Do You Have to Love Your Body to Heal?
If you struggle with your body image, you may be wondering if you have to love your body in order to heal. Messages about self-love are prevalent in the body positivity community, and these messages can feel overwhelming if you’ve spent years hating and judging your body.
The truth is, you don’t have to love how your body looks in order to heal. All that’s required is body neutrality – the ability to look at your body as simply a part of your experience of being human, neither good nor bad. From there, you can start to identify ways to move towards a kinder way of treating yourself as a whole.
What Healing Really Looks Like
Healing isn’t waking up one day magically loving every part of your body. Our culture is inundated with critical messages about bodies, and these messages are easily internalized and turned into self-criticism. It takes time to untangle these messages, and for some people it can take a lifetime of re-centering when negative messages throw you off-kilter.
Instead of being perfectly immune to these messages, healing can look like gradually being less influenced by them over time. Healing also involves exploring what else is important to you. When body image distress takes over, your focus can narrow, leaving you feeling like your flaws are the most important thing to focus on. Healing can help you expand your focus to recognize there’s more to life than having a “perfect” body.
From Criticism to Curiosity
Self-criticism is a habit, and one that takes practice to unlearn. The next time you notice a critical thought, instead of taking this as a sign that you are unlovable or that you have something you immediately need to fix, try observing that thought with curiosity.
Our thoughts are merely suggestions that our mind puts forward, and we don’t have to take every suggestion it serves. When observing your critical thoughts with curiosity, notice if that thought sounds like anyone else – does it sound like messages about bodies you’ve observed from social media or critical comments from “well-meaning” family members? You might discover that these thoughts are not even your own – just memories of times you’ve received hurtful messages that aren’t even in line with how you’d like to treat yourself.
Body Acceptance Is a Process
It took time for you to develop your body image challenges, so it will also take some time to heal from them. But healing is possible if you take the time to work towards it. Body acceptance is an ongoing process of allowing your body to be as it is without judgment.
Our bodies change over time as we age, gain and lose weight, and our abilities change. This means that body acceptance is a lifelong process of making peace with the fact that our bodies do not always conform to our ideal expectations for it. This process is like riding a bicycle – steadily righting your balance any time it’s thrown off.
Focusing on Living Instead of Looking
When you start to build the skills of body acceptance, you can free up your attention and mental energy towards living a life that is fulfilling to you.
Instead of spending hours in your closet trying to find the perfect outfit to cover your perceived flaws, you can spend that time enjoying a meal with friends. Or instead of worrying whether your body is going to be judged at your local gym, you can focus on how it feels to take a dance class you’ve been wanting to try.
Body acceptance is not just about arriving at a perfect place of self-love; it’s about accepting your body enough so that you can get out of your head and into making a life that you enjoy.
How Therapy Can Help
As we’ve covered in this article, body acceptance is a process that takes time. If you’re struggling to figure this out on your own, therapy can offer you a supportive environment to unlearn self-judgment, build self-compassion, and explore your values.
If you’re in Texas, I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in helping you to grow kindness and acceptance toward your body so that you can live your life more fully. I offer virtual sessions for people throughout Texas, and in-person sessions in my Houston office. If you’re interested in working with me, schedule a free consultation call at the link below.