Overcoming BODY SHAME - Beyond the Mirror

SPEAKER_00: The emotions and psychological side. There are reasons why you can't stop eating. And that's what we explore here. Here we'll support you on your journey to stopping binge eating altogether. This podcast is produced fortnightly, and I am your host, Jelly Treacher. Welcome. Today I'm talking about body image, body confidence, and body esteem. Because how you feel about yourself and feeling shame about that kind of comes along with comfort eating. Today I'm talking about ways to think differently about your body and about yourself. It's all very much bound up with self-confidence, but most of my clients have very specific and obvious hatred of their bodies and how they look, so it's an issue to tackle on its own. How you talk to yourself makes a huge difference. Much like with any self-criticism, criticizing yourself for how you look is going to affect the way you feel and possibly lead to binge or comfort eating as well. So if you're looking in the mirror and you're thinking, I don't like that, you're gonna feel bad, which will have a bearing on how you treat yourself in other ways and perhaps be a part of reaching for comfort. So the first thing I want to talk about is starting to get to know how you talk to yourself and your body critic. What do you say to yourself in your head? What's the unconscious thought every time you catch a sight of your reflection? Or when you see yourself in a shop window or walking by a bus window even, what's the first thing that pops into your head? If you're not aware of that, take some time to notice. What's actually in your head? What's the semi-unconscious thought, just as you look in the mirror? If you're here, at least some of it is going to be unconscious self-criticism. So become aware of how nasty you're being to yourself. You're probably talking to yourself in a way that you would never say to somebody else. With everyone else, you'd be kind. That's where we need to get you to. To a place of looking at your own reflection with love and compassion. I asked this of my group, and one person came up with you've let yourself down, is the thing that she says when she looks in the mirror. This one is so common. Can you identify with it? Do you look in the mirror and think you've really let yourself down, you've let yourself go, and you feel ashamed of yourself. So many ways to put yourself down in one breath. This one often leads to running yourself down for not being able to stick to goals that you've had for yourself. So again, you're supporting the idea that willpower should be enough. Is for everyone else, so why isn't it for you? But that's I hope if I've taught you anything, that that's really not relevant. Often self-criticism about being overweight runs into self-criticism about other areas really quickly, about being a failure. This can swiftly lead to feeling unlovable, and often some really nasty ways of talking to yourself. I have a lovely client who recently had a breakthrough with this particular subject. She suddenly realized that she'd been putting herself down all her life. Every time she looked in the mirror, she just didn't realise that. So for her, just realizing that changed the habit of a lifetime. As far as I know, she is still talking much, much more kindly to herself. So start thinking of how you can replace this negative thought with something much, much kinder. The second part of what I want to talk about today is learning to value what your body does instead of how it looks. Start to replace body negativity with all the ways that your body functions really well, and all the ways that your body does something good for you. That means you can appreciate something in your life and have a good experience. So, for example, I really appreciate my eyesight. I go out every day for a walk. This also means I appreciate my legs, the ability to move, and my lungs. I get so much pleasure from it. Seeing the sun, the rain, the birds, the trees, feeling the air on my skin, the dogs and the puppies, and the people. Especially right now. This actually gives me a sense of something that's worth living for, and something that I'll take into the rest of my working day. I don't know where I'd be without it. I'm not saying that you have to go for a walk every day, that doesn't suit everybody. But for me it works. There's something that your body will be doing for you that really means a lot to you. So start listing these and noticing them all day long. Just notice what your body does. What it does for you that makes you enjoy your life in a way that how you look has nothing to do with. My third topic for today is check your value system. The things that we value in people. At the moment you're overvaluing your looks, or the negative impact of your looks, or the perceived negative impact of your looks. If you really think about this, that's not actually very realistic. Because what we really value in people is not really their looks. Of course we find people attractive, as how we might hook up with our partners, but in the end, what makes you fall in love with somebody, what makes you love someone long term and stay with them is not really how they look, is it? Last time I asked you to come up with three qualities that you like about someone that you love. So just think about those qualities now. Think of the qualities that you admire, you respect, you appreciate, maybe that you wouldn't want to be without in your life. I'm willing to bet that very few of them are physical. The qualities I hear mostly about in my groups are things like a good listener, people who are accepting, people who are warm, people who are kind and loving and fun to be with. Those are the things that I appreciate. What about you? And I think most people are quite similar on this one. Looks just don't even really feature when you're building long-term relationships with people and the experiences that you'll remember in your life. So why would it feature for you? Why have your looks become so important? This is where we touch into the body positive movement, where it's a really good idea to try and accept yourself and others as we are, rather than trying to conform to a perfectionist ideal, which is kind of what we're doing when we're trying to look attractive. It's okay to look in the mirror and be thinking that you don't really look like yourself or how you think about yourself, and it's okay to want to lose weight. It's just that if you try to change yourself by being self-critical, it's not going to work long term or in any healthy way. And the way you think you should look may not be based in reality. What you really need to train yourself in is thinking positively about who you are through and beyond how you look. Hatred of how you look is inseparable from hating yourself. And also the inverse. Liking yourself includes being kind to how you look. Here we get into your value system and your belief system. Are you objectifying yourself? Of course, this is a massive thing in our culture. Really, the extent of it is only just coming to light. But for a long time this has been a real problem. There's lots of books written on this, from fat is a feminist issue to one of my clients recommended Women Don't Know You Pretty. What these books do and what you need to start thinking about is converting the belief that physical attractiveness is of the highest value in life. Challenging the myth of needing to be a certain kind of attractive for anyone who loves you in your life. And knowing that there are so many other qualities that can make you attractive. And you need to learn how to be compassionate to yourself if you feel or if you have been objectified. This is something that needs healing from rather than living by. The fourth thing that I want to talk about today is your history with body shame. So now that you know you're criticizing how you look, overvaluing your looks, and objectifying yourself, you could be starting to wonder where all this comes from for you. In your history, who does the criticism sound like? Is there someone who is really critical about their body or about your body? Or were they in the past? What feelings did that leave you with? That now needs to be processed. Here is often where the belief system began. Sometimes the critical voice goes way back to something that's happened to you. Something that people have said to you, or something that you might have imagined that people have said. Sometimes it's something you've interpreted as criticism that really hurt you a long time ago, but that you've carried forward for the rest of your life, believing that there was something wrong with you. This can get easily placed on your looks. So there's an exploration that needs to be done here in order to process that experience through. To come to terms with how you feel or felt, and then to provide compassion for how you felt then and how you feel now as a result. Here's where you ask, what happened to you to develop this visual self-criticism? You could be asking, who are you doing this for? Who are you actually wanting to look more beautiful, more attractive, more perfect in inverted commas for? Is it someone in your past that no longer exists in your life? Is it someone in your present? In which case, how come they get to have looks at the top of their wish list? How come your personality isn't the thing that should be valued the most? At this point, I just want to mention body dysmorphia. Sometimes people ask me about this. Body dysmorphia is at the extreme end of body image issues, but managing it requires a similar skill set to managing any body esteem issues. Body dysmorphia is a highly anxious obsession or preoccupation with how you look. It can often show up as an anxious obsession with one particular part of you. My understanding of body dysmorphia is that just like comfort and binge eating, it's another way to manage how you feel. So with a lack of education on how you can respond to how you feel and how you can manage how you feel, different anxiety traits can easily develop and show up. Body dysmorphia is one. Anxiety can also be a way to manage other feelings that we don't want to feel. Like pain and grief, and of course trauma. So much like any body confidence issues, it's what's underneath the anxiety that might need healing. So here's a summary of everything that I've talked about today. One, the most important point is to start noticing how you're being self-critical about your body. How mean, how awful, and how nasty might you be being to how you look. Number two, learn to value what your body does instead of how it looks. Number three, value who you are rather than how you look. Number four, explore where your body shame comes from and what you need to heal from. And number five, start to recognize that you might have image anxiety, so you need to deal with this in the same way as you would with any anxiety. And there may be again things that you need to heal from. How you look does have a bearing in this world. We can't deny that. We live in a kind of a fattist culture. But who you are can have so much more bearing. How you think about the way you look and how you talk to yourself about the way you look really matters and has a profound effect on everything that happens to you in your life and everything that you do. So make it a project to heal, to understand, and to see how you can be more positive about how you look. Because you deserve to be happier. So that's it for today. I'll be back in two weeks, but thank you so much for listening. But if you're ready to go further now, please be in touch. My programme details are at bristolcounselling.co.uk, or you can get in touch with me, shelly underscore treacher at hotmail.com, and you can also join my support group, Facebook Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group. Thank you so much. I hope to see you next time.