What if I told you that in order to heal your body image issues, you needed to learn how to speak up for yourself?
Due to people-pleasing (and learning to center their worth in what other people think of them), they never learned or practiced the skills of self-advocacy, boundary-setting, authentic communication, or letting themselves be seen and known.
As a result of these lacking skills, my clients often struggle to connect with people.
In place of grounded communication and intimate bonding, there is often a lot of anxious detective work in their relationships:
A lot of people’s nasty inner monologue around body insecurities, anxiety, obsession, and hatred comes down to a lifetime habit of doing this detective work to try to figure out what other people think and feel about them.
When your default mode of communication with people is to search for hidden meaning in all the subtle things they say and do, it’s pretty damn easy to find “proof” that people hate you or are judging you, and that goes double for your body and appearance.
The interesting thing is that the people who engage in this kind of hidden-meaning detective work are nearly always the same ones who find it impossible to speak up clearly and truthfully for themselves. It’s a kind of projected paranoia, as if your inability to directly communicate and advocate for yourself makes you unable to imagine that anyone else could either.
Since this mental habit both comes from and creates anxiety, you can be sure that it’ll apply to any insecurities—body image included.
Do any of these sound familiar?
“She’s judging me for what I ordered; she must think I’m fat and disgusting.”
“They think they’re so much better than me because they lost weight during quarantine.”
“He did xyz because he obviously doesn’t find me attractive enough.”
This is all projected paranoia, based on a habit of trying to do a bunch of detective work to figure out what other people are thinking/feeling instead of just asking them, or trusting them to speak up if they have something to say.
I’ve noticed that such behavior often gets labeled by my sensitive clients as “empathy,” but I’d call that a gross misuse of the concept of empathy.
Picking up on non-verbal communication is one thing, but picking up on non-verbal communication and then imagining that it’s all about you, weaponizing it against yourself, and using it to disrupt connection with the person is not empathy. It’s just a mixture of sensitivity with anxiety, self-monitoring, people-pleasing, and self-loathing.
