Ghosted: From Self-Hatred and Body Image Problems to Self-Love
In the silence, fictional stories are made.
Have you ever been given the silent treatment, ignored, or been ghosted by someone? How did that make you feel? Did you stop to think about it or were you only focused on pointing fingers at the ghost? Although people drop conversation, give the silent treatment, and ignore people for various reasons, unless they tell you why they took off without ending the conversation, you might never know why. People who feel shame about themselves, have a hard time being vulnerable, or are afraid of love might drop conversation because it can feel very intense for them or even scare them to get close to someone who brings up their insecurities and feelings of low self-worth. Additionally, they might just not be very interested in communicating anymore. Some communication about needing to vacate the conversation or some truth about how they are really feeling about you could be very helpful. Even if you might not like the truth that they aren’t that into you, in the long run, it saves a lot of time and heartache. Not everyone wants to know the truth and not everyone likes giving someone the truth (the bad news). It can feel like confrontation to the one doling out the hard truth. But, it is still more respectful to be kind in letting someone down than to ghost them all together.
How Is Their Poor Behavior Your Responsibility?
The bottom line, however, is that if someone treats you this way, it is time to turn around, stop abandoning yourself, and figure out what their behavior says about you. In other words, what meaning are you making about yourself in the light of their behavior? In the deafening silence that is left, do you create a story about yourself that makes you believe that you are the one in the wrong? Do you remember times as a child when you were given the silent treatment as punishment and all you felt was ashamed of yourself, like you were a bad little girl or boy, or that you let someone down because they chose to ignore you and act like you didn’t even exist? This is very painful to face. It was excruciating as a child to go through, and now, when the world is in pain and ghosting as some form of power-struggle, game-playing competition runs rampant, you have to re-experience the trauma of being ignored. Make no mistake, it was traumatic to be given the silent treatment. It is one of the very worst ways of being emotionally abused. Often, people will say that they would much rather be hated than ignored and I think that sounds about right. At least if you are hated, you know something. You know where you stand. You know that you exist. When you are ignored, you feel like you don’t even exist to the person who is cruelly bolting.
In this current day of being ghosted on the regular, you might recall how, once upon a time, you tried so hard to “please,” to get it “right,” to “serve,” “perform,” “be funny,” or to be “helpful” in any way that would give you favor again or at least make them see you and treat you like you were alive and existed. Silence can make you feel like you don’t even matter at all. This is terrifying to any human being, because we are a social species and we need to feel like we belong in order to feel safe. Back then, when given the silent treatment, you were forced to self-abandon in order to stay alive because needing to exist with your caregivers was a matter of life and death as a child. So, what did you do? You efforted to make it all better for the cruel abuser who mistreated you in this way. Maybe you fawned or bargained for any kind of breadcrumb of acknowledgment that you were okay, loved, belonged, and were safe. You started to hate yourself on a deep level because you thought you were in control of your caregivers. You thought that since they ignored you, you were at fault and deserving of such abuse. You thought that because you had a bad grade or yelled at your sister that it meant that you should be hated and banished to the farthest reaches of the universe.
As a result, today when you meet someone who triggers the same reaction to the shame you felt when being given the silent treatment as a child, you try and you effort once again. You might decide to chase them for their attention or cross your own boundaries of what is morally acceptable for you. You might throw out your own values just to be close to this person. You want a “do-over” with another person who reminds you of the person or people who first ghosted you so long ago. You want the emotionally unavailable man or woman to be emotionally available…this time. You want to be interesting, lovable, good enough, sexy, and wanted by this person. You want to matter. You might think that if this person can give you these things, you will finally be permanently happy. I wish I could tell you this is what would happen, but I can’t. The inner work is your job. No one can fill you with all the love you ever need. The silent treatment created a deep void, a false belief, and, from there, a fictional story that you are not good enough or lovable enough. This was your caregiver’s mistake. This is the rupture that was never repaired. Now, you have to repair it for yourself. It is not your fault that this happened, but it is your responsibility to fix it for yourself. No one but you is responsible for making you feel worthy. The good news is that doing your own work is empowering and creates confidence and inner security that no one can ever take away from you again.
How Body Image and Self-Image Coincide
For many women, not only does their self-image take a huge hit when they are ghosted, but also their body image can go wonky, too. A woman’s body image and her self-image often go hand-in-hand. Whether she is ghosted by a man or a woman, a love interest, or just another person who is only a friend, a woman can start to think that maybe the way she looks has something to do with why the person left the conversation. This can be especially true if your caregiver bullied you about your weight or somehow indicated that your weight was a problem in some way. Once you have these messages carved out in your mind and then you see how society ensures that fat equals gross and thin means gorgeous, we, as women, are set up to try and reach unreachable standards. Most women are not a size zero with less than 10% body fat. Thank goodness! The human race would never survive if that were the case because at that kind of body weight, the chance of losing your period is likely ensured. There are many women who, as teens, starved and exercised themselves to the point that they could not have children later in life because they never got their period as young girls. This ends up being a very sad reality for a woman who desperately wants children and cannot have them. When we are teens, we don’t always think of the long-term consequences of our actions. Our pre-frontal lobes that control impulses and executive functioning are not fully developed. What happens in front of us is all we focus on. And, for young girls, being liked, athletic, smart, popular, pretty, and good enough for the person of our desires is really all that we care about. Being thin means that we are acceptable and lovable to an unhealthy world that hates itself.
Being a MILF Should NOT Be Your Goal.
When thin equals value, respect, and love by society, women feel extreme levels of self-hate, self-rejection, and even more self-abandonment as they try hard to please everyone they meet in an effort to fit in and belong. Many women want to be perceived as having it all together—their clothes, the way they work and parent, the way they keep a home, and by how perfect their bodies are. Women are often set up to fail at life because being loved only for the way your body looks and for the “things you do right” create a shallow and lonely existence. And not just for women. The men, children, and partners of the women who hate their bodies also suffer. This is because women who hate their bodies and think poorly of themselves cannot love their partners well. They might feel too self-conscious to be intimate with their partners or too ashamed to eat certain foods with their families due to a fear of gaining weight. They might start arguments and take things very personally and think they are being attacked and not loved because of their body shame. This becomes a life-altering and obsessive path that leads to heartache and misery for everyone.
Being considered a MILF was something that was made fun of back in the 80s and 90s on shows like Jerry Springer simply because it was very much frowned upon that a grown woman would ever be vying for attention from their teen child’s friends or boyfriends. And today, many women seem to aspire to be this to young men. Please start to think about this. It is not flattering to be objectified by hormonal teen boys (essentially children in men’s bodies) any more than it is to be seen this way by grown men.
Always Choose Self-Love
How can we resolve this? Well, first and foremost, and as boring as this may sound, the only real way to get over our body image issues is to heal our self-image issues by stocking up on the self-love. When we change the limiting beliefs and the false narratives we tell ourselves about our unworthiness and start to see ourselves through the eyes of our higher selves, our souls, our personal god, or Source, we can really start to come to a foundational level of self-acceptance. We can realize that our bodies have nothing at all to do with our value. Our bodies have nothing to do with our worth. Our bodies are a reflection of what we tell ourselves about ourselves. We can start to remember that we are lovable simply because we exist. When we love ourselves where we are at today, we ease up on ourselves, love ourselves, and our bodies start to change. When our bodies feel loved, safe, and good enough by us, they have no reason to hang onto extra weight. They have no reason to protect themselves from us and the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves and our bodies.
Additionally, if someone chooses not to be in our lives and ghosts us, then we have to put that back on them. It is their issue. It is about them. No, they may not be attracted to us or like or love us. They might even hate us. This is really their problem and not about us. Unless we have done something to hurt them or they tell us the reasons they need space and give us a chance to make things better, then their ghosting behavior is squarely about them. It might feel sad to be left in the dust, but it also might open the door for a better, more satisfying love or friendship to enter.
The story we tell in the silence of someone running away from us is a story that can be and needs to be changed. This is an old story that was created by a child who had very few tools to cope with trauma and emotional abuse. As an adult, you no longer have to believe this story.
Let me help you change it!
