Body Dysmorphia Quotes

It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you.

...she was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry.

Understanding rustled through me, soft as leaves. It wasn’t quite the same, but I’d often felt I didn’t fit inside the boundaries of the word girl. It reminded me of a country I could happily visit, but the longer I stayed, the more I knew I couldn’t live there all the time. There were moments when I sorely wished to be free of the confines of this body, the expectations it seemed to carry.

...this beast dwells within whom many confuse with vanity.

There are rules you've gotta follow when you fuck to forget. A body's only a temple if and when you treat it like one, but a heart can still break even if you never put it together properly in the first place.

I am profoundly grateful to say that I have never felt inherently worthless. Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied – people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large. The world around me simply insisted on it, no matter what my gut said. I used to describe it as ‘reverse body dysmorphia’: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kind – why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was a home run.

If I were in a different body, this would be the time I would lean down and kiss her. If I were in a different body, that kiss could transform the night from off to on. If I were in a different body, she would see me inside. She would see what she wanted to see. But now it's awkward.

Welcome to your new bodies, gentlemen. If you'd like, I can help you start your own 'dysmorphia is all in your head' support group.

Maybe she’s a natural beauty, an untouched beauty. The sales pitch for every powder, cream, procedure. But there’s always a consequence, some side effect that keeps away the promised miracle. Acne from pore-clogging foundation. Asymmetry from filler injected willy-nilly. Body dysmorphia from the asymmetry caused by the filler, which even when dissolved leaves your skin stretched out and floppy. It’s the same with pills: Vicodin cuts the pain, but then you can’t shit;

Grant looked skeptically at his uncle. “What?” “You have a lot of muscles.” “Thank you. One day I’ll tell you about gay men and body dysmorphia, but not today.

What started as a longing to be loved and seen for my physical beauty digressed into the warped belief that the illness itself was what drew the attention I so craved. I towed the line between longing for perfection and longing for pity. Using my body as a signaling flag, oscillating between peacocking in times where I felt beautiful, and waving distress calls in the depths of my sickness. I never used my words, and I didn’t know how to. I used my body.

Fuck you . . . you fucking body-dysmorphia porn-addict trust-fund-baby compulsive-masturbation motherfucker.

Don't train to GET a better body, train to BE a better body.

Over the course of our sessions, I’ve written down some words you’ve used to describe your body,” she said, clearing her throat. “Amorphous. Out of control. Disgusting. Exploding. These kinds of words reveal to me a deep dysmorphia—

Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike. We can find more peace in the skin we live in, declaring a truce with the bodies that only try to care for us. But more than that, we can build a more just and equitable world that doesn’t determine our access to resources and respect based on how we look. We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous. We can build a world that conspires against eating disorders and body dysmorphia, working toward more safety for eating disorder survivors of all sizes. We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.

It was torture to be starving and not being able to eat. All I could think about was my face and my chewing and how much food was on my fork when I brought it to my mouth. Eating in front of people was like stripping and standing there naked for everyone to judge. My mind was in a constant state of panic wondering if I looked like a pig when I was eating, or if I was chewing too loud. Or worse, what if I ate too much and everyone saw what my mom always saw: a fat sob that could do with losing a few meals? The thought always left me in cold chills.

As much as I dig my sexy body dysmorphia, I’d prefer for you not to have given it to me.

I have Body Dysmorphia... I think I look amazing!

There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

Tina stomped over and drilled a finger into his chest. “You don’t tell my kid about getting fat. That shit goes to a girl’s head. Body dysmorphia and shit like that.

It’s an engagingly evil paradox—the kind of mind-fucking a North Korean dictatorship would go in for, if they decided to suppress the proletariat using only cattiness and rampant body dysmorphia.

Quickly, I grew numb to the content of these “real” posts, and they became weekly tasks I checked off my list. My anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia—these issues morphed into talking points that I used to fill my social media feed and make myself more relatable. Somewhere along the way, I stopped acknowledging to myself that these issues were still real to me, that they still chipped away at my happiness and sense of self.

Boys—I think you're old enough now that I can talk about—certain topics with you. You know, most men expect a woman's body to look a certain way and not all of them do look that way. So sometimes a woman has to do something that will change her appearance so that she'll be accepted by the people around her. People expect a woman's breasts to be a certain size and mine aren't that size. They're smaller. So I wear a padded brassiere—it makes it look like my breasts are the size that most women's are.

au-delà de la crainte de la première fois, bien au-delà du risque de tomber enceinte, je fuyais mon propre corps, sa mise à nu, à jamais associée pour moi à l'ordre d'un nazi, à son regard humillant tandis qu'on nous rasait la tête et le sexe, à son verdict : la mort ou le sursis.

Patients with eating disorders contend with an emotional landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. Help with these struggles will never be found in a pill or a set of therapeutic exercises, in spite of the potential usefulness of both. It is only through a meaningful emotional connection that we can help patients begin to "bear the unbearable and to say the unsayable".

Eating disordered patients often grow up in families that place an inordinate amount of importance upon bodily appearance, including weight, and focus upon particular parts of the body: protruding tummies, thunder thighs, and tree-trunk legs. We see these same pathogenic qualities in much of the advertising that is directed toward women and girls.

In families of eating-disordered patients, the narcissistic use of the daughter by the mother is often immediately striking. Throughout the literature the degree of enmeshment or symbiosis between mother and daughter is remarked upon. Daughters are torn between the urgings of their own developmental strivings and their need to meet their mothers' narcissistic needs.

When eating disordered symptoms arise in men, Schoen (ibid.) writes, they may signal difficulty integrating dependency needs into a masculine identification. Sands (2003) notes that men are more likely to express disavowed needs and wants through projections onto others - witness the preponderance of compulsive sexual behaviors in men - whereas women are more likely to use their own bodies to contain disavowed desires.

Kernberg (1995) observes that patients with anorexia tend toward sexual inhibition, whereas those with bulimia are more likely to enact sadomasochistic sexual interactions, especially when eating disturbances temporarily recede.

Although self-starvation as manifest in anorexia nervosa is a deadly form of self-destruction, it is also a healthy expression of the desire to be autonomous.

The capacity to think about, to reflect upon, difficult feelings is what allows us to forego expressing them in more problematic ways, such as, for patients with eating disorders, through a binge, or a purge, or food restriction.

The anorexic is strongly defended against her object hunger whereas the bulimic’s defenses against that hunger break down, leading to her over-consume and, in an effort to undo the eruption of that need, to vomit.

One of our central tasks with patients with eating disorders is facilitating the capacity to postpone action in favor of reflection. We inevitably find especially early on, that this is challenging: the pull to binge, or purge, or restrict is difficult, often impossible, to resist. To understand this fact, in this chapter we begin with a discussion of Freud’s (1914) notion of the compulsion to repeat and then formulate the eating disordered patient's symptoms as repetitions against traumatic themes from childhood, never-ending (because never fully successful) attempts to magically undo the pain of the past.

Patients with eating disorders typically report little power to stop their eating disordered behaviors (i.e., reversibility), are often unaware of the thoughts and feelings they have when engaging in them (i.e., self-observation), and, by definition, their behaviors are self-defeating and fail to forward their development in constructive ways (i.e., appropriateness).

We all need to feel safe, that the world is predicable, that obstacles can be overcome, and conflicts resolved -in short, to maintain narcissistic equilibrium. When such conditions are met, infants can pleasurably engage with their environments. When faced with overwhelming experience, internal or external, they must find a way to restore their fragile self-esteem. Some infants, especially when faced with overwhelm that cannot be overcome, turn away from reality and toward omnipotent solution. This learned response feels dependable and, over time, takes on an addictive quality, restricting her access to other solutions and pathways to further growth.

Mourning is the vehicle of transformation through which traumatic themes can be acknowledged, disillusioned wishes for an ideal object relinquished and painful early relationships transformed into aspects of the subject’s character that are carried forward in constructive ways.

Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.

If there is one commonality between patients with eating disorders, perhaps it is that there is disharmony in the link between body and mind. This can manifest in various ways such as, for example, the “false bodies" described in a later chapter.

Numerous patients with eating disorders refuse to eat with their families and friends, even insisting on eating only in private. Many of the practices that are seen as essential for creating and sustaining relatedness - the sharing of food, living together, sexual relationships, and even reproduction - are consistently negated by anorexic and other eating disordered practices.

In her article, Williams (1997) describes a class of "psychically porous” patients who suffer from eating disorders, most frequently bulimia nervosa, and suggests that they had parents who themselves suffered extensive traumas and as a result were either frightening or frightened or both in relation to the child.

Some patients may struggle to describe and elaborate on their experience, for instance, of need, desire, or hunger. While they can speak to their feelings, often quite articulately in other realms, in these particular areas this capacity is conspicuously absent.

Object relations theory is concerned with how the patient's early relational experiences have been intemalized as a psychological structure that continues to organize and give meaning to her experiences in the present. Are her objects "whole," reflecting both the good and bad aspects of important early relationships, or are they ''parts," representing of "all good" or "all bad" experiences of intense gratification, longing, or deprivation? The objects that populate her psyche shape the anxieties with which she struggles, the longings she feels, and the defenses she erects to manage the intensities of both. From this point of view, it is the underlying psychological structure -not just the eating disorder symptoms that manifest because of it – that are a focus of treatment. The eating disorder, in other words, is a result of dynamics that are woven through the patient’s personality.

Each internal representation of the mother has its corresponding self-representation - the first as bad, empty, and guilty and the second as passive, compliant, and good. Working together, these internal objects undermine patient’s journeys toward adulthood, which is compatible with the symptoms and behaviors of the disorder.

Curiosity improves our life skills, decreases bias, and increases well-being. Curious people are more empathetic, and, as with openness, they are also happier, less stressed, and more comfortable with ambiguity. In contrast, the absence of exploratory behavior is associated with an increased risk of everything from self-harm and body dysmorphia to groupthink, prejudice, and low empathy.

Jonathan suffered from bigorexia, the body dysmorphia that occurs when a young man like Jonathan continues working on his physical strength, often temporarily magnifying it with steroids, in the hope that it will fill the black hole of his psychic wound.

I knew that girls made fun of each other, but talking about someone’s body like that seemed so wrong. You can’t choose your body! I was suddenly aware that I was under-performing in ways I didn’t even know existed. From then on I always showered in my swimsuit, changed clothes in the outhouse (which defeated the purpose of showering), and worst of all, I developed the habit of swimming in a t-shirt.

Connie sits on the toilet, and I think about whether she noticed how much the bathwater rose when I sat down in it. It's something I'd worried about since I was a teenager, the serenity of a bath marred by my anxiety about my own volume. She is so thin, so elegantly formed. I feel certain she knows the water she'd displace wouldn't be more than an inch or two.

Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied—people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large. The world around me simply insisted on it, no matter what my gut said. I used to describe it as “reverse body dysmorphia”: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kind—why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was