When you see yourself in the mirror, how do you feel? I hope you like yourself and feel friendly towards the person reflected back at you. After all, you have to live in that body every moment of every day, for the rest of your life.
Sadly, many people don’t feel that way. Clients often tell me they don’t like some aspect of their appearance, whether it’s a facial feature such as their nose or chin, or their whole body, which looks bigger than they would like, or one specific body part they focus on.
Although I have had male clients with such body-image concerns, it’s usually the women in my consulting room who don’t like their appearance. And if we reflect on the culture most girls grow up in, it’s not hard to see why. Despite moves towards body positivity in recent years, such as the celebration of plus-size models, many of the images women are bombarded with are still those of painfully thin teenagers and twenty-somethings, the beauty ideal all women are told they must aspire to.
This is heartbreaking on so many levels. Is a 50-year-old woman supposed to look like a 17-year-old, unnaturally thin model? It’s a tragedy that modern notions of beauty reject ageing faces, hair, and bodies. It would save women so much suffering if we could all accept that people inevitably get older. To my mind, grey hair, wrinkles, and lived-in faces look beautiful (and I say that as a wrinkled, grey-bearded, 58-year-old man!).
Far too many teenage models are, very sadly, eating-disordered1, having to restrict calories to dangerous levels just to make it in the industry. And how can we help young girls feel good about themselves and their developing bodies if they are saturated in such images? This is especially the case with those who are heavy users of social media, which, research shows2 can have a major impact on adolescent girls’ mental and physical health. No wonder so many girls are anxious and lacking in self-worth; they have been taught that the primary measure of their value as a human is their appearance, which is both destructive and plain wrong.
Could a Painful Schema Be to Blame?
As I tell my clients with body-image issues, the way we feel about the person we see in the mirror is the way we feel about ourselves. When I see myself in the mirror, that’s the physical manifestation of “Dan”, the persona I identify with every waking second of my life. And if I don’t feel good about me on the inside, I will project all that criticism, judgment, and disapproval onto the image I see in the mirror.
It’s helpful to explore the mental schema that may be to blame here, because it’s so common and such a crucial factor in many people’s struggles with their mental health, whether recurrent episodes of depression, low self-esteem and self-worth, eating disorders, substance abuse, body dysmorphia, or whatever. I’m talking about the defectiveness schema, the I’m-not-good-enough, low-self-esteem schema that makes people feel that there’s something lacking and shameful, deep down.
Defectiveness is so common; most of my clients have it (as do many therapists I know). It’s also, like many schemas, fundamentally untrue. If you’re not familiar with schema therapy, a core concept is the presence of one or more ‘early maladaptive schemas’, which are neural networks in the brain supporting unhelpful ways of thinking and feeling. They exert a strong influence on how you behave in particular situations.3 Defectiveness is the most common schema.
Body Image and Low Self-Esteem
Sara was 30 when she came to see me because of her lifelong struggles with disordered eating, especially her tendency to restrict food when she was stressed or felt bad about herself. She had profoundly low self-esteem, calling herself “disgusting” and “ugly”. These words were banned from our first session on, as they were so upsetting for her. “I always hated myself, especially the way I look,” she told me. “I wince when I catch a glance of myself in the mirror, because I just hate everything.”
Sara’s defectiveness schema was especially severe, formed in a childhood home in which her highly narcissistic, punitive mother would berate her for being too fat, too plain, the child who “brought shame on the family”. Poor little Sara had to just sit there and take it, because she was too small and vulnerable to fight back. The nasty messages soaked into her psyche, until they just felt true, which is how schemas often form.
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It took months of hard work to first soften Sara’s inner critic, which used to berate her in the same way her mother did. Then we worked to weaken that defectiveness schema, processing Sara’s traumatic memories and rewriting her life story into a kinder, more self-compassionate narrative. Over time, although her schema still got triggered, it no longer had so much power over her. In our last session, Sara tearfully told me she now liked herself and, grudgingly, thought her body was “OK”. I helped her understand that her mother had the problem, not her. She was a sweet, lovable little kid and was now a kind, decent, lovable woman.
If any of this resonates with you I am sorry: It’s a horrible thing to dislike your appearance, because that’s what makes you you. Learning to like, or at least accept, the way you look, perhaps with help from a skilled therapist, will be fundamental to feeling better about yourself as a person.
I wish you courage and strength on that journey.