Why do I hate my body so much?
Amelia sat in my therapy room and sobbed. Her dad had just been diagnosed with stage 4 Prostate Cancer. She had been there at his appointment with the consultant when they had talked him through his treatment plan – chemotherapy and hormone therapy. The consultant had commented that the hormone therapy may lead to some weight gain around his waist and, without hesitation, he had declared that he did not want the hormone therapy if it meant getting fat. Amelia sat and sobbed with me for so many reasons. She was scared for her dad, she felt an immense amount of emotional pain at the thought of what he was going through and she sobbed that he would rather die than have a fatter waist.
Amelia had not consciously realised, until this point, that she had always policed her body to make sure that she did not gain weight. She constantly critiqued her body, hating her fleshy thighs and voluptuous bottom. She calorie counted and weighed herself daily to check that she hadn’t suddenly ballooned. Her dad had never told her that she should not gain weight but now it was clear; her dad did not need to explicitly say anything to her about her weight. She had breathed in his disgust at bigger bodies, she had absorbed the look of distaste he’d shown her when she’d eaten a calorific cake and she had simply known, without words, that body change was a disaster.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Amelia became increasingly aware of the ways in which she had attacked her figure. Together we explored her complicated relationship with her body and to eating. Amelia made a conscious effort to separate from her father’s fear of fatness and continues to work on living from her body rather than constantly critiquing it.
There are multiple and complex reasons as to why you may hate your body. Perhaps, like Amelia, you have soaked up your parent’s own body hatred. Perhaps you were called names at school and those comments about your body have stayed with you. Perhaps your body has come to symbolise all the other things that you may hate about yourself; your greediness, your laziness or your fragility and you attack it.
Hating the body is not confined to females, as we can see from Amelia’s dad, and neither is the fear purely linked to being overweight. Preoccupation with how the body looks, whether it be that the body is considered too fat, too thin, too short, too long or textured wrong is often a symptom of a disturbed relationship with the self.
Do you often find yourself moving away from your own experience and fixating on how others perceive you? Do you worry about how a particular person or people will judge your arms, your stomach or your thighs? Do you sometimes feel frozen by this fear? Sometimes it may feel that your body does not truly belong to you and that it is instead an object for others to like or dislike. The desire to perfect an ideal body type can be an extension of people pleasing.
If you are self conscious about your body, wanting to hide it away, picking out every fault and trying to change it, you may be caught up in the hell of trying to control other people’s perception of you (something that never leads anywhere good). Perhaps you have learned that you must never disappoint others and meet their needs regardless of your own, and this can often extend to how your body looks. If you are often looking at your body through the eyes of other people it is likely that you have lost touch, or never were in touch, with your own desires, your own appetite and your own needs.
Of course, there are cultural and societal influences on how you perceive your body. We are constantly bombarded with filtered images of conventional and narrow ideas of beauty. It is close to impossible to not be impacted by the emphasis placed upon appearance on social media, in advertising, on shows like Love Island and promoted by the wellness industry. This, combined with a distorted relationship with the self, early trauma, a shutting off from your own emotions and desires or an over identification with the other’s gaze, can all make you more susceptible to body hatred.
Body hatred has been encouraged by industries making money from our dissatisfaction and it has almost become normalised by society. I usually only discover the hatred people feel towards their bodies quite far into our work together. Body hatred has become so omnipresent and accepted that it is not initially noticed or mentioned. Once it can be thought about with an empathic professional, people can be freed up from this way of relating to themselves. Exploring how you have come to hate your body, to experience some compassion for yourself and to then be curious about what your real desires are, beyond other people’s expectations of you, can open you up to living from your body rather than attacking it.
If you are struggling with your body image and you would like a better understanding as to why you hate your body, or if you have any questions about how psychotherapy might be able to help, feel free to contact me here: contact