Reading Reddit Stories: Body Image Edition

So Reddit story number one, recovering but still suffering with body image.

Even before I developed anorexia, I've long had insecurity surrounding my appearance.

I'm now recovering, eating more with less worry, and so grateful for it.

Despite this, I'm still obsessing over my jaw, my body, and strange random physical features that I use to determine my worth.

Over and over again, I check myself out in the mirror or have a hand on my stomach or a finger feeling my jaw.

It doesn't stop.

Could someone please give me advice on how to combat this? How do I stop the insecurity? I'm sick of the worry and the paranoia.

I see body image concerns and worries as information from your nervous system.

If you have ever had the experience of looking in the mirror one day and thinking you looked amazing and actually... really appreciated the way that you looked.

And then the very next day, hated everything you saw.

That wasn't about your body.

That was about your nervous system.

We perceive our body differently based on the nervous system states that we're in.

So when you are more in a survival state, like fight, flight, freeze, or what I like to call flop, which is aka immobilized or collapsed in your nervous system, you will perceive your body image as... threatening, and dangerous.

Whereas when you're in a state of safety and connection, you will perceive your body image as fine.

Oftentimes, you won't even be thinking or worrying about your body.

So the first thing that I get curious about for this person is what nervous system states she is predominantly living in.

If we see that food recovery can often be a response to past trauma, and she spent years in anorexic behaviors, I get curious about what has been potentially undigested or unprocessed from her past.

As I was just talking about earlier, Food behaviors can stabilize, but if it hasn't felt safe to exist in your body, sometimes that gets put on the body's appearance as a way to try to control the lack of safety.

It can be like, if I just looked the right way, then I could finally feel safe in the world, rather than the focus being on that you don't feel safe in the world.

and that this never had to do with your body's appearance.

Now, I don't want to diminish that because of the world that we live in and that thin privilege exists and fat phobia exists and weight stigma exists, that there are some bodies that do navigate much more in the world because of the way that we interact with those bodies.

So sometimes it can be the experience of past trauma, but sometimes it can also be, yes, it is attached to your body's appearance, but that doesn't mean that your body is the thing that needs to change.

The culture needs to change.

People need to be doing their own work around how they perceive and work through their own body judgments.