On my blog entry entitled Issues with Body Image after Child Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:
It must be hard to have more than one part who is not happy with your body. That is something I would have never considered till you described it. I have enough trouble with just a single part that is frustrated with my body.
Could you speak to how you got these parts to be more accepting of your physicality and how you got to the place where you could be more in control and integrated in a physical sense? Does that question make sense? ~Mia
From the perspective of a multiple, I do have parts that reject my body. Sometimes I will experience a child alter part that views my adult thighs as fat because that part still feels like it lives in the body of a skinny little girl. The physical difference between a woman’s body and a little girl’s body is jarring to that part of myself.
However, you don’t have to have dissociative identity disorder (DID) to reject or hate your body. Many child abuse survivors who never “split” hate or reject their bodies for a number of reasons. Some reject their bodies because their abusers harmed their bodies, which in turn led to harming the child emotionally. Others hate their bodies because they physically resemble an abusive family member’s body. Many child abuse survivors find that they can harm their bodies as a way of managing their emotions, such as cutting their pain into their bodies instead of feeling it, “stuffing down” emotions through binge eating instead of feeling them, etc.
As for how to move past this, it all comes from self-love and self-acceptance. Whether you are a multiple or “singleton,” all of your parts are “you,” so you can choose to love your body today just as you have chosen to reject your body in the past. I am not saying that this is easy — nothing about healing from child abuse is easy – but you really can “choose” your way toward loving and accepting your body.
The first step is to stop putting energy into hating your body. If you have been thinking negative thoughts about your body every day for decades, you are not going to be able to snap your fingers and simply love your body in an instant. Before you can turn the ship around, you have to start changing course.
You do this by choosing to stop beating yourself up. Whenever you feel tempted to think, “I’m fat,” or “I’m ugly,” replace that negative thought with something positive or, if you cannot do that, at least with a different thought, such as, “I wonder if the Braves won the game today.”
As you stop fueling your negative thoughts about your body (stop feeding the evil wolf), you can start throwing some morsels to your good wolf. Look for things to like about your body – your eye or hair color, etc. I now marvel that my body could endure so much punishment – first from my abusers and then from me through an eating disorder and self-injury – and still be in as good of shape as it is. Keep feeding that good wolf, and you will gradually begin to love and accept your body.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
I’m quite overweight, having as I do a BMI of about 38 or so. Admittedly I’m “big-boned” to begin with, but no matter: I am still clinically obese (though notably less so than I used to be, which is good).
Anyway, I once saw a psychiatric nurse who theorised that my weight was down to me trying to ‘protect’ myself; that if I were ‘fat’, then perhaps I would be ‘unattractive’ and ‘less inviting’ to potential abusers.
I have mixed feelings about this hypothesis. Firstly, it assumes that being overweight renders one unattractive, which is not necessarily true at all. Two, it assumes that child sex abuse is primarily about the perpetrator’s sexuality and lust, rather than power and control. But three, from an average sized child’s perspective, the idea could have some value. I doubt that my five year old self would have had the time nor capability to come to the rational conclusions of the first two points I’ve made, and as she’s still ‘inside’ me in a sense, it seems potentially credible that she unconsciously drives me to food (more specifically, the wrong type of food) as a defensive strategy.
All that said though, I don’t especially hate my body. There’s a lot I’d like to change, but one, I’m trying to work towards that and anyway, two – it could be a lot worse. In this respect, though, I fear I’m fairly lucky. Lots of other survivors I know and have heard of (here or on other blogs, Twitter etc) seem to really struggle with body image, which whilst understandable is very sad. I hope your post can give them some hope, like it has done for me 🙂
Take care
Pan x
Pandora,
I am glad that you don’t struggle as much with body image. I personally, HATE everything about me!!! As I got older, I thought I could ‘protect’ myself by gaining weight, and that other people would view me as the same horrible, disgusting thing that I always felt that I was–it didn’t work! The abuse continued! But still, in my mind, I thought eventually, it had to work! So now, here I am 39 years old, and still feeling like the same horrible disgusting freak that I have always felt like!
Hope this isn’t out of order, but tho I got no idea what you look like, Faith, don’t even know what colour your eyes are, I already think you are beautiful =)
Same goes for the people who comment here =)
It seems to work for me to know my body is different and I consider my body all of the physical space I occupy. My body developed in hostile and dangerous conditions and there are effects.
Some are obvious. I am strong for my size. I can push my body to extreme physical limits. I did not sleep in any normal way. My eye sight changes. I have/had TMJ, fibro and CFS these are physical not emotional results of PTSD
My body reacts differently to experiences. It is not just emotion that releases adrenaline and such.
My brain which is part of my body works different. My memory which is part of my body works different. My body uses food as fuel in a different way and it is not consistent.
Now my body is a human body. If someone wants to believe that it is the same they can label the differences minor and really just a body that is a little bit different They can be comfortable assuming I do not understand when it is they that do not understand my body. Go figure.
I do a lot of unlearning which is much about rejecting what is told to me about me.
Going for a walk is not relaxing for my body. This one I can correlate to normal bodies. If a runner walks up a flight of stairs they will be out of breath. Their body is telling them to get oxygen.
I swim it is a different experience for my body.
I am 55 and have seen the knowledge of the body change to the point where I consider it fashion and not science. Salt has just been determined to not be linked to heart disease etc.
My body tells me things that it would not had it experienced a different environment when growing. It will tell me not to eat and in its experience that is best. The key is to giving my body different experiences.
I use the concept of mask which is very close to coping. The effects are not permanent. If I treat my body utilizing current understanding of the human body it will mask what I need to do and I can cope extreemly well. I have the self discipline and methods to do this.
When I treat my body well meaning what is good for my body which is not normal the result is more work of trauma. Not fun.
My body tells me that change is bad for it. That is my bodies experience.
I can override my body and tell it to eat or not to eat temporarily. We use the concept that the reptilian brain is going to win it is a matter of when if we mask.
We went through times when we would do “everything right” then crash and made the false assumption the cause was we stopped doing “everything right” when the reality is we were doing everything right for a normal body and wrong for us. More masking.
We work with a concept that the die is cast. By that we mean it is what happened in the past that causes our body to tell it what it does. In the immediate past say I skip breakfast than my body will tell me that it needs carbs. Telling my body it does not need carbs is not going to work.
If I eat breakfast which I normally do I will be hungry mid morning. Grab a donut in the morning and I will not be hungry till mid day or later on. The reason is we do not do anything. The die is cast as we skipped breakfast. It is futile to tell our body it does not need carbs. It knows better. The body thinks in the immediate.
We have learned and are still learning that taking care of ourselves is the best way to heal is a hairs breath away form the best way to mask.
We learned that cross training which we did our whole lives was really multiple training and forcing a regiment or schedule was a way to leave some away.
We do not go with loving our body. It seems that for us the body is incapable of love and operates on a like level. That we can love what we experience if we like our body, It is good for our spirit as it were.
As I wrote this novel it occurred to me that it is all about sleeping. That I did not ever learn to sleep in the environment that I grew in. That when we all learn to sleep things work themselves out.
Our body never learned to tell us it was tired. We went a year trying to be aware if we were tired and sleep when we were tired. It was part of our process. We slept when ever we were tired and that was a lot. We then figured out that it was best if we could sleep than we did. We would write our therapist that we are going to take a nap even though we were not tired and sleep for hours. Sometimes 6 times a day. It was tough to stay with it as it mirrored depression and was disruptive. We watched very closely to make sure we were not just avoiding which would meet the current understanding of a PTSD body. It was not our body was healing and needed much sleep. Up to 16 hours a day.
In the last few days we have experienced rest. This is new and the result of our daring to sleep when it would be called depression. Our need for sleep is decreasing which is the result of not making it a goal and staying away from good sleep hygiene for a normal body.
Healing from trauma is not a normal experience if you are not healing from normal traumatic experiences and it takes a long long time. The body goes through things that are not within the normal experience or known to professionals. Least that is what I needed to accept to heal from my experiences. The model that my experiences resulted in a body that I only had to treat as if it did not have the experiences it had and that would somehow change my body is not creditable.
I would not have understood all this with out complex psychotherapy and complex expressive therapy.
Maybe not a novel just two chapters. Smile
Dear Faith,
I have battled anorexia off and on for years… it did nearly kill me. After reading about it, I did fit some of the reasoning for not wanting to eat, but really I don’t weigh myself now, like I used to, or care too much how I look. It comes and goes like a switch goes off in my head… this just happened to me again about a month ago… I have lost weight, I know intellectually it is not healthy. I feel like I can handle everything better, in public, with others, in therapy, if I do not eat. I’m scared because I know how hard it is on my organs, and it could kill me… but I can’t snap out of it. I feel so alone and cry so much, or sleep, to escape my own mind. Recently though, to everyone else, emotionally they all think I am doing better. Some people think I am too thin, but most are not concerned, I think because I can now hold EVERYTHING in. I know this is literally killing me, emotionally, and maybe even physically. How do I stay strong, stay in complete control, be this other part of me, with out dying? I want to eat. I wish I could. I feel like I’m choking all the time. Some days I can barely swallow water or juice. Alone I am losing my mind, but to others I can pretend to be okay, and I don’t know how to fix this without feeling too sad to handle being so alone. Sorry if this doesn’t make any sense. I’m so confused about everything…
Dear Annabelle
My heart goes out to you, sitting with you for a while – can tell that you’re hurting so much and trying so hard to keep it together…know what you mean…
Have you ever been to http://www.isurvive.org ?? It’s a place where I’ve found support on days when I feel like I”m desperately holding onto my sanity with greased fingers and I’m just so alone. It’s a also a place where you can give support to others. Worth taking a look if you haven’t been there…
I’ve an acc there with a few posts up I can read the posts but I can’t post without help because of some mysterious issue with my Internet settings =(
sending you blessings
Thanks Faith. That makes perfect sense. What I don’t get is that if one alter or host makes the decision to love your body, does that mean they all do because they are part of you? My thinking was that only happened after some kind of integration. Can this work for people who are still loosing time and not integrated? I know you can only guess, but your theories make more sense than a lot of “professional” information I’ve read… Just curious.
Thanks for addressing two of my comments/questions. I love that you do that for us.
Peace,
mia
I do not know what I am, but I do know I am sad! Very very sad! I like to pretend that nothing has ever happened! I argue with my therapist, I am not a victim.
Yet I know I am, I want to say I am but the lump in my throat grows bigger, suffocating me into silence and I am back to quiet, another session ends.
It is so sad singing bird. I feel your sadness. I understand. Keep trying. Keep reaching and one day you will be a soaring bird as well. 🙂
I too, am very ‘overweight.’ But I am somewhat confused by some of things that you say. In other posts, you have said how bad it is that you are ‘fat.’ How is that accepting you and your body for who and what you are? I realize that it is better not to be overweight–for me, I feel like that was something that I ‘did’ to protect myself from any one wanting to be near me–but you seem to always view it as a negtive thing. Maybe it is just me, and I am reading into too much, but that seems to be the vibe that I hear when you talk the subject.
I have always believed that love is not a feeling but a way of treating someone. I don’t care if someone says they feel love for me if they don’t treat me like they love me. Since I’ve been trying to heal and “take back” what was stolen from me, I have tried to do this with regard to my body. I don’t “feel” like I love or even like my body, but I realized that I could still treat my body “as if”. Maybe this sounds weird. But it has helped me to do special things for my body even if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, just to say, “Someone may have abused me and treated me like and told me I was disgusting to them, but I’m going to treat that like the lie it was.” I sometimes would go get a manicure, for instance – something I used to think was a TOTAL waste of time and money especially since it was just going to get ruined before I got home. I thought people who got their nails done regularly were shallow and vain. But for me that’s not what it was about. It was about allowing myself to have TLC in a relatively non-threatening way. Letting someone hold my hand and treat it like it mattered. So I would say to myself, “My hands belong to God and they are for Him to use to bless people, not hurt people, so I am going to treat them like they are His.” And that kind of thing has really helped me stop focusing on how much I don’t want my body. It’s something positive I can do towards healing even if I dissociate, because I’m focused on my actions and not my feelings. It also revealed to me just how much I had neglected myself and devalued myself, exactly like my abusers did. I don’t want to be like them. I think maybe if my child parts see me taking action and paying attention to and taking care of myself – whether I “feel” it or not – maybe they will trust me that they are safe with me and start communicating more. Maybe this kind of idea would be helpful to someone else.
Hi Faith
I don’t know if this is something you would be able to post about some time, it is not directly related to this post.
You said:
“Sometimes I will experience a child alter part that views my adult thighs as fat because that part still feels like it lives in the body of a skinny little girl.”
I notice you often talk about parts of yourself in the present but I think you have also said that you have integrated your parts.
How is it that you still perceive different parts of yourself after integration? I thought you would be just speaking of yourself as ‘one person’ after integration?
Sorry for any misinterpretation or misunderstanding of your posts.
It is a long journey from hating yourself to loving and accepting yourself. It’s a journey well worth taking though. Give yourself time and forgive yourself when you fall into old habits. Faith, what you do here is wonderful and very empowering. Thank you.
I like my eye colour, as horrible as it feels to.
Not sure exactly why, but I feel the need to put a trigger warning here. So,
*** Possible Trigger Warning***
When my ex-husband and I were first dating he knew a bit about my abusive mother – but clearly didn’t understand how that played out for me. He was trying to convince me that her messages were invalid and, one morning when we were laying in bed, held a mirror up to my face and said: “See? You’re beautiful. You have beautiful eyes, a beautiful smile, beautiful nose, I love your high cheekbones” etc… As I was laying on my back, on the side of the bed up against the wall, it caught me by surprise and I felt like I couldn’t escape it. I felt like I was struggling mightily – thrashing about – but when we finally talked about it afterward I found out from him in reality I was frozen. Here he’s thinking that I’m listening to him and his positive messages are getting through, but I’m being horribly triggered by having to see that horrible monster I see in the mirror every time who reminds me of my mother. Eventually I broke through my panic and literally threw him off the bed and ran out the door into a largely unfamiliar neighbourhood – still in my nightclothes with boots and coat hastily thrown on top. I was in a triggered state for days after that. After that point my ex ‘got it’ and never tried anything like that again – although he did try to convince me that I was nothing like my mother.
This post has helped me to see something I’d never acknowledged before: I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to love and accept my body, literally because I know it contains her genes and chromosomes. It’s as if, all these years of trying to face what I see in the mirror, that if I could I would literally try to vaporize her half of my body. In a heartbeat. Being a somewhat transparent, shadowy, vaporous figure would be soooo much better than carrying any part of her around inside of me.
And, somewhere in there, I think I have a belief that loving any part of myself or my body is somehow feeding the part of her that lives on inside me. I’d already made the decision never to have children (not that I was conscious of all the reasons – mainly it was because I always heard my mother’s abuses excused in MY therapy as “she did the best she could” and didn’t want to risk doing that to any child I had). But reading your post here I had an immediate negative reaction to the thought of trying to love my body, because I know that some of my body comes from her genes. And there is no way in hell that I would want to pass that on into the world. At the moment it feels like there is no inner wolf I can feed that won’t somehow be feeding parts of her too.
The more I write this the more I realize that some of her behaviours have been branded into my implicit memory, and come out sometimes when I’m on automatic pilot. And I hate that and don’t know how to break out of that. So I think I starve myself from many things that might make my life better, just in order to starve that part of myself that I consider as ‘hers’.
Not sure where to go or what to do with this, but it feels better having at least acknowledged that.
I think perhaps I need to start with *very* selective feeding of things I know don’t connect to her in any way. That is something I *can* do. Because the most defining characteristics of her are her hatred, sadism and contempt directed towards anyone who is vulnerable or kind-hearted. And, thank God, I didn’t inherit any of those.