Letting Go Of Our Inner Critic

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-psychology-making-us-sick/201301/shame-body-image-and-weight-loss

Changing Your Style Can Change Your Life

Tina Fey

Diana Vreeland

Maya Angelou

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sally-mcgraw/personal-style-happiness_b_2489758.html?utm_hp_ref=body-image

BodyLOVE

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If I were 20 lbs lighter I'd be an architect...

What is it that causes us to see only the flaws, the imperfections and the things we want to change about our appearances?  What motivates us to attend with such scrutiny to the folds, the sags, the creases and the wrinkles?  What prevents many of us from seeing the beauty and uniqueness that we do actually possess—no matter what our shape or size?  What stops us from accepting ourselves as we are?  The answer is, ALMOST EVERYTHING.  Our body image evolves over time and resides in some complex amalgam of messages and experiences gained over the years through family, friends, community, culture and society. Women are bombarded by messages on a daily basis about how they are in need of improvement, about how they are not OK the way they are. 

Lose 20 lbs in 8 days!  2 weeks!  A month!  Women are assaulted by these assertions daily while standing in the supermarket checkout line, commuting or surfing the web.  Magazine headlines, billboards and flashing sidebar messages promise that the secret to happiness and success hinges on weight loss, and reinforces that it needs to happen now! Fast! So that life can actually begin.  This can lead to the indefinite postponement of projects, career moves and/or relationships because we feel that we are not worthy or deserving of satisfaction, success or even comfort at our current weight—the way we are NOW.  As stated by Geneen Roth in Women, Food and God, “The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are.  Your true nature. Your essence.”  In other words, it may be a matter of learning--training ourselves--to pay attention to what we already feel, need, know and want, to the signals and signs that our bodies and souls are giving us in the present moment that frees us up to pursue what we truly need and want, what fuels our souls.  Mindfulness-a here and now connection to our bodies and feelings- could possibly help end our obsessions with weight loss and perfectionism and allow us to live our lives to the fullest.  

Recent research states that on average, most women have somewhere between 13-50 negative body thoughts per day.  Advertising strategically harnesses this overwhelming anxiety about body image.  The media-along with the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry-convinces girls and women that physical appearance is inextricably wrapped up in self worth, encouraging dieting and prompting the purchase of products that will somehow smooth, flatten and tighten us.  And they almost never work.  A 2006 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine states that most people participating in weight-loss programs “regain about one-third of the weight lost during the next year and are typically back to baseline in three to five years.”  Dieting tends to be one of the main factors that instigates an unhealthy relationship with food and disordered patterns of eating.

The lens of critical hyper awareness that society provides and through which girls and women learn to view their bodies frequently leads to obsessive thinking about food and disordered eating, as well.  This critical lens can also trigger fear-fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of love because, as Geneen Roth suggests, we don’t want to surrender to love in a relationship because we don’t want to give ourselves to something we might eventually lose. Emotional discomfort—feelings of fear, sadness, grief, loneliness or boredom tend to scare us, which sometimes conditions us to run—to numb out, to turn to obsessive thinking about food and/or weight loss to distract us from feeling what is actually there.  We get into a cycle of thinking about food, and instead of listening to the cues in our bodies and eating to satiate hunger, we eat to soothe ourselves for relief or comfort which then leads to feelings of guilt, shame and contempt for our actions and our bodies. According to Jean Kristellar, PhD, Co-founder of the Center for Mindful Eating and the Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness Training Program, “It is extraordinarily common in our food abundant society for ‘unwise’ eating patterns to develop and become entrenched, resulting in eating disorders and obesity.  Patterns, developed since childhood, interact with societal pressures to override basic nutritional needs.  The use of food as a viable source of pleasure and emotional satisfaction becomes distorted." Kristellar’s research has shown that mindfulness, when applied to hunger, fullness and eating can help transform our relationship to food and our bodies while also helping us to address our inclinations to flee from our feelings.

In response to these important issues, The Women’s Health Resource Center at California Pacific Medical Center has created an innovative program called BodyLOVE, a 12 week group for women co-lead by Janet McBride, a nutritionist/dietician and Helena McMahon, a psychotherapist who both specialize in women's health, body image and eating disorders.  Such topics as Mindfulness and Mindful Eating, Food and Mood, Binges and Cravings, Expressing Needs/Assertiveness, Creating Safe Food Surroundings and Building Energy and Movement are explored from both physiological and psychological standpoints, allowing for optimal learning and exploration of these central themes in efforts to create a more positive and healthy relationship to food, eating and our bodies.  In a safe, comfortable and contained environment, a variety of creative approaches and learning points are integrated to help guide participants toward understanding and incorporating important new information, gaining new perspective and reflecting upon their own relationships with food, eating and body image.  The groups also provide women with a safe space to explore relationships generally and to build trust and self-confidence, and offer participants a unique opportunity to identify unhealthy patterns and to learn how to change them.  Groups meet on Wednesday evenings from 6-9PM.  Call Barb Silver, CNP, Director of the Women's Health Resource Center at CPMC at (415) 600-0502 for more information and/or to sign up for the group.

It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found. ~D.W. Winnicott

I am reading a wonderful book right now entitled How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys To Mindful Loving, by David Richo.  He explains in his book that we all need the "five A's"...attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing... to have a successful and healthy adult relationship.  But what exactly does "successful and healthy" mean in regard to relationships?  It means a lot of different things.  To have boundaries--allowing each other the space to grow and be individuals in the midst of real connection, closeness and togetherness; to accept one another fully--whether or not we understand or agree with the other's feelings or choices; being open to giving and to receiving; knowing what we need to feel loved and learning how to ask for it--not expecting our partners to be mind readers...and on the flip side learning what it is that our partner's need to feel loved and giving this to them; loving someone the way they are--letting go of control and trying to change our partners or getting them to be the way we think they should be; allowing our partners (and feeling the freedom ourselves) to express our feelings or to disagree and to fully be ourselves.  

Richo connects all of these essential elements in intimate adult relationships to our early childhoods-whether or not our parents were able to allow us to separate and individuate to become the unique people we were meant to be.  As one might imagine-this process of separation and individuation does not always go smoothly, or even well.  Our parents might have been overprotective and afraid to let us venture out to explore the world around us, sending us the message that the world was too dangerous and that we could not trust ourselves to know what we needed or wanted; or they might have had difficulty seeing us for who we were, needing us to be what they wanted us to be, presenting us with the challenge of becoming and later being our true selves, so that we became dependent upon other's evaluation/approval/reassurance rather than knowing within ourselves our worth, who we were and what was right for us.

The question always comes back to, so how do we get there?  How do we do it?  How do we create the kind of relationship that allows for individual freedom and continued growth while also fostering true closeness, intimacy and connection?  How do we let go of our need to cling and control or to distance and withdraw to get what we think we need from another?  

The answer might be surprising-but perhaps it will make a lot of sense.  

Richo posits that "in healthy intimate relationships we do not seek more than 25% of our nurturance from a partner; we learn to find the rest within ourselves."  So while we all need another to  feel mirrored, safe and to help define us...to allow us to come out of hiding and to be found...we cannot rely on this "other" to do all of these things for us.  The main source of these experiences needs to come from within ourselves.  The reassurance that we are worthy, special and will be "OK" in light of whatever occurs externally resides most fully inside of us.  For many of us, this is a new concept!  Scary, maybe, but also exciting, as we can have more control over our wellbeing and happiness than we ever thought was possible.  As Richo states, rather than relying on ourselves,  many of us have been looking for the "perfect partner"  to fulfill all of our needs, the oasis that will offer us everything we lack--total happiness and emotional fulfillment.  We have not had the opportunity while growing up to develop this strong inner sense of security, and we have learned to search for or to rely upon someone else to give it to us...often ending up frustrated, dissatisfied or even desperately disappointed that another was not fully capable of filling all of our needs for wellbeing and emotional satisfaction.   

Now, as adults, we have a renewed opportunity to revisit this space within ourselves, and rather than allowing our fear to create distance from ourselves by looking for another to fix us or to fill us up, we can face our fear--by allowing ourselves to feel it--and we can look within for our own wellbeing and comfort.  We do not have to be as reliant on another for how we are going to feel from one moment or one day to the next, but rather look within ourselves for this reassurance.  Instead, we can turn toward our partners for support, love and closeness--which can free us up to do the emotional work that we were meant to do to become fully ourselves.