When I read pieces like this, I can't help but wonder: "What's the likelihood that someone who provides counseling services to bariatric patients who struggle in various ways is sought out by bariatric patients who struggle in various ways?"
The reason that quantitative studies are useful is that they avoid the "I have a brother-in-law who ...." problem of extrapolating anecdotes into "everybody knows ...." truthiness.
If quantitative studies' results don't mirror the real situation, that's because the studies aren't well designed or because they suffer from severe non-respondent bias -- not because they're quantitative studies or because they're conducted by "professionals."
I have no doubt that transfer addictions of all kinds plague some patients or that most of us don't have challenging issues of the kinds OP has listed. For instance, who among us doesn't have "family of origin" issues? But in my long life (70 years), I don't believe that the WLS patients I have known struggle with these issues any more than people who never had WLS. Again, that's an anecdotal report -- not based on a well-designed, well executed quantitative study.
That having been said, I still look forward to the rest of the OP's series. But I do hope that it's not just a series of "The Story of Pitiful Person X" followed by "The Story of Pitiful Person Y." I hope that the series explores meaningfully the significant and permanent improvements in self-care that WLS patients must deliver to themselves to be successful for longer than the weight loss phases.
This last bit is much more in line with the OP's post: This surgery is a really big damn deal. I fluctuate between thinking that (1) WLS patients have great courage and optimism compared to their peers who don't choose WLS, since WLS is a potentially life-changing operation that comes with no guarantees vs. (2) too many WLS patients have nowhere near the support or the internal resources they will need to adapt to such a potentially life-changing operation and its aftermath. Actually, I believe both of these takes are true.
