The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Molly Forbes on accepting your body, even when you don't like it

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

In this episode Anna chats to Author, Podcaster and Campaigner, Molly Forbes about how all bodies are good bodies and how we can teach our children to embrace their body regardless of their shape or size. Molly is the founder and director of The Body Happy Org. You can follow Molly on Instagram at @mollyjforbesYou can buy her book Body Happy Kids at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Body-Happy-Kids-Unlocking-children/dp/1785043587/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=body+happy+kids&qid=1613053841&s=books&sr=1-1&tag=linkfire-smarturl-21And find out more about The Body Happy Org and Molly's other work here https://www.bodyhappyorg.com

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist's mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me for the next 15 minutes as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Therapy Edit. thing and today I have Molly Forbes with me. Molly is the author of Body Happy Kids, a book guiding you and how to help children and teens love the skin that they're in. And also actually on her social media, I find that she helps me love and appreciate the skin that

I'm in too. So she's absolutely worth a follow over at Molly J. Forbes. And Molly is a journalist. She's a campaigner for all things, Body Happy Kids. She's also the director of Body Happy Ork. So Molly, hi. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. You're so welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

And how are you? How are you today? I'm okay. I'm feeling optimistic. I'm really pleased that the very beginning of the year is over, to be honest. And I'm feeling brighter and a lot more optimistic than I have been. So, yeah, I'm all right. I'm okay.

yeah so when you go through that kind of heavy time and then it's almost a relief isn't it when you feel that sense of optimism you're like oh I'm not going to be feeling like that forever yeah absolutely and my mood is really impacted by the weather as well and I think I feel like this is such a cliche but it does feel like there's a little whiff a really really distinct little whiff of spring in the air you know and I think that that really changes how I feel as well that kind of hunkering down of winter, I feel like we're starting, little pinpricks of light are starting to appear. And that makes me feel optimistic and hopeful and really, really affects my mood. So I'm doing okay. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. So Molly, the question I ask, the guest here is if you could share one thing with all the mums, what would that one thing be? My one thing is to help your children understand and really try and understand this for yourself as well, that all bodies are good bodies. All bodies are good bodies. It's such, it sounds like such a simple sentence, but when you untangle it a little bit more, it's actually something that can be quite

difficult to really know in your heart and help your children know and understand as they're growing up because there are so many messages telling us otherwise. But that's my one thing. And I would say if there's one thing you can do for yourself, your own mental health, your health, your body image, then it's knowing that. But also it's such an important thing to help our kids know and understand as well. And it's, you're right, there's so much to be unpicked in that, isn't there? Because I think we're often shown this idealised image of what we should all be moving towards or wanting or seeking to attain. So for those of us who have had that image so deeply embedded over the years how do we how do we start to to challenge that how do we start to

really believe that all bodies are good bodies i guess it's about i mean there's so there's so many different ways and there's not necessarily a right or a wrong way but i think the first the very first thing you need to do is just be really really kind to yourself give yourself lots of self compassion and recognize that we're not going to unlearn this lifetime of messages overnight because it doesn't just, we don't just wake up one morning and decide, oh, right, I'm going to be body happy today. I'm going to know that all bodies are good bodies. Actually, there's a huge amount of unlearning that needs to happen. Like all, all of these ideas are deeply embedded in our brain, the pathways of our brain. You don't just unlearn that stuff

overnight. So being really, really gentle with yourself and giving yourself time to learn and understand more about this subject. And then on a personal level, thinking really clearly about what your body does for you every day and just trying to show a little bit of kindness to your body. It doesn't mean setting yourself up to look in the mirror every day and think, gosh, I'm amazing. I look amazing. Actually, it's more about coming home to your body and feel, you know, really being in tune with what your body feels like. So it could be something as simple as just being aware of, you know, having a check-in every hour and thinking, am I thirsty? Do I need a wee? You know, when was the last time I went to the toilet?

am I hungry and just trying to get back to being at one in your body and then recognizing the next step would be recognizing all the things that our bodies do for us every day and I'm not talking about going from you know marathons or you know doing some amazing kind of fitness challenges although if that's your bag fine but it could be something as simple as cuddling your child or holding your your kids hand on the way to school or I don't know just, you know, being in the bath and just enjoying the feeling of the warm water on your skin and that feeling of, ah, I can actually breathe. You know, these little moments of joy, body joy, are just ways that you can come home to your body and feel at one in your body

and then start to appreciate how your body allows you to live your life. And then once you've got to that point, you can start thinking about the bigger societal picture, which is a whole other subject, but really, really important one. And you can't have one without the other, I don't think. Yeah, that's so powerful. And I think that phrase, you know, coming home to your body, if I think back over my own life for a long time, you know, my mind was something I worked on. I wanted to kind of grow and get more understanding of how my mind ticked. And to me, I noticed that there was such a separation between my head and my body, like my mind and my body. My body was something that it was like a tool. It was something that I owned. I could use.

it and abuse it and manipulate it. It was something I potentially took emotions out on instead of recognising that actually my body and my mind are my home. You know, one is as valuable and deserves as much respect. And yeah, I think respect is the other. Absolutely. They can't be separated either because if you're feeling a certain way in your mind, it impacts how you feel in your body. We know that with little kids who, you know, go to, you know, at school, maybe they're saying that they've got tummy ache and often it's linked with anxiety and anxious feelings. I have that this, you know, I see this with my own children. When we're angry and we feel rage, I personally get this real tightness in my chest and I struggle to kind of catch my breath and I almost feel like pent up

with energy. I need to just kind of shout or scream or, you know, run around. And actually I find that If I do run around or jump up and down on the spot, it releases some of that energy and my mind feels calmer. Our bodies and minds, the way we talk about mental health and physical health, actually we need to take a bigger picture and recognize that our brains are part of our bodies and accepting different mental states and our different emotions. If we can do that, we also need to start recognizing that we need to start accepting our bodies in the same way and recognizing that our bodies will change and fluctuate just in the way that our emotions do,

and that's normal and natural, and it's not something to be afraid of. And this idea that there's a perfect body and this is something that we should strive towards to look a certain way is just as damaging as this idea that there's a perfect, you know, mental state to be and that everyone should just be really happy all the time, because actually that's not realistic, either. So it's kind of really, for me, it's about encapsulating this idea of being a whole human being, a whole person, and then recognising that every single person is different. And that's the beauty of humanity. Yeah. So coming home to yourself and starting to notice those moments of gratitude and just feeling and feeling in your body, because I think you're so right. Often our body is

less defended against emotion than our minds. We often build up so many different coping mechanisms and narratives, don't we, in our heads? And actually, sometimes our body, if we start to notice what's going on, it might be able to tell us more and more clearly than the tangled, you know, mess that can feel like our minds in those moments. So, yeah, noticing. I like that. And coming home. That thing of noticing as well is really important because so much much of the time when we feel bad about our bodies and when children are displaying body insecurities, it can actually point to something else. So it might be that we're feeling anxious about something we're feeling tired, maybe we don't have the energy that we usually have. And

often the go-to response in that situation is, oh, if I can just take control of my body and how my body looks and actually it's my body's fault, you know, or this idea of I feel fat, you know, and automatically equating the word fat with a negative state of being. It shows how vilified that word has become and actually really neutralizing all of these emotions and all of these feelings and all of these words, you know, using fat as a neutral word, as a neutral descriptor, and then recognize it can help us then think about, okay, what is actually going on here? You know, actually what is going on for your child in this moment when they're saying this

about their body? is it something else? And having those little moments to connect with your body and think about, you know, what is this feeling? I know that you talk a lot about naming the feeling. And that's, you know, that's something that I included in my book because it's so important because often we think that we're feeling one way, but actually it's not, we're feeling another way. And that can impact how we feel about our body and then in turn how we treat our body. So if you're feeling, you know, insecure in your body, you might then think, right, the answer right in this moment is to restrict what I'm eating and, you know, to over-exercise in a way that doesn't feel good. And actually,

if the original feeling is actually maybe you're feeling anxious about something or you're tired, maybe that's the feeling that you need to address, not the body feeling, the body, the idea that you have about the way your body looks. Yeah. So this is so thought-provoking. And I think we're, you know, we'll all start recognizing. And it's the awareness, isn't it? It's starting to recognize where we're doing these things without even noticing. And then when we do start becoming aware of it,

that's when we can start addressing it. And I think the wonderful thing about your book, Molly, is that it's a book about kind of supporting your children and teens. But actually, I think we learn so much about ourselves as we read it. And that's part of the work, isn't it? is we're working on our relationship with our bodies. Like our kids are going to be watching on and benefiting from our freedom in that journey as well and how that's changing for us.

Yeah, absolutely. Lots of people who've read it have said to me, and this wasn't the intention when I was writing it. And it isn't really something I even thought about, to be honest. But lots of people who've read it have said to me it's helped them with their own body image because it's almost like they've had to think of themselves as a child. It's that inner child thing, isn't it? So I think that's a good side effect, I guess.

Absolutely. It's powerful, isn't it? I think when we're looking how to support and love our children the best way we can, we end up exploring how we're appreciating and respecting and supporting ourselves. So, yeah, what a powerful side effect of the words and the wisdom that you've poured into that. So thank you so much, Molly, for your message. To finish off, I always ask a few quick fire questions. So Molly, I would love to ask you what for you is a motherhood high?

The thing that I want to say is something that we really went through a period last year where one of my daughters was really, really suffering with anxiety and it was affecting she wasn't wanting to go to school. She was very nervous about starting secondary school. She was having stomachate. She started having panic attacks and feeling really sick. time she was sick. And that doesn't, you know, it doesn't sound like it should be a motherhood high, but actually the high for me was that I was able to support her and help her through it. And she's in a really good place now. She's really confident at school. She took part in the school show in her first time at secondary school. And these moments are always going to come.

But the thing that really helped me help her, I think, was allowing her to see that there's nothing wrong with her. And actually these feelings that she's feeling, they don't make her weak. They don't make her, you know, soft or a bad person. These are feelings that I have often as well. And actually, these feelings also make her super compassionate and kind and thoughtful. And it means that she really cares about things. And when she was doing a piece of homework recently for, she does a subject at school called Beliefs, Values and Citizenship. So it's kind of like R.E. and PSHE combined and she had to do a piece of work about what makes her unique and she wrote on it I get anxious about things and sometimes it really affects me in a bad way but actually it also means

that I'm really compassionate and I'm often able to understand how other people are feeling and I just had this little moment of joy after all we've been through over the last six months that was a real high for me oh I love that and and it's also so indicative of what we were chatting about earlier about how when you have gone on that journey yourself of changing, you know, some of the stigmatism around certain feelings, you know, that we might, yeah, about anxiety that actually it's not weakness, it's just a response to what we're going through. Then, and to have that compassion for yourself, then she's going to be able to learn that so much more readily because you're living it. Yeah. It's like, oh, oh, yes, I can see how that is a high, definitely.

And Molly, what's a motherhood low for you? Do you know the same thing? It was such a difficult time when I was actually living it in it. And I did question myself. And it forced me to really confront some of my own personality traits and feelings and emotions and memories actually of experiencing. And some of these memories are really recent memories of that 2020 in the pandemic. And I started having counseling that year and did a year of therapy all around these feelings of anxiety, which could sometimes turn to rage and feeling overwhelmed and out of control. And so helping my daughter through some of these emotions, it was really difficult at times because I second guessed myself a lot. And I had to, and at the beginning, when she first started feeling that way, I felt a lot of shame and blame. I blamed myself. I was thinking she's got it from me. It's a genetic thing. Or she's learned behavior that she's learned from me and had to really work through a lot of these really difficult emotions to be able to help her with it. So that was a, it was a really difficult

time for me as a mum. You know, I would say it's probably aside from the sleep deprivation of the first, you know, the really early, early years, that period of six months is the hardest time I've ever had so far as a mum, you know, it was a really challenging, difficult time. So it was a low as well as a high. Yeah. Yeah. It's reminded me of this raise that, you know, it's in the valleys where the flowers grow. It's in the valleys where the growth is. And the mountaintop, you know, it's great and you get the great view. But those valleys, those hard times, there's painful. But also that's where that high came out of as well. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. So Molly, what's one thing that makes you feel really good? It's a, it's something that I'm

loving at the moment because I couldn't do it when I wasn't having the energy, but I love going for a swim. I go for a swim every morning, if I can in the week. I get up really early and I sneak out when everyone else in the house is still asleep and I have half an hour to myself and it's just half an hour of bliss. I get out of the pool and I just feel calm and happy and I feel like I can take on the day, no matter what the day throws at me. I love the fact, I mean, people can't see your face, Molly, but you were literally glowing as you spoke about that. So to finish off, I'm going to ask you,

how would you describe motherhood in just three words? Not an easy task. Oh, golly. Confusing, uplifting and challenging. Confusing, uplifting and challenging. Those all really resonate. Thank you so much, Molly. Thank you for all that you do in helping us support our children

and the relationships that they have with their bodies. But also in that, yeah, as you share your journey with this and inspire ours as well, powerful stuff and necessary stuff. So thank you. Thank you, Molly. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit.

If you enjoyed it, please do share. share, subscribe and review. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my two books called Mind Over Mother and Know Your Worth. I'm also the founder of the Mother Mind Way, a platform full of guides, resources and a community with the sole focus on supporting mother's mental and emotional well-being. It's been lovely chatting with you. Speak soon.

Thank you.