ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an innovative perspective to understanding and measuring embodiment based on examining how women recovering from anorexia nervosa (AN) respond to questions and scenarios assessing body connection and emotional awareness, two essential facets of embodied lived experience. To begin, this chapter opens by briefly reviewing the contemporary frameworks of conceptualizing embodiment and the current practices in the assessment and measurement of embodied experience in individuals living with eating disorders. Then, a holistic, phenomenologically grounded theoretical-methodological framework for conceptualizing and measuring embodiment is proposed. This framework is illustrated by the presentation of key findings of an empirical investigation on response processes underlying answering questions and scenarios assessing body connection and affective experience. The results of this response processes inquiry suggest that women articulate their experience of embodiment via several interlocking processes: (a) interoceptively, by tuning into their body sensations; (b) affectively, by attending to the bodily experienced emotional cues; (c) kinesthetically, by moving and engaging expressively with their body; (d) cognitively, by constructing/imagining scenarios or accessing episodic and declarative memories; and (e) relationally, by attuning to and empathizing with others’ emotional states through their body. These processes are mapped onto women’s recovery journey in order to establish potential benchmarks for monitoring the recovery process in a manner that honours women’s lived experience of their bodies. A discussion of the theoretical and clinical implications of the proposed framework for understanding and measuring embodiment will conclude this chapter.
