Shedding my emotional armour, and even though today's weigh-in should have been joyful, I'm a wreck! Logically I know this is the right thing to do, for myself and my family, but losing weight is going to make me 'visible' again.

I know there are many out there who were sexually abused and use their weight as a coping mechanism, as I did for several decades. For those that have already shed their armour, how did you emotionally cope? Any good books or websites your recommend? Support groups online?

I do not have any people close to me that understand, and even though I thought I could do this myself, I was obviously wrong, considering todays reaction.

I have some of that. It helped me to think of coping in baby steps and to add skills as I go.
Since I had "hidden" at age 9 or 10, I didn't quite know how to cope with the world at a normal size.
Permission to learn skills a little bit at a time as I go, just helped me mentally.

And in practice, nothing in adult life seems as overwhelming as all that childhood stuff was.

I did go through a group workbook on adult children of alcoholics and that was really good. Through local counseling services.

I was never sexually abused, but I have the same problem.

It's held me back in losing weight because I have this real fear of people noticing that gets in my way. I've found that self-help books for people with body dysmorphia have helped me some. It is definitely a constantly ongoing process, though.

I was never sexually abused either, but I too deal with this - I don't think it's just coincidence that there are certain weights where I always stall out (and eventually regain from).

Understanding this self-sabotage is important to me, especially as I both have more to live for now (young kids) and a keen awareness of how much harder it is to lose as I get older, so making this PERMANENT is critically important to me (it's far more important for me to maintain where I am now than to lose another 20 or more pounds).

I've found a lot of the work around Health At Every Size (HAES) quite helpful - it's about accepting your body and Making It Healthy without the self-judgement of the number on the scale. It's not exactly fat acceptance (although you'll find a lot of that in the HAES community too). Groups on Facebook, online, etc for that, and a good book (author is Linda Bacon).

I've also really benefited from the work of shame researcher Brené Brown - she has a few TED talks online, and three books, all of which are useful and helpful to me.

There are other things I find useful periodically in the overarching field of "self love" but I'm hard-pressed to recommend a specific resource, I think it really depends on your personality and what kinds of things appeal to you - I'm very fickle with that stuff...