Written by: Lee Thomas
Time to read: 9 minutes

What’s your body image like?

If you’re like most people, that question makes you think about how your body looks. We tend to boil it down to good body image = I think I look good, and bad body image = I think I look bad. But our body image is about so much more than how our body looks, or even how we feel about how our body looks.

When we use the term body image, we’re talking about the entire relationship that you have with your body. So that can include things like how you look, how you feel about how you look, health issues, the way that you take care of your body, your experiences of pleasure or discomfort, the way other people treat your body, experiences of oppression, your personal and family histories… it’s a lot.

We’ve had a relationship with our body our entire life, but we’re not really taught to think about it as a relationship. And for a lot of us, that’s where the troubles begin. 

Relationships are learned in the same way that we learn pretty much everything else: from other people. We learn about what makes a good family relationship, a good work relationship, a good romantic relationship, a good friendship. But most of the time, this learning is not direct. People don’t necessarily sit you down and say “a good romantic partner should always be interested in sex” or “a good friendship should never have any boundaries” or “a good employee should never call in sick.” I suspect that’s because if we said these rules out loud, we might be able to notice that they seem…. Not great. So instead of saying them out loud, we learn these rules indirectly and implicitly, where they get to operate from the shadowy corners of our psyche. 

And in this same way that we’ve learned other relationships, we’ve learned criteria for what makes a good body. A good body is thin, able-bodied, usually white, cisgender, has no acne, has hair in all the right places and none of the wrong places, etc. This sort of learning happens explicitly and implicitly, and it happens everywhere: in classrooms, in conversations with our parents, in the grocery store checkout line, on the playground, in the lunchroom at work, at the doctor’s office.

And usually, through these many different avenues, we’ve learned all the ways in which our body is bad. It’s not the right shape, or not the right colour. It has acne. It has hair in the wrong places, or doesn’t have enough of it in the right places. It wants sex too much, or not enough. It needs to pee even though the teacher says no. It needs sleep, even when it doesn’t fit into our busy schedules. It feels anxious at inconvenient times. It wants delicious food, even though we’re taught that that delicious food is bad (or even sinful — check out Raquel’s webinar on this later this month!).

So we learn to distrust our body. We learn that our body is sneaky and undisciplined and needs to be kept quiet. When we’re tired, our first question is usually not “how can I get more rest?” but instead “how can I stop feeling tired?” When our body refuses to lose weight our question is not “how can I accept and celebrate my body’s size” but instead “how can I force it to change?”. We learn that our body signals are not supposed to be honoured, they are supposed to be overruled.

And of course, along the way, we learn a ton of shame. How could we not? We learn that our body is gross and shameful and bad, and that that must mean that deep down, we are also gross and shameful and bad. And so because our body is so awful, we criticize it and punish it and hide it and mistreat it.

You can see how it becomes a vicious cycle very quickly. We feel shame about our bodies, so we criticize and mistreat ourselves in order to fix our bodies so we can feel less shame. Instead, we feel more shame, because someone (us) is criticizing and mistreating us all the time. And we try to fix that shame by (you guessed it!) heaping on some more criticism and mistreatment.

We shame ourselves to try to stop feeling shame, like a desperate person alone in the ocean drinking salt water to relieve their thirst. Our solution to the problem makes things worse.

An essential element of changing your relationship with your body is something that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) calls “creative hopelessness.”  Which is basically a fancy way of saying “giving up.” Not giving up on everything, but specifically giving up on the stuff that we do that doesn’t actually work for us. Because let’s be real: if shaming ourselves was going to fix things, it would have by now.

So… now what? If we accept that shaming ourself isn’t the solution, then what?

The “creative” part of creative hopelessness is the idea that when we become hopeless about our current approach and give up on it, we open up the door to creativity about what else might be possible. When we accept that what we’re doing right now doesn’t actually work, we can commit to trying something different. 

Imagine for a moment that you have a coworker who you’d like to become friends with. What you probably wouldn’t do is go “I’m going to be really critical of this person until they’re perfect, and then we will be best friends.” What most of us would (hopefully) do is start by treating them kindly. There’s no guarantee that treating someone kindly is going to result in a friendship, but it is a prerequisite for a friendship to develop. If you’re waiting until you’re already friends with someone before you start treating them well, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

The same is true in our relationship with our body. If we want to start having a caring, respectful, trusting relationship with our body, we need to be caring, respectful, and trusting toward it. And we have to start with actions, not emotions. We can’t wait until we feel positively toward our body before we start treating it kindly — instead, we have to treat our body kindly as a prerequisite to feeling positively toward it.

This is where we might notice our brain protesting. If I stop counting calories, then I’ll hate my body even more! If I stop criticizing myself, who knows how awful things will get! If I start trusting my emotions, my whole life will fall apart!!!

If you notice your brain doing that, I’ll encourage you to come back to our creative hopelessness — you’ve tried to make yourself feel better by counting calories and criticizing yourself and distrusting your emotions. Has it worked? Has it brought you long-term fulfillment? Is that why you’re reading this blog post, because your relationship with your body is so great?

This is often where grief gets involved. Most of us have spent huge amount of our precious time on this earth at war with our bodies. We’ve missed out on culturally important foods, joyful social occasions, potential romantic relationships, maybe even job opportunities because we disliked our bodies. We’ve spent countless dollars on trying to make ourselves feel better about our bodies with special foods, slimming clothing, or exercise equipment. We’ve done things that have significantly deteriorated our physical health, like smoking cigarettes, taking shady supplements, or drinking too much to try to ease our insecurity.

The biggest grief for me, when I started this befriending process many years ago, was realizing the mental energy I’d wasted. I used to spend my days entirely consumed by thoughts about my body and food — I didn’t even realize it was a problem, at the time. In fact, I thought it was a good and virtuous thing that I was doing, trying to tame my unruly body.

They say it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something. Without even being aware of it, I’d become an expert at hating myself. I suspect, if you’ve read this far, you might also be an expert at this.

It’s an immense thing to grieve the time and energy lost to body hatred. And so lots of people don’t. I think of the Carl Sagan quote, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Giving up means acknowledging that we have been bamboozled. We have spent our precious lives at war with someone who was never our enemy in the first place. And when we can really recognize that, we can finally stop fighting.

The good news here, one reassurance that I would like to offer, is that our bodies are remarkably gracious. They’re apprehensive sometimes, understandably, but they don’t hold grudges. Like the Nayyirah Waheed poem says: 

and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’

Give yourself the gift of giving up. You might find that your whole life is waiting for you.

If you are ready to start changing your relationship with your body, registration for our Befriending Your Body group closes Tuesday. It is a professionally-facilitated six week group based in the principles of Acceptance and Commitment therapy. If you’re interested in registering for this group, or would like to be kept in the loop about future group offerings, send us an email!