional acceptance from her mom, and she had to hide her true self and her true feelings in order to meet her mom’s expectations.
In the beginning of her modeling career, Portia and her mother would go toMcDonald after a go-see or a modeling job, which made food aprize for pretending to be an adult. Due to thatexperience, she started to use food and her control over food as a means to deal with her difficultemotions such as vulnerability and distress; i.e. she compensated for her insecurities by means of compulsive eating.
ased on Cass’s model of sexual orientation identity formation, Portia may be in the third stage, identity tolerance. She admitted her homosexuality but merely tolerated her homosexual identity. At the age of seventeen, it was almost impossible for her to truly accept her sexual orientationsince it was hard for her to accept her true self.
When she was nineteen, she left law school and tried to become an actress with the love for her girlfriend Sacha. At that time, she barely met the criteria of the identity tolerance stage. She preferred Sacha to be heterosexual since she didn’t want to be a lesbian. Before feeling comfortable with her sexual orientation, she had to slowly shift self-hatred toward self-esteem, andthroughself-esteem she would have been able to experienceself-acceptance and self-confidence.
3 Intervention
3.1 Therapeutic Goals
The primary therapeutic goal shall help Portia to adjust to her daily life and to better take care of her body. Before taking baby steps to help with her eating habits, I would like to develop the therapeutic relationship with her to make sure she ishonest with me about her daily food intake.
Learning to listen to her body’s signals and developing alternative coping mechanisms for comforting herself that don’t involve food would be the second goal. Keeping a recovery diary,where she can write down her emotions and feelings,will help her maintain awareness, preventtriggers and explore her feelings in more depth, especially when she is dealing with issuesinvolving food. Embracing body diversity may be a small but important step for her as well.
ecoming more effective in the meaningful relationshipsand learning about social skillswould be beneficial for her as well.Gaining support from her family and feeling connected sociallycan be a priceless victory for Portia. Finding a support group could be the starting place to develop social connections. The long term goal would be workingtogether to help her self-confidence grow naturally until she becomes comfortable in her own skin.
3.2 Conceivable Counter-transference Challenges
Having a similar family structure with Portia, this was a difficult read for me. I strained to read it slowly, as, during each passage centered on Portia’s sadness, I revisited my own. My mom is a beautiful woman who values the physical beauty. She is strict with me that she supports my dream and most time she wants me to be the best. My dad disappeared when I was eight. And I have a good relationship with my brother. I have also been on a diet since I was 15.
It is easy for me to put myself in her shoes, and it is frustrated for me to see her go throughthe struggling process. I might be too emotionally involved to handle her case. With my own struggles with eating, it’s hard for me to think her anorexia nervosa and bulimia could be her hiding from the homosexuality. I prefer to think her eating disorders and her sexual orientation as two independent suffering,which might be my misunderstanding. I maybecome too focused on her eating disorders and the relationships with her mom (just like what I did with the essay), but overlook the distress of her sexual orientation.
More likely than not, Portia will conceal her real food intake and bingeing problems from me, which might make me feel frustrated and not trusted. The real problem for me is how to separate my own feelings from Portia’s case.
3.3 Prognosis
Even though her desire to appear perfect is overwhelming, particularly for a sensitive young woman who is also struggling to come to terms with her sexual orientation, there is still hope of Portia’s recovery.
ortia’s histrionic eating habits, her poor self-image, binge-eating and laxative and her fear of being exposed as homosexual could be the poor prognostic factors. It would take a long time for her to accept who she is. The Relapse of her eating disorders could be a normal part of recovery which should be well prepared.
The earlierthetreatment isinitiated, the better the prognosis will be.
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(二)：Heaviness
ortia De Rossi is an Australian-born actress born in 31, January 1973, best known for her roles as lawyer Nelly Porter on the television series Ally McBeal, and Lindsay Fünke on the sitcom Arrested Development. Portia used to have a marriage to Mel Metcalfe, who cheated on her and ran off with his brother's wife. She now lives in Los Angeles with her wife Ellen Degeneres. Unbearable lightness is her first book.
Unbearable Lightness: A Story Of Loss and Gain is an autobiography about how Portia, as a outstanding Australian actress working at Hollywood all by herself, fights and struggles with her eating disorder and sexuality. The story begins with a dream about the loud, clear voice that reverberates in her head like an alarm that can't be turned off, “What did you eat last night？” This sound has been bothering her since she was twelve when choosing to become a model. Especially during the four years of acting on Ally McBeal, she only ate 300 calories a day and exercised as long as she could. Despite the fact that her families always talked to her about being too thin, she still thought “my calves are too thick, my thighs are too big, my ass is droopy, my hips are too wide, my stomach is round and has rolls.” This strong idea that she had to be thin to be considered pretty so that she could be worthy of attention formed in her mind for so long not just in request of her acting career, but mostly because of her dad. Her dad died when she was eight, but she never tended to talk with her mother or brother about these heavy and emotional feelings caused by her father's death. For the first time she has expressed her feeling in her book, “I blame you, dad. I blame you for telling me that I was pretty. I blame you for dying before you had time to change your mind. Because of you I have to make up stories, have fantasy lives.” Fortunately, with the help of her then-girlfriend Ellen, Portia successfully get rid of the anorexia and the idea that she is never thin enough. She realized she was gay when she was back in middle school, but at that time she couldn't tell anybody about that because being gay is abnormal at all. When she grows older, she couldn't expose her sexuality for risk of losing her job, because Ellen DeGeneres's TV show had just been cancelled after her decision to come out, and there had never been any openly lesbian actresses ever. Eventually she had to marry Mel, whom she had met on the set of her first American movie, to hide her real sexuality and run away from her true self. After her husband cheating on her and their divorce, she only told her mother of her sexuality. Portia haven't date anyone for years on the ground of her severe fear of putting her acting career in danger until Ellen came into her life to show her what beauty is. The book is aimed at telling about how to overcome self-doubt, and become self-acceptant.
I bought this book about one year ago, curious about how Ellen's wife would be. I have no idea who Portia De Rossi was, but I knew Ellen DeGeneres was a famous host full of humor, so I wonder who was so lucky to be her wife. At the first glance of the book, I found it dramatically boring, because Portia can’t stop talking about how she struggled with how much she should eat. I was very disappointed with Ellen’s choice, for after this quick skim I pictured Portia as nothing but a stupid actress like most actresses in Hollywood who just had beautiful appearance and nothing else. So this book ended up sitting on my book shelf for almost a year.
Recently I am watching previous Ellen Shows; I abruptly find one episode that Ellen interviewed her wife Portia. It awakes my interest; in the interview Portia introduced that she wrote this book to inspire all the girls and women who had anorexia and were not satisfied with how they look like. When I am watching this interview, I couldn’t help but crying because I feel related to Portia’s story for I myself have been through some rough time struggling with my small appetite. For a very long time I feel no desire to eat anything; even if I feel hungry indeed, I can’t choose what to eat in the school canteen owing to being particular about food. It fusses me a lot but my friends can’t understand me, in their opinions losing appetite is the precious opportunity to lose weight that everybody long for. When I reread this book now, my emotional states change all the way through. At the beginning, I feel the empathy when Portia writes how she felt obsessively about calories and weight. For me this seems like a private experience that nobody will share in public. After reading half of the book, I feel exhausted. Portia confesses so much that I even can’t read those paragraphs of repetition of bingeing and dieting. Although comparing to her, my personal experience seems nothing, but it still hurts. Portia’s story is like a reflection of mine.
Eating disorder is one of Portia’s and my problem, another is consistent self-doubt. Portia hid herself of being gay and always worried about her image as a public figure. As for me, I’m always in the mood of worrying. I worry about if I answer my teachers’ questions perfectly; I worry about my relationship with my friends even there is nothing wrong going on with our relationship; I worry about whether I give a positive impression on those people I care about; I worry about if I can be a qualified journalist; I worry about every aspects in my life not in its best state; I even worry about whether I will have a future. This annoys me and I have no friends to share because it’s too private for me and for them as well, and still, I worry about them not willing to listen to me talking about this kind of nonsense. When Portia threw this book at my face, for the first time I realized self-doubt can turn to self-acceptance, and these private experiences can be shared by this brave woman Portia. It gives me courage to go to therapy to talk about myself, and so far it goes well that I am willing to confront myself now. As Portia portrays, “I met Ellen when I was 168 pounds and she loved me. She didn’t see that I was heavy; she only saw the person inside. My two greatest fears, being fat and being gay, when realized, led to my greatest joy. It’s ironic, really, when all I’ve ever wanted to be is to be loved for my true self, and yet I tried so hard to present myself as anything other than who I am.”
There certainly are some flaws in this book on account of Portia is not a professional writer. Until the epilogue Portia kept talking about the trivial details of herself and her sickness, which gave me an impression that she wasted all her time on this kind of nonsense and couldn’t figure something more important. But ultimately in the epilogue she says, “By starving myself into society’s beauty ideal, I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life...I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference.” I even worried for Portia because many people may not stick to read to the last page so that they can’t get Portia’s idea, but it is in the epilogue that the epilogue she recovered from anorexia with the help of professional medical aid and Ellen. It forced her to accept herself. What’s more, she finally came out to the public of who she really is and got married with Ellen DeGeneres.
With the help of my therapist and this book, I realize my eating disorder and self-doubt eventually will fade away, they are just latencies that erode my health or life. Portia De Rossi and her book wakes me up just in time and forces me to confront with myself. I can’t imagine how hard it was for Portia to write this book out solely for helping numerous people with the same problem. It was something difficult to understand by outsiders, but Portia’s writing gives us inspiration and direction. I sincerely want to use the last sentence in her book as ending to inspire more people, “True nobility isn’t about being better than anyone else; it's about being better than you used to be.”
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(三)：得与失，自我认同，灰色的故事
当初看到portia上oprah 还有 ellen 节目时声泪俱下的样子就着实被震撼到了，这个在我看来有着足够skinny身材的女人，曾经有过多不堪回首的一段历程？也正是因为太多的眼泪，太多对过往的回忆，我放弃了网络上随手可找到的电子版，认真的等待二十多天买来了正版实体书。
这本书的阅读过程绝对是难以用愉快来形容的。从少年时代进入模特行业开始，到进入好莱坞这个娱乐中心，一路的前进都伴随着节食、瘦身。很难想象一个在大家看来足够苗条的女演员那种永远对自己身材不满意的心。但事实却是，外表和身材是她在长久的自卑与自我厌恶中找到的一颗救命稻草。从节食到厌食症，到死亡边缘的挣扎，再到康复过程中反复的暴食、节食，作者让我们一同压抑的同时，其实很深刻的揭露了这种心态形成、变化的过程及周围环境对其造成的极大影响。整本书除了对进食近乎变态的严苛，portia对自己长期的心理剖析也是灰暗颜色的重重一笔。
对于一个能以如此真实深刻的角度去回顾那些对自己来说过于残忍的往事的作者，无论是谁都应该对其感到钦佩。每个人或多或少都有那些阴暗的过往，都有那些不愿对外人提及的所谓变态的心理，但有几个人能如此清晰的将其公之于众？portia做到了。如其书中所讲，她愿意以自己的这段真实的经历去帮助那些罹患厌食症或者在长期进行节食的朋友，告诉他们什么才是真正对自己好的生活。
其实如果没有happy ending，我会将其定义为一个黑色的故事。还好，portia得到了应有的救赎。Ellen的出现是她人生中巨大的光芒。是的，但愿二人长长久久，但愿一路前行，但愿这缕光芒能够将灰色的故事一点点照亮、漂白。
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(四)：the dark side was no longer so dark
when i was reading this book, it mostly felt like portia de rossi was sitting right in front of me and talking, revealing her unknown miserable past, like i was her therapist.
最开始听说这本书是去年底。虽然很喜欢ellen degerenes以及ellen show，很少关注她和portia的私生活，以至于当初一直认为portia只不过是个嫁了ellen d.的不知名过气小演员。
听说这本书后不到一个月，没想到的是我也开始了一段半年之久的eating disorder。前几天偶然看到portia宣传新书（2010年）上ellen show，之后在pad上下载，第二天通宵看完。不知道没有体会过eating disorder的人读完这本书是什么感觉，但是对我来说好像书中每个字都像尖刀一样戳进心里，让我能完完全全感受portia d.r.当时的痛苦 迷惘 与挣扎。
我相信每个人都有不愿提及的过去。大多数时候我们会为了保护自己下意识忘记，以至于很多时候不开心的回忆只是脑子里的blur。但portia在ellen show里面有段话说得很对。如果你没有办法正视过去的痛苦，总有一天它或它们会让你的痛苦加倍，one way or another。
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(五)：The Grand Moment
I have gotten an impression before, that there is a grand moment when all the sudden one important change happens, once forever. But the truth seems to be that it is always a slow and painful process to make a difference. Only after that, we may record one important point as the moment and forget the pain in the change. This is misleading. If one believes in the existence of such moment and look for it, he may give up each time when he struggles to make a change. The change is thus never going to happen.
The author, however, takes the same aspect. She spent about nine tenths of the book describing the awful memories when she went through extreme eating disorder and distorted beliefs in her body image. I like that she is not trying to manipulate readers' emotions by using strong words, but describe it with modest and honest deｓｃｒｉｐｔion of the facts. As I get older, I sympathize more with writings in this way. But she emphasizes the grand moment. After the day she is nearly dead, the process of recovering happens all the sudden. This is exactly the grand moment. I myself still have doubts about the ease of this process, but the near death experience can be quite different from normal realization of "Oh, I have to make a change!". When I gain more life experience in the future, the reflection can change and then I will update my belief here too.
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(六)：Unbearable Lightness 一个关于得与失的故事
ortia de Rossi，生于1973年1月31日，原名Amanda Lee Rogers，出生于澳大利亚维多利亚州，12岁开始做模特，曾以优异的高考成绩进入墨尔本大学法律系，其间辍学只身飞往LA园演员梦，98年参演“甜心俏佳人”走红，04年出柜，08年8月16日与著名脱口秀女主持人Ellen DeGeneres在加州法律认可同志婚姻时结婚。2010年11月2日出版自传回忆录“无法承受的轻盈：一个关于得与失的故事”（Unbearable Lightness：a story of loss and gain），主要内容有她曾与厌食症，暴食症斗争多年的惨痛经历，和之前自己对于自我认同和性取向的挣扎等。
《Unbearable Lightness》读后感(七)：Thank note to PDR
Once I thought of leaving this book unfinished, because I felt agonized before last chapter. Thanks God for my compulsion forcing me to end it so I hadn’t miss this valuable lesson.
My psychological states changed several times during this reading. First, I felt excited when Potia wrote how she felt obsessively about calories and weight. It awoke me immediately the feelings I had toward diets started from middle school. I never thought of some one would share this secret so vividly. Then, I started to be angry and tired. She confessed too much. Most volume of book was the repetition between bingeing and dieting. Worst of all, we all thought this was nothing serious or wrong and even were proud of our self disciplines with brief success. It was like a irony of myself. I felt resistant to accept I was once sick too. At one point, I almost threw the book away and shouted: can you think of something more important to pursuit in life instead of wasting life only on these nonsense？ At last, I relieved when I read about what I was waiting for:
“I remember feeling ashamed for calling myself a feminist when I had blatantly succumbed to the oppression of the mass media telling me what was beautiful, how to look and what to weigh... I had always prided myself on the fact that I was smart, analytical, and someone who didn’t “fall for it”.By starving myself into society into society’s beauty ideal,I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life...I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference.”
Definitely, a dieting life is never happy and endless. I bought smaller size of clothes to force myself dieting to fit in and feel failure after every try. At the first year living alone, I didn’t have ordinary meals and simply indulging in all desserts which were prohibited by my father from my childhood. After gaining weight, I stopped eating rice when I lived at school and only rely on vegetables and fruits and rewarded myself by bingeing guiltily with chips or sweets. I hated foods but the starvation made me eat all the stuffs that I wanted to throw up. I even felt proud that malnutrition colored my hair a little blonde. I didn’t want to go home on weekends simply because I would have to eat normally in front of them. When I had to meet friends I would starve myself first, and let it go during the period I stayed at home.Gaining weight recently under my family’s care, I am just thinking about I would need an extreme plan to get these fat off when I finish my application. I never thought this would be a problem until Potia’s book slapped me on the face.
Although luckily, I have many interest in life thus I didn’t go too far on diet, but it is a latent not that may damage my health or life. I sincerely want to thank for Potia De Rossi for waking me up in advance and realizing the problem clearly. It must be a hard effort to write this book out, but as Ellen said, “ it will help numerous people”, especially for girls and women. It was something difficult to understand by outsiders.
Thank you for this extraordinary book, Potia De Rossi. And by the way, always a thank to your wife, Ellen De Generes, who reminds me to be happy.