The Therapy Edit - Confessions - I hate the way I look

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Today Anna tackles a new anonymous Confession from the Therapy Room;"I hate the way I look I look in the mirror. I feel like I'll never make peace with the way that I look."Anna replies with some compassionate advice and tips that will help everyone, regardless of whether they can relate to this confession or not.Please note - the names and voices of some of the Ask Anna/Confessions contributors may have been changed at their request.

Welcome to The Therapy Edit. I'm your host, Psychotherapist and author Anna Martha. I will be bringing you bite-sized episodes twice a week full of tips, wise words from expert guests and insights to support your mental well-being. Hi everyone. Welcome to Confessions episode of The Therapy Edit. So today's episode is a big in. Actually, I read this confession, which is an anonymous confession written into a box on my website where you don't have to share your name or anything and I spent 10 minutes sharing some kind of therapeutic thoughts and this one kind of got me in the gut really and I think it just I felt quite sad and compassionate for this person so I know that it will resonate with people and maybe you've got a friend or a family member you would love to send this episode to it or just take some of the I guess

insights from it share with someone. I'm, yeah, I'm going to go through some thoughts. And I guess that kind of leads us really well into this confession, which is this. I hate the person I see in the mirror. I feel like I'll never make peace with the way that I look. Oh, that's a heavy one, isn't it? And I think a couple of things really struck me about this confession is the hate. the hating the person and I know that this person goes on today I feel like I'll never make peace with the way that I look but actually what is felt here is I hate the person

I see in the mirror as if there isn't really a separation between how we look and the entirety of who we are and whether you look in the mirror and you feel apathetic you feel kind of an arm you don't really feel much or you just feel a sense of ugh or you feel a hatred. I want to speak into those places today. And the other thing that really struck me about this confession is I feel like I'll never make peace with the way that I look. You know,

I feel like I'll never make peace. There's a little bit of an inn there, isn't it? It's like if you feel like you'll never make peace, then we know that we aren't our feelings that maybe There is hope, which is why you are sharing this confession in the first place. So I really do believe that there is hope. And that is what I want to inspire in the words that I shared today. So the tips that I have and I kind of have six, really. The first one is seek professional help if needed. You know what?

A therapist or support group can help you unpack these feelings because body image struggles or just hatred to the reflection that you see in the mirror often stem from emotional roots and I will tell you this that it is possible to find more self-acceptance it is possible to find more compassion and kindness and gentleness for yourself when you look in the mirror and I can personally attest to this not only clinically when I've seen just a real beautiful shift in the way that people feel about themselves and treat themselves because often the two are so intertwined, right? If we treat ourselves as someone of value despite certain aspects of who we are,

then we will start to shift our sense of value. But the important thing is that you do not wait until you feel deserving of honour. and respect and kindness to start treating yourself in that way because actually it's the feeling that follows the action. So professional help, therapeutic help, support group, if it is around kind of, yeah, body image, then there are support groups available for you. But it is so possible to unpack those feelings and often that self-hatred, you know, you weren't born hating yourself. You weren't born. hating what you see in the mirror. There may well be cultural influences. There may well be

relationship influences, things that people have said, maybe bullies, the words that people have you know whole sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. We know for well that words do the most damage. But there is hope. And often it does take a bit of unpicking and unpacking therapeutically to really start putting cracks through that hatred and that feeling that you will never make peace because I am telling you now that you in time can make peace. But it's not easy. This requires work. It requires work around comparison and accepting support and those small acts of self-acceptance regardless of how you feel about yourself. So the first one is that professional help if needed.

Do you seek that? The second one is being compassionate towards yourself. And I've touched on this already. Self-hate is so heavy to carry it. It gets into everything. It weaves through the way that you act towards yourself. It just the way that you respond to yourself. Because if things go wrong, you're just likely to fall into that self-criticism and just layers on that self-criticism.

just layers on that self-criticism, that self-hatred. So start with acknowledging how you feel without judgment. It's okay to struggle with your self-image. Okay, we are cloud messages coming at us that we should look like this, that we should look like that. If we feel like this, we should do that. If we feel like that, we should spend money on this to make ourselves feel better. So much of the focus culturally is on image,

but we are and you are so much more than that. If you think about a child, think about someone that you know, someone that you love, it might be one of your children. You know, if you were just to criticise how they looked all the time and if everything was to come back to that,

think about what it would do to their self-esteem. Okay, but instead, what do you do? You share nurturing words, you share kind and supportive words and you can see what that is. that does to them. You want to show them that not everything is about how you look. So start responding to yourself in a similar way. Start focusing. Shift the focus. This is the next point. Number three, shift the focus leading on. Shift the focus. You want to tell a child, your child,

you want to show them that actually they are so much more than what they look like. How they look, it's going to change over life. We, you know, we get wrinkly, we get grey. We get weak. We get all of those things as we move through our lives into kind of, yeah, the end of our life. So the more the more focus we place on how we look, the more our worth is going to get impacted as our looks get impacted by time and life and circumstances and age. So just as you do with your children, shift the focus. Your worth is not tied to your appearance. despite what culturally the value our culture places on worth. It's like building a house on sinking sand because it is going to shift and change underneath you.

It is not a solid foundation. Try and focus on what your body does rather than how it looks. Think about how your body has carried you through life, has helped you experience joy, has healed itself when you've been unwell. think about what it has journeyed through with you, how it's supported you, how it has facilitated life. So shift the focus. The next one is surround yourself with support. Lean into those relationships, those people, those connections, those friendships, those groups, those resources

that support you, that foster positivity around your body and health. how you look or actually just focus on everything but that you know i speak to people who have joined those um you know communities of cold water plunging and cold water sea swimming all you around and they say that when they first turned out they felt subconscious about turning up in a swimming costume and then with the beach in the grey in a group of people and it felt like a massive thing to do that but actually took no time no time at all to feel so accepted to feel like you were part of something that literally no one gives a toss how you look, what colour your swimsuit is, how it fits. No one cares. How wonderful. Because we can go

feeling anxious and then that can so easily with the right people in the right company just suddenly feel so insignificant. So surround yourself with the people, the friendships, the groups in which you just relax into and how you look feels. insignificant. Because at the end of the day, what you bring, who you are, the smile, the memories, the joy, the stories, the care. Those things are what people, what make people feel good in your company. Those things are the things that are value. And actually sometimes just hearing how other people navigate and have navigated these challenges, how people, like, gather stories, be a story gatherer if you see someone confident in their own skin in a way that you would love to be ask them

how so another thing another tip number i think we're on five i think we're on five is stop comparing and it's so easy i said than done social media comparison you know it can find us feeling inadequate you can go actually feeling all right and then suddenly you see something you speak to someone you read something and you know it's actually we know it's not the full picture we know these things are often edited and curated but suddenly those feelings of comparison and inadequacy come in so when you notice yourself comparing what can you do to step away what can you do to think you know what i already feel these things about myself i want to foster a different way and this is just driving me further into where i do not want to be

So notice when that comparison is creeping in, all those friends that actually you just feel so pulled into comparison when you're around them, perhaps that is a conversation that they so often engage in that comparison, that gossipy, you know, have you seen so-and-so, oh, so-and-so looks amazing, so-and-so's lost weight, so-and-so's done this, so-and-so, and actually, you know, how can you step away from those conversations? And then, hmm, the final tip that I want to share with you is, practicing small acts and gestures of self-acceptance. I think so often we want to go from self-hate self-love. Actually, that can feel like a massive jump to make a leap. A leap. What would it be like

actually to be going into self-hatred to self-respect? Starting with respect. Starting small. moving from actually I am sabotaging I am acting in a way that is disrespectful dishonouring to myself and my body what would it be like in this moment to move to self respect I'm respecting myself as a base level it might be that you take care of herself in a different way perhaps you add another step into your routine in the evening certainly it feels nurturing a bit of self-massage, get some oxytocin going, you know, it's really good for, and just that sense of connection with yourself, maybe just give yourself a little hand massage before you go to sleep something like that, or add, yeah, paint your nails, do something that is a gesture of honour to

yourself. It might be that actually you, you feed yourself well at the next meal. You know, you nurture yourself by being hydrated if that's something that has just, yeah, is just not. at the top of your list right now are those basic acts of self-care and self-nurturing that perhaps you've overlooked because self-hatred, it finds us sidestepping these really basic acts of self-recare, well, self-care and self-respect when I've hated myself. It has not been my prerogative to nourish and nurture myself. Absolutely not. And as I said at the beginning, do not wait until you feel deserving of these things. Do not wait until you accept or feel respect of yourself to start acting in that way because those are what foster that sense of

self-respect and self-care and I do want to say you know sometimes it might be there are you know people that have gone through life altering surgery or have had accidents or have been through things in life that find them looking in a way that actually is really really hard for them to accept that maybe it's been visually that has visually changed how they look and sometimes it is okay and actually really important to grieve the fact that maybe physically you do not look in the way that you used to look and you miss that maybe you feel like you look in the mirror and you don't recognize yourself anymore for whatever reason and it is okay to grieve that in fact grieving these things paves the way for self-accept acceptance grieving

what we miss, grieving what we wished for, paves the way for self-acceptance. And then some of these things might feel a little bit easier to implement. But I'm sending you love. And I really hope that these words have brought some hope for you. And yeah, we'll be back soon. Thank you for listening to The Therapy Edit today. If you enjoyed it, please do take a sec to like and subscribe so we can share the words further and wider. If you have an Ask Anna question or an anonymous confession for the

Confessions from the Therapy Room episodes, head to anamatha.com and click on the podcast tab to submit. Want more? Grab a copy of my most recent book, The Uncomfortable Truth, change your life by taming ten of your mind's greatest fears or enjoy some of the video and downloadable resources on my website, tackling everything from burnout to driving anxiety. So until the next episode, goodbye. Thank you.