Body image issues are inherent in our culture. Women, as well as men, are healing this problem by waking up to what it is and how it operates insidiously within our culture and within individuals.
Body image definition: ‘Body image refers to how people see themselves. Distorted body image (also called negative body image) refers to an unrealistic view of how someone sees their body.” L1
Here we will look at how this perception was created and the process to heal it.
“We are all the children of patriarchy. While our culture depends upon three thousand years of cultural process focused through masculine eyes, it has been won at a high cost. What began as masculine values has degenerated into lust for control.” Marion Woodman; Leaving My Father’s House, P.2
Masculine values have a place. But they have gotten out of hand. Females and males have been hurt by this because the feminine(feeling) in all of us has been put into an inferior position.
Seeing life through “masculine eyes” is as important as seeing life through “feminine eyes”. However, when these are out of balance we have dis-ease, negative self esteem, despondence and other emotionally related problems.
It takes emotional intelligence to rise above the rigid rules and regulations of beauty, sexuality, and feminine rights that have been laid down for thousands of years.
For example, body image and the media is one relationship where we can see that intelligence or lack of it. It can shine light on how these body issues are created and then healed. The movie Black Swan is a very good example of this dynamic. It shows the mother-daughter relationship, the relationship with food and being thin, the need for a father, and the process of moving toward inner balance. We are coming out of the dark ages and it is slow.
What are masculine values and feminine values?
Masculine values have to do with thinking, logic, the individual and science.
Feminine values have to do with feeling, abstraction, the relationship, and the imaginal.
Everyone has both sides.
We need logic and we need abstraction, to “think and feel outside of the box”. We can collaborate emotionally as well as rationally.
We all have and need rational qualities as well as feeling qualities. It’s a given. However, how these two work together is the emotional intelligence to heal body image problems. We need to learn a new perspective because the old one is making us sick.
When women and feminine values are made inferior to masculine values, we have a big problem.
It is a problem for women that ranges from rape, sexual molest and emotional imprisonment(negative self-esteem) by masculine logic.
It is a problem for men because there is no self-reflection or empathy for another. Men can lose touch with life itself when the feeling side has been rejected.
How Does Body Image get messed up?
Daily, as a therapist, I hear women describe how their father, their mother, their uncle, their neighbor, their somebody criticized their body or lusted at their body. “This part of you is too big or that part is too small”. (I’m not good enough as I am?). Whether it was the look in their eye, what they said or how they touched; your body was judged, analyzed or used.
Whether the judgement was from the mind of a women or a man, it was analyzed “good or bad”. This creates deep emotional hurt which may lead to anorexia, bulimia, or obesity.
Science, or masculine logic, objectifies this deep hurt and fails to understand the story of emotional entanglement behind the symptoms. Science sees the symptoms only. Anorexia or bulimia at one end of the spectrum and obesity at the other end.
True, one needs to eat more and the other less. That is part of the treatment. However, the story under these symptoms is the primary importance. If the story is not expressed the symptoms remain. That is why loosing weight is so difficult. Masculine values say we need more discipline. No, we need more feminine, more feeling, more imaginal and more self reflection.
Heal Body Image Issues and Self Esteem
Our capacity to feel deeply was lost or disconnected. Now, our primary job is to get it back and heal this injured ability to feel; “how to live in our own skin.”
1. Knowing the goal is to live in our own skin; not only feel what we are feeling in our bodies, but to love it, be inspired by it and learn how to suffer the emotional pain that is there.
Healing is a lifestyle. Hating on oneself was learned because feeling and emotion were perceived as out of control, not rational. Therefore, the child learned “I can’t trust my feelings, I don’t matter, I am unloveable and so forth.
It is not a quick fix. This is the kind of thinking that we were hurt by in the first place; for thousands of years.
2. Recognize that self hate gets in the way of deeper feelings that need to be felt, talked about, cried about, written about, explored and expressed in some way.
For example, we may have feelings of low self esteem and self hatred day after day, year after year without relief. People can tell us how great we are or how good looking but nothing changes. This is because the deeper feelings are not experienced. Without feeling the helplessness under this self hatred, nothing will change. We need to feel the helplessness we felt as a child in various relationships.
We could not help what happened to us. When we can get some help with our helpless feelings, the self esteem problems begin to dissolve and lose their power over us.
Other feelings under the self esteem problem can be grief, anger, betrayal, love, gratitude and confidence.
3. Find others on this same path.
We need to find therapists, teachers, friends and relatives that we can trust with vulnerable feelings and topics. If we do not have that, we need to find that. This is not something to do alone.
4. Learn to feel the movement of the breath.
See: Meditation
This can get you through the worst of times. Feeling the breath keeps us on the ground and in the hear and now.
Feeling the movement of the breath brings us into our own bodies and “living in our own skin” and feeling our deepest self.
LINKS:
Meditation using the breath
