Written by: Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As a third-generation Sicilian immigrant growing up in 1960s America, I never felt like I fit in. Saturated with TV images of blue-eyed girls with corn-silk hair, I was continually confronted with the “other-ness” of my olive skin, my weird first name, and especially the wild profusion of frizzy hair that sprouted from my crown chakra, which made me look more like young Bob Dylan than like the Barbie dolls I played with and so desperately wanted to emulate.
I remember at age 5 recognizing that the image I saw in the mirror was me. I threw myself on my mother’s bed in convulsive sobs of white-hot shame. With great alarm my mother kindly asked me, “Honey, what’s wrong?”
In between my choking tears I blurted out, “Mom … I’m … ugly!”
Decades later, I read an article written by a Puerto Rican woman who similarly struggled with the messages of cultural exclusion imposed onto her hair. Relief and liberation surged through me upon seeing someone who looked like me playing to her native beauty. She determined never to dye, straighten, or otherwise alter her hair to conform to arbitrary aesthetic norms and chose instead to wear her effusive locks with pride.
After that day, so did I.
Where Does Body Shame Come From?
What do you say to yourself when you look at your body in the mirror? If you’re like 7 out of 10 women on this planet, the word you most likely utter is disgusting.
You probably didn’t emerge ex utero saying that, right? I certainly had no concept of my appearance as good or bad prior to that moment in the mirror.
Where, then, does this global plague of female body dysmorphia come from?
Ever since the first women’s fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, appeared in the mid-19th century, we gals have been fretting over our appearance in an effort to conform with unattainable and unrealistic mass-media images of beauty. The trend intensified as media sophistication accelerated over the past century and has now reached fever pitch in the age of social media.
Instagram, in particular, has recently come under fire for having an especially nefarious impact on teenage girls’ body esteem. Nearly three out of four teen girls use Instagram daily, for a staggering average of three hours per day. According to the now-famous Wall Street Journal exposé released last fall, Instagram exacerbates body-image issues for one-third of the girls who spend time on it.
Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that social media platforms have rigged their search algorithms to take viewers down progressively darker and more addictive rabbit holes, with the goal of keeping their eyeballs obsessively glued to the screen for as long as possible. A young girl following a fitness influencer can be led willy-nilly into the underworld of “thinspiration” or “pro-ana” media that advocate anorexia and other self-harming behaviors.
Our human brains, Harris says, and especially those of developing girls, are no match for the supercomputers behind our screens that predict and direct our online behavior toward obsession, dissociation, and body self-objectification.
Fortunately, many girls are now awakening to realize that their extreme dieting, eating disorders, and loathsome body regard have stemmed from the relentless cyber-popularity contest they’re struggling to win against the girls that get the most likes and shares, and they’re starting to just say no.
Detoxing Body Shame: A 5-Fold Path
It’s one thing to understand the roots of body shame intellectually. It’s another thing altogether to detoxify that shame from our nervous system.
How do we flush out the relentless not good enough messages assailing us 24/7? Here are my suggestions:
1. Stop. Inquire. Disrupt. When you feel a shame attack coming on, stop. Place your hands on your heart and take three conscious breaths. Sit until you feel some stillness settle in.
Then silently ask yourself, Who’s shame is this, really? You might find memories bubbling up from your history, images you’ve internalized from some media or other, a snarky remark someone said—or you might find nothing at all. Either way, the act of simply stopping and turning toward the shame (rather than habitually shrinking away from it) can sometimes be enough to disrupt the momentum of the feeling.
2. Get specific. Besides my hair, I used to feel horribly humiliated about my thighs, which in childhood my sister mockingly referred to as thunder thighs. It was nearly impossible to see my thighs as acceptable, much less beautiful, until I realized I was looking at them through my sister’s shaming, not my own.
Laser in around what’s driving you crazy in your appearance, see if you can find the roots of that feeling, and then proceed to the step below.
3. Use EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) to dislodge the shame. We can’t intellectualize our way out of shame, but EFT (also called “Tapping”) can bypass our smarts and release the shame from our midbrain’s limbic system, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
Wanna give EFT a try? Click here to meet me on YouTube, where I’ll guide you through some Tapping to help you stop berating yourself for all the ways you’ve abused your body over the years and reset your path going forward.
4. Know that anything you feel ashamed of you can feel proud of. After you’ve done some Tapping and dispersed the distress of the shame, consider flipping your shame on its head. What seeds of gratitude—and even pride—might you find inside the swampy morass of the shame? Now that I’m nearly 60, I’m so grateful for my thick hair and fleshy thighs as the telltale traits of a midlife woman in robust health.
5. Focus more on how your body feels than how it looks. If you need to, drape a cloth over the mirror, at least when not needed. Treat yourself to some gentle movement, a tasty meal, or a luxurious bath, and in those activities begin shifting your attention to how your body feels rather than how it looks. You could even journal at the end of the day about what felt good to your body today. Whatever we focus on expands, so the more you divert your attention away from the trash-talk and toward the feel-goods the more dividends of body love you’ll eventually harvest.
Lastly, Remember …
Deeper than the incessant media noise lies the truth that your body is a miraculous reflection of Mother Nature’s generosity and glory.
You’d probably never dump toxins into your backyard creek or litter the highway, right? It’s time, then, to stop trashing your body ecosystem with toxic judgments of disgusting and begin restoring your inner landscape to its primordial innocence and integrity.
With all the problems we face today, transforming your body shame into body love is one simple thing you can do to lift up your life, the lives of everyone you love, and the well-being of your world.
Would you like to go deeper with Marcella? Use the code BRAINZ33 to receive a 33% discount on her upcoming online retreat, From Body Shame to Body Sanctuary, February 11 – 13, 2022.
Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine MARCELLA FRIEL is a mindful eating mentor who helps health-conscious women love and forgive themselves, their food, and their figure. Marcella is author of "Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body." In 2018 Marcella founded the Women, Food & Forgiveness Academy, an online transformational mentorship program to help health-conscious women heal the emotional and metabolic roots of yo-yo dieting, binge eating, sugar addiction, and chronic body shaming. Marcella draws on nearly 3 decades of 12-step recovery and 35 years’ practice of Tibetan Buddhism to help women heal the self-hatred traumas that lie at the very root of their nervous system. She passionately holds an unflinching faith in trauma as the catalyst of evolution and guides others in dowsing their life experiences to find the gold amidst the dross. Learn more about Marcella by visiting marcellafriel.com
