My Unconventional Method for a Healthier Body Image
I’m someone who used to struggle a lot with body image.
A lot of the progress I’ve made comes from eventually reaching a point where I was sick and tired of my body image being in the way. In 2014 I decided to quit counting calories and finding new workout regimes, and instead focus solely on finding ways to love myself.
On my journey to self-acceptance, there was particularly one aspect that I could never figure out:
Why do I struggle with body image when I’m otherwise independent and open-minded?
For that reason, I felt like my body image issues and the voice that told me all the negative things about myself were almost a separate part of me — a devil on my shoulder.
It never aligned with anything else that I thought, valued, and stood for.
Naturally, I struggled to understand why I had this devil there. Was its agenda just to make me feel bad? And if so, how could I stop it?
I tried to do the advised thing and think more positively. When I caught the little devil saying “You can’t wear shorts with those thighs”, I would answer back “My sole purpose for wearing shorts, or exist in general, is not to please other people’s eyes”
It worked there and then, but it also became tiring after a while.
I gradually discovered that my problem was this:
My values and identity were part of my conscious mind, but my body image issues came from my subconscious mind.
My psyche was storing something I wasn’t fully aware of: a lesson that I learned at some point, a memory, or emotions, that I hadn’t processed fully, didn’t like, didn’t accept, or didn’t want to have there.
And telling it to just go away wasn’t helping.
This led me onto a very different road to healing my body image, and it required a different approach than I was used to.
The role of our subconscious
I’ve never heard much about the role of the subconscious in body image work. In my experience, there’s a tendency, especially in the self-help world, to “go towards the light”; meaning that there’s a lot of advice out there to think positive, empowering thoughts.
The logic behind it makes sense; we have negative thoughts, so we attempt to replace them with positive ones. Usually, it involves positive affirmations that we say to ourselves, or purposefully doing positive self-talk.
In my own experience, it was never that easy. If we could control our own thoughts, we would never be unmotivated for anything, and we would never procrastinate, because we would always be able to “think positively” about anything we want.
I agree that we always have a choice in how we view a situation, which in turn can change our thoughts, but to control our thoughts is very difficult and requires a lot of strength and perseverance.
Secondly, if we always try to replace our negative thoughts or “put something on top of them” as a band-aid, we will have to do it over and over again, because we haven’t looked at the core reason for why they’re there in the first place.
Our unwanted, seemingly irrational, thoughts that guide the behavior we want to get rid of, are often coming from emotions, whether we are consciously aware of them or not.
In our subconscious lies the parts of your psyche that you haven’t recognized or haven’t processed. They are an equally important part of you as your thoughts are, and they sometimes make themselves heard through acting “irrational”, because we haven’t listened to them, or we haven’t learned to listen to them yet.
For instance, when we procrastinate, or when we do things we later regret or we feel out of our control, it’s because our emotions are making themselves known. We might not be aware of them, but they are exercising their right to a say in our behavior.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
— C. G. Jung
The subconscious can be reminiscent of monsters from old folklore or mythology: the monster might be scary, but expose it to sunlight and it will die.
Its’ role in body image
If you ask someone why they struggle with body image, a lot of people will mention social media, traditional media, advertising, our generation’s obsession with perfection, etc.
This is the logical answer, the answer most of us have in common, and the answer we already know. Now it’s time to investigate our subconscious attitudes — the parts we’re not aware of.
If you’ve ever been in therapy, you might be familiar with the 2-chair technique: the therapist points to a chair next to you, and asks you to imagine someone sitting there (your father, mother, sibling, your 6-year old self etc.) and asks you “What would you say to them?”
Maybe the therapist asks you to sit in the other chair yourself and answer what you believe the other person would say. Then you go back to your own seat and answer back. You catch my drift.
This technique can also be used to talk to aspects of ourselves. For instance, the parts of us that demand that holds us to perfectionist standards, or that thinks— no, demands! — we should be on a diet.
Spoiler alert: This is what I did in therapy myself.
And the results were, in one word (or two, with a hyphen): eye-opening.
Instead of constantly pushing it away, I was finally having a real conversation with the devil on my shoulder — my “perfectionist self”.
And not just an ordinary conversation, but a heart-to-heart.
I’ve always heard in advice about loving myself that “absolutely every aspect of yourself deserves love, and if you have negative thoughts, show them love too”.
Advice like that has never made sense to me, because why should I show something love when it doesn’t serve me, but makes my life miserable? How am I supposed to “love” the perfectionist voice in my head?
This is where the true value of this technique lies. When I started having a heart-to-heart with “my perfectionist self”, I started to understand it. I understood why it was created, and why it has continued to live.
In my own case, my perfectionist self exists to protect me. Filling me with fear about what others believe about me, is a protection mechanism.
I’m absolutely not saying it has employed the right strategy of never being happy with anything, but now I can at least understand it.
From there, I (together with my therapist) tried to figure out where it started, what experiences made it stronger and more convinced of its mission, and then see those again with my adult eyes, instead of my younger eyes who might have seen situations very differently than I would as an adult.
This is also where the second phase comes in: bargaining. To ask my perfectionist self if there’s anything I can do to calm it down. Is there anything I can do to show it that I’m “safe” and don’t need protection?
And that’s it.
That’s what worked for me in therapy. Hopefully, this is of help for someone else out there too. I highly recommend therapy for anyone to become happier, and to get the full effect of this technique.
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