Body Shame: Attacking Self Instead of Loving Self
Just like with all addictions, eating disorders are actually a SOLUTION to a problem.
Did you know this? Well, it’s true. Often, people will use food as a coping mechanism in order to create a sense of emotional regulation or calmness in their nervous systems after a lifetime of abuse or trauma. Emotional dysregulation often stems from a poor attachment to a primary caregiver at a very young age or from emotional neglect or abandonment by a caregiver. The anxiety and fear about not being safe that this creates in a child is enough to make her not want to be inside her body where those feelings live. Bingeing comfort foods creates a sense of fullness and calmness much like a baby feels after gorging on milk. It makes her feel calm, loved, and safe. This makes the nervous system feel very happy and solid. Eating food covers up pain—the pain of physical and emotional hunger as well as the pain of the unwanted emotions.
However, the downside of this is that a person will often begin to gain weight and then feel ashamed of herself for not being socially acceptable as a thin, fit, attractive person. This habit or addictive cycle becomes the way in which someone calms down and eventually they don’t know how to emotionally regulate without coping mechanisms such as binge-eating. This can lead to beliefs that she is not lovable or worthy as an overweight person. And, to add insult to injury, because society does shame overweight people by assuming they are lazy, unworthy, undisciplined, unlovable, gross, ugly, and stupid, the person who has already had significant attachment trauma from birth and feels scattered, overwhelmed, scared, and sad most of the time, also has the added mark of not being acceptable in the world. Shame upon shame upon shame.
How do we react to shame as humans? We do one or many of several things. We deny that bad things ever happened, we attack ourselves, we people please, we attack others, or we isolate. Shame hides. All of these reactions are hiding reactions. The way a person with disordered eating patterns behaves is often in a denial of the body or in an attacking self way. We lose ourselves in addictions such as bingeing, purging, or starvation, we dissociate, we fix others instead of our own feelings and issues, we listen to a very tough inner critic, we cut ourselves, or we maintain perfectionism in every aspect of our lives so that no one sees how '“messed up” we truly are.
Shame about the body is the same as shame anywhere else in our lives. We freeze feelings with the use of shame. Shame binds with other emotions to hold them down so they won’t protest too much. This serves as a protective function when we are young and can’t speak up, yell, scream, cry, or even laugh. When we are “too much” in some way, shame “saves the day.” Food does this as well. Food covers up feelings to soothe them so we can ignore them and pretend they are not there. But, they are. They always will be until we face them head on.
We can’t love what is on the outside unless we love what is on the inside first.
Shame also keeps us out of our bodies where these emotions are stored so that we won’t go near them and possibly feel them out loud. If we have to feel the fear or anxiety of the loneliness we feel in a home where love is not available, parents are neglectful or ignore us, where physical, sexual, or verbal abuse is rampant, or out in the world where the social isolation we feel when kids bully us for being too fat is ever-present in our lives, we do just about anything to avoid our body. We run from it. We hate it. We don’t look at it. We don’t appreciate it. We surgically remove parts or add parts. We change our bodies in an effort to finally love them. But, we can’t love what is on the outside unless we love what is on the inside first.
What is on the inside? The feelings. The pain. All the disappointments, the let downs, the scary fights we witnessed, the abuse, the memories of the losses and hard moments. And that is a lot to feel. And, at some point, it really is the only thing left to do. Running from the body by eating over the pain, starving it, or even exercising it to death won’t make the pain go away. Doing these things to extreme can eventually kill you, but the pain will still be there.
When we are ready to face the shame and its bound-up emotions, we begin to find freedom in our lives. We start to have compassion for our little one who has so much deep feeling because of her wounding from so long ago. We start to hear our body’s wisdom about what we should eat and how best to move it. We start to feel gratitude and appreciation for what our bodies do for us each and every day—the way our bodies love us and continually give to us no matter how much we abuse them. We might not feel a lot of body positivity at first, but we can find body neutrality. We can take parts of our bodies that we CAN appreciate and show them love until we build up to loving every part.
We can start to have a relationship with our bodies and learn to hold them and love them for how they look, feel, move, and interact in life right now in this perfect moment.
The freedom to look in the mirror without grimacing, to see a picture of ourselves and not run away from it, and to love and to have deep compassion for why our bodies look and act the way they do, how they got to this particular size or have the afflictions or illnesses they have as a result of how we have self-punished for decades can help us to better understand how our bodies are always in service to how we think, act, and feel at any moment in time. We sabotage our bodies. It’s not the other way around. Our bodies simply carry out the orders of our minds—the subconscious beliefs and self-hating thoughts we have about it. The vessel of the body is also a mirror into ourselves and the truth of how we feel inside. Self-love is, once again, the antidote to abuse—the abuse we inflict on ourselves.
Don’t be afraid to look inside.
The truth will set you free.
If you want help with body self-love, please contact me to schedule a free one-hour Discovery session.
