Mirror Images: Body Image and Self-Worth

My therapist told me to make a pie chart of all the pieces of myself that contribute to my self-concept, and I could only think of one piece. That one piece was my body weight and shape. I realize in my rational mind that the above is far from ideal and highly inaccurate, but it does give a good glimpse into where my self-esteem came from at the time, and I got to thinking of what else might be in that pie chart if I had a healthier view of who I am.

Then, I began to think of many other things that could create my self-concept like success, performance, talents, external validation from other people (anything fleeting), but then I began to shift that terminology to be more positive like purpose or work, passions, and healthy relationships. However, I still felt like something was missing. I still felt like purpose or work, passions, and relationships weren’t at the real core of my worth.

In order to discover what that missing factor was, I had to go back to the fantasy of “When I’m thin, I’ll be guaranteed love, respect, fulfillment, health, happiness, inner peace and a sense of completeness.” I had to ask myself, “What does thinness promise me?” before I could comprehend all the cognitive distortions associated with that promise, and come to a place where I understood what I personally wanted to use to create a healthier self-image.

What I learned is that it’s so much easier to feel that I deserve love, respect, fulfillment, health, happiness, inner peace and completeness if and when I have earned it, and earning a “perfect” body would somehow fulfill that condition. This also gave me hope to think that when my body was perfect, I’d have what I’ve been looking for my whole life. The thinness fantasy hid that I needed to validate myself if I wanted to move forward in life.

The promises of thinness are absolutely not true, and I think it takes a lot of courage to stop believing them. The truth is that those things listed above are available to anyone, including myself, and it’s available to anyone in whatever body type we are currently in. There is really nothing we have to be or do to earn our worth. Stripped away of everything we think makes us who we are, we are still worthy and enough without it (at least that’s my belief).

Editor(s): Jasmine Hyder