At some point in your life you began to question how you view your body and how it impacts your relationships with yourself and with the world. A negative experience of your body can become a torturous preoccupation. Eventually, your attempt to ward off feelings of self-disgust creates a rigid belief system in which you’re only allowed to be thin and you insist that anything else would leave everyone including you disgusted with you.
Embedded in this belief system is the idea that if you could be thin, your life would be better. You might avoid participating in activities because you are “not thin enough.” Thus, you isolate yourself and hide behind a veil of shame. You might recall earlier times in your life when you were thin, and wonder why you didn’t appreciate it then. Only now when you look back at pictures do you appreciate the body you used to have. First and foremost, you know you didn’t appreciate that thinner self at the time, and it is only in retrospect. This desire for what once was and now isn’t only increases your sense of heaviness and self-consciousness.
The struggle to feel good about yourself as a person while struggling to feel that you look good is exhausting. Working toward liking yourself as you are and accepting that your body has flaws and will always have flaws is a way of moving toward self-acceptance. Understand that your shame about your body is the antithesis of self-acceptance. Shame is fueled by self-hate. You’re never good enough. Never thin enough. You don’t love yourself and you feel like no one could ever love you. But you can’t be thin enough. You are who you are. It is by accepting this fact that you begin the shift to a more positive self experience.
People who struggle with body image often struggle to maintain an emotional connection in a romantic relationship. Your body shame is your painful secret and every minute you spend in a relationship is another minute that you risk being discovered as flawed, vulnerable, and exposed. And so you might try to stay out of relationships altogether, or you might sabotage the relationship you’re in before your partner can find you out.
In order to be accepted and loved, you feel like you must be thin. But you believe that being thin requires a torturous preoccupation with and negative actions toward your body. Your shame drives you to hide your beliefs and actions. Now how can you be accepted and loved in an authentic way? This is one of the most damaging and brutal cycles I see in my practice: “I want to be loved and accepted for who I really am but I have to keep who I really am a secret.”
Another manifestation of body shame is the belief that you have to maintain or obtain an unrealistic, even unreachable thinness to earn or keep your partner’s love and approval. Because you judge yourself, you may seek a partner who judges you – you may even enlist a hyper-critical partner to collude with you in your unhealthy, unrealistic, and never-ending pursuit of thinness. The pressure is intense. Ironically, it might even make you crave comfort food, which will only exacerbate your anxiety about your body.
Anxiety builds as you and your partner get closer, and he or she becomes more likely to discover your shame. It is such an unbearable concept to be discovered as so “imperfect” that you might even feel you have to choose between a shameful and punitive relationship with your body and your relationship with your partner.
The path to recovery is a challenging one. The idea that thinness equals acceptance and love can be a central component of your identity. But only by working to release this all-consuming, rigid and deeply embedded belief system can you make room to feel good about yourself and be able to receive love. The excruciating work of loving yourself even after allowing your body to be its natural size is the only way to grow close to yourself and others.
