It's About The Body - Quality Of Life, Self-development

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-08-25 11:55

While sitting, do you try to draw in your belly so that it appears smaller? Are you trying to "get" into a good angle when taking photographs for a passport? Wear skirts that hide your thighs and avoid chunky dots on your blouses?

Almost every time you appear in society, you are somehow unhappy with your body and make symbolic remarks to it. Your relationship with your body is very important - believe me, it deserves love!

In Western psychotherapy there is a stable expression "celebrate your body" - it means that a person is satisfied with his physical shell and finds in it a lot of joys and pleasures of life. He knows the value of sound sleep, delicious food, active movement - that is, all the opportunities that he has thanks to his body.

However, not everyone can boast of such an attitude to their own body - on the contrary, almost everyone would like to add a little here, remove there, and in some places even lengthen it. Moreover, during life, such desires may not fade, but, on the contrary, only intensify.

And no matter how many friends and acquaintances kept repeating about the far-fetchedness of these complexes, we pay for the "luxury" of having dissatisfaction with our own body with problems in our personal life, reduced self-attitude, and difficulties in communication. And for some, his body is so uncomfortable that he is ready to turn to the services of plastic surgery or drive himself to the gym before a heart attack.

ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM

The body image is a part of a person's “I” -concept, a component of his “I” image. It consists of our ideas about our own body and our relationship to it. The existing ideas about the body are compared with the "I" -ideal, but the result of this comparison motivates us to do certain things: promise ourselves to sign up for a sports club on Monday or buy a new suit that emphasizes all our merits. Body image is not innate - it is formed throughout life, with early impressions (up to 5 years) having the greatest impact on it.

The child has nothing to do with his body - he uses it, he breathes it, moves, plays, he does not consider his body separately from himself. From the moment he discovers his body (looks at the arms and legs with surprise, "tastes" them, waves and shakes them), and until the moment he receives the first assessment from an adult, his relationship with the body can be called idyllic.

Gradually, the child accumulates knowledge about how the most important adults in his life relate to him, and this knowledge becomes the basis of his relationship to himself and to his own body. As long as the baby receives approval and care, he feels good, but the first one sounds: “Lame! Clumsy! Hook hands! - and a distorted body image begins to take shape.

In adolescence, peers appear, whose opinion takes on serious weight. The adolescent world is distinguished by cruelty, and for small and sometimes cute details of appearance (for example, freckles), a young man or girl can get the stigma of a "freak" and severe damage to self-esteem for many years.

In addition, the body image in adolescence is additionally attacked by the media, showing long-legged beauties with breasts at least the third size, luscious lips and huge eyes. A rare girl can meet such standards. Not having time to heal the wounds, a young man or girl finds himself in the world of adults, where they are greeted by their clothes and escorted by their clothes (no matter how the opposite is stated in popular wisdom.

Here a new character enters the scene - a dear beloved friend of the heart. He is the one who gives corporeality a chance for revenge, but imagine the huge baggage that the hero of this story has accumulated by this moment! In his personal experience, there was a place for his mother's remarks, and for stinging attacks from classmates, and for Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie as a model for comparison … It will take royal patience to increase the self-esteem of a loved one and help him to love his body.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL

We have described in such detail the horrors of distortions of the bodily "I" in order for you to imagine how dangerous it is not to love your body. While this article is being written, there is a report on TV about a beauty contest among obese women - it seems that this is a real shift in the media's perception of female beauty.

The more women, full of health and beauty, will be on the screens and on the pages of magazines, the fewer young girls will cut their daily diet to a sour green apple, washed down with one percent kefir.

Regardless of its proportions, shape and distribution of bulges, your body is one and only and unique. If you take good care of it, it will give you a proud posture, a healthy glow, shiny hair and a glowing look. It is difficult to call an ugly woman endowed with such wealth.

The bodily "I" is a term that denotes a person's ideas about his body. The body scheme is a person's ideas about how the parts of his body are located in space, about the degrees of freedom of his limbs and the overall dimensions of the body. Additional items can be included in the body image - for example, a racket or stick for athletes or a car for drivers.

EXPERT OPINION

Victoria Panchenko,

psychotherapist

MISS ARTIFICIAL BEAUTY

Even in Soviet times, people tried to look good, looked after themselves and, if possible, performed plastic surgery.

It is banal, but Chekhov also said that everything in a person should be perfect. The problem is that modern life does not allow people to age beautifully and have noble wrinkles that adorn their appearance. Today people carry a colossal clot of negative energy and emotions, which is reflected on their face, unhealthy diet provokes obesity and cellulite, ecology - problem skin, hair and nails. If a person leads a healthy lifestyle and prolongs an active energetic youth with the help of plastic surgeons and cosmetologists, then this rather indicates his harmonious attitude towards himself, loved ones and others.

As a rule, highly spiritual, intelligent, creative people who simply do not need it are opposed to plastic surgery. Secondly, those who do not know anything about the modern achievements of aesthetic medicine deny its necessity, they judge very superficially and usually do not have money for an operation.

A certain percentage of patients with mild dysmorphophobia, of course, after the operation gets rid of their complexes, self-doubt and, therefore, open up new opportunities in themselves. The same patients who want to look younger, after operations see in the morning in the mirror not a gray wrinkled face, but a rejuvenated one, with smooth skin and say to themselves in the morning: "What a beauty I am!" - thereby increasing self-esteem, self-confidence, which means they save themselves from depression.

I am sure that plastic surgery and cosmetology are akin to art, and it’s great that competitions are held between patients and, therefore, between pygmalion surgeons. I would like Russian women who have done plastic surgery not to refuse it until they are hoarse in their voice, but to be proud that they have found the time and opportunity for this.

RARE BODY IMITATION FACTS

1. Girls who imitate their mothers as children are less likely to have a distorted body image than those who did not.

2. The number of men undergoing liposuction has tripled over the past five years.

3. The idea of a woman's attractiveness is connected not with her weight, but with the shape of her body. The more she looks like an hourglass, the more attractive others find her.

4. More than half of women overestimate their body size. When in an experiment, Canadian scientists were asked to determine the width of a box by eye, they gave an answer with a high degree of accuracy. But when women were asked to estimate their body size by eye, they exaggerated their waist circumference by 25% and their hip circumference by 16%.

5. Anorexia ranks first in mortality among mental illnesses.

EXTREME OPTIONS

If distortions of the body image begin to interfere with a person and his environment, experts diagnose a mental disorder called dysmorphophobia. A person's exaggerated attention to any minor defect can negatively affect his social life - work, study, communication. Often, sick people begin to avoid contact with others for fear of being ridiculed. The main symptoms of this disorder are a mirror symptom (compulsive gazing at your reflection in a mirror, an attempt to find an advantageous angle in which the defect is not noticeable), a photography symptom (a categorical refusal to be photographed), attempts to mask your defect, excessive dependence on loved ones and relatives, depressive experiences and suicidal thoughts. The defect that a person complains about may be imaginary, invented,but this disease is characterized by a complete loss of realism in assessing one's body.

This disease, in mild degrees, often occurs in adolescents and normally goes away within a few years. In severe cases, dysmorphophobia not only destroys the social side of a person's life, but in some cases threatens his existence: the sick person may try to get rid of his bodily defect on his own - for example, cut out a birthmark.

In such cases, a qualified plastic surgeon insists on consulting a psychiatrist.

Body image is also grossly disturbed in eating disorder - anorexia. A person seeks to reduce his weight for fear of obesity, while his own body seems overweight to him. Although anorexia was previously considered a predominantly female disease, it is now more and more reported in men.

Three factors influence the onset of the disease: predisposition to the disease, the presence of relatives with a similar eating disorder, psychological (difficult relationships with parents) and social (the desire to meet the expectations of others, imitation of famous people). It is the psychological factor that is the cornerstone in the formation of anorexia. Most often, in adolescents, anorexia is provoked when the child does not receive parental love. A son or daughter who is very dissatisfied with his figure and shows an increased interest in improving the body is in dire need of the support of parents and their unjudged love. “We accept you as you are, you are always good for us” - this is the best prevention of distortions of the body “I” in adolescents that parents can give them.