Have you ever criticised your own appearance only to be disagreed with again and again? Have you ever been accused of being addicted to plastic surgery? If you’ve ever experienced a difference between your “actual self” and your “perceived self”, you may have suffered from body dysmorphic disorder.
I kind of think I have the opposite disorder. I always think I’m skinnier and taller than I am, until the photos get developed and I’m faced with the real truth. I probably could use a little BDD.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder is such an important issue because the way we perceive ourselves affects how we treat others and interact with the world, and will therefore have a significant impact on the future of our careers and relationships.
Fortunately, there are several solutions to recovering from this disorder. When the focus is on developing your spiritual life, you start to consider your self-worth to be consistently inherent rather than sporadically earned. In traditional Western society, the value of a person is sometimes calculated on the basis of monetary and physical measurements. From the mathematicians of ancient Greece through the Copernican Revolution and into the discoveries of the Enlightenment, our culture has sought ways to define, classify and comprehend the external world through logic. However, the worthiness of an individual is subjective and therefore not intellectually definable. As a result, any attempt to compare people to one another will never allow us to arrive at the ultimate truth. We can deceive ourselves into believing that scientific units such as measurements can provide us with a superior understanding of what is and isn’t important, beautiful or meaningful, but that observation is a fallacy and therefore ultimately an illusion.
The first solution to the BDD dilemma is to change your thinking and actions with some Neuro-linguistic programming. Try incorporating one or all of the following three tasks into your thinking and behaviour in order to increase your self-esteem and therefore improve your love life: appreciation, accountability, and/or responsibility.
1) How to appreciate yourself more:
-Know that we already have all the resources we need within ourselves.
-Remind yourself that there is no failure; failure is subjective and, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. Regularly replace the word failure with a term such as “information”.
-Recognise success when you feel good about something. Redefine and expand the definition of what the word “success” means to you. Maybe something you can control such as smiling, having loving intentions, or being gentle with yourself are new ways for you to feel successful as a person.
2) How to be accountable for your actions:
-Let go of perceiving yourself as a victim of circumstances. Take responsibility for your contribution to the relationships in your life.
3) How to act responsibly toward others:
-Take the focus off of yourself. Reach out and be of service to others. Let your actions build your sense of self-regard, not your evaluation of the changeable, unreliable, unstable external state of being which is your body and face.
-Esteemable acts create true self-esteem. Try reading Esteemable Acts: 10 Actions for Building Self-Esteem by Francine Ward for more specific ideas on how to integrate esteemable actions into your daily or weekly routine.
Luckily, if you are not getting all the results you want from the above NLP techniques, there even more are spiritual solutions to this mental and physical dilemma. Hypnosis can help!
Try the following self-esteem self-hypnosis exercises:
1) Think of someone whose confidence and charisma you wish to emulate. Enter their body and live a day of their lives in your imagination.
2) Imagine you are about to go to a meeting or any upcoming event where you want to feel confident. Picture a circle on the floor of any colour. Fill the circle with the feeling you want to increase in your life (confidence, success, etc.) Step into the circle in your imagination and let your body be filled with the sensations of confidence. Imagine your body filling up with that colour from your feet up to your head.
3) Imagine photos of moments when people made you feel less confident. Picture them as black and white, then transparent, then floating off into the universe until they become a tiny dot and then disappear. Replace those with photos of moments when you felt successful in your life.
4) Create a Confidence Anchor. Press the middle finger and thumb of your left hand together and recall a memory of when you felt completely confident, seeing the images more brightly and clearly, hearing the sounds more loudly, and feeling the feelings with greater intensity. Use this exercise whenever you feel a decrease in confidence, are having a hard time making decisions due to trusting yourself less, or anytime you need a boost of confidence in order to feel well.
5) If a memory of the voice of someone criticising or belittling you is playing in your head (or even if you are criticising yourself), hold out your right arm and thumb and imagine that voice moving from your head down into your arm and eventually travelling into your thumb. Hear it now in your thumb, more distant from your head, and in the voice of a cartoon character. It can be a different cartoon character depending on who was saying it, or you can keep it simple and use the same character every time. Then, when the voice gets quieter, imagine the silly voice floating out of your thumb and disappearing into the universe, getting quieter and quieter. Repeat as necessary.
6) Increase self-love by imagining somebody who loves you. See the loving look in their eyes. Imagine them smiling and happy that you are with them. Then pretend your spirit floats up out of your body and into theirs, seeing yourself through their eyes, noticing what they admire about you, and allowing yourself to feel and deeply experience the love they have for you.
7) The mirror technique involves imagining someone is talking into a mirror rather than to you when they are criticising you or speaking to you in a tone that you don’t like.
8) EFT Tapping: Do the tapping on each point on either side of your body (see the diagram below), rotate the eyes 180 degrees clockwise, then counterclockwise, count from 1-5, and hum the first few lines of “Happy Birthday” while imagining someone in front of you who is judging you, mistreating you, or blocking you from feeling confident, whether or not they are still in your life. Check in with yourself at the beginning and end of the exercise: how much does it upset you to pretend this person is in front of you from 1-10, 10 being the most upsetting and 1 or 0 meaning they don’t bother you at all? Keep repeating this exercise until the number is closer to 1 or 0 and you feel a better sense of detachment from the person who has been triggering your internalised uncertainty. Perhaps you will discover the source of your decreased confidence in early childhood, so consider trying this exercise by imagining someone such as a parent, guardian or teacher and see if it becomes more effective once you’ve identified the source of your inner critic.
Hopefully these techniques will give you some of the results you are looking for. The more often you practise them, the more effective they can be.
For more information on this disorder, please visit: http://www.bddcentral.com
Additional Recommended Reading: Finding the Angel Within: Spirituality, Body Image and Self-Worth by Pamela H. Hansen
For more information on booking a personalised hypnotherapy session, please visit https://www.kyraoser.com
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