What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “body positivity?”
For most women I’ve met, body positivity means “love your body” or “feel good about your body.”
I see this as a problem.
While loving your body and feeling good about your body are definitely good ideas, they are not things that can be compelled. You cannot compel yourself to love anything, let alone your body. And you cannot compel your feelings. So – within the context of the Body Positivity and Body Image Movements – a lot of women are left hanging.
One of the Catch 22’s of “Body Positivity” is the fact that most women do not feel good in or about their bodies. And without a process to take someone from a place of body shame and pain to an authentic place of freedom and peace, a movement is simply a lot of hype. Personal transformation is not a sound bite. It is very deep – and it is very personal.
Furthermore, these Body Positivity and Body Image movements have the potential to create even more pain and shame because there is no room within the context of “body positivity” to feel the deeply negative feelings of self and body hatred that need to be felt in order to be transformed. As the old adage goes, “you need to feel it to heal it.”
But perhaps most importantly, the Body Positivity and Body Image movements fall miserably short because they fail to change the premise at the heart of the pain. We live in a culture that suggests that we can – and should – meet some externally imposed physical ideal. We live in a culture that suggests that we can – and should – control our body and our weight. We live in a culture that suggests that we can achieve these goals by controlling what we eat and what we do for exercise.
But the fact that we are responsible for what we eat and responsible for what we do for exercise does not mean that we can therefore control our body and our weight through diet and exercise. That is a fallacy. That is the fallacy upon which the entire diet, fitness and weight loss industries base their business models. That is a fallacy by which the publishing industry sells its women’s magazines. And unfortunately, it is a fallacy that has seeped too deeply into our cultural consciousness, creating a lot of unnecessary pain and shame.
We can heal the body shame and pain by understanding the root fallacy that creates it. We can heal the body shame and pain by gaining a new perspective. We heal can the body shame and pain by changing the underlying model of weight loss and well-being. But since the body positivity and body image movements fail to do this, the fundamental source of the pain is neither revealed nor transformed. And as a consequence, the pain is often exacerbated.
For Body Positivity to be effective, it needs to come from a place of authenticity and congruency within. And this can happen. But without a new framework and set of skills and tools with which to navigate the cultural landscape, Body Positivity can ultimately end up creating the exact opposite of its intention – more Body Negativity.
In my experience, transforming the concept of Body Positivity from the ideas “loving your body” or “feeling good about your body” to a perspective of “respecting your body as your partner in a relationship” can have powerful results. By viewing your body as your partner in a relationship there is something with which to work. You can cultivate a deeply satisfying and beneficial relationship through respect and communication. And within the context of a relationship, there is room to develop feelings that may eventually turn into authentic love and appreciation.