“What was your mother’s relationship to her body and to food like?”
It’s a question I always ask new clients, especially since 99% of my clients are women and the mother-daughter connection to body image and relationship to food is profoundly strong and heavily correlated. In just that one question, a whole inner world and history unfolds. In that one question lies a tale of body hate, diet culture, and ideas of femininity based in restriction, dampening of desires, and the Big Lie.
What is the Big Lie?
It’s the one that has been sold and told to women and girls from generation to generation.
It’s a mathematical equation of sorts that leads to a lifetime of cutting off parts of ourselves to meet someone else’s criteria of who they think we should be. It’s one that leads to wearing a mask of false satisfaction and joy. It’s an agreement to dampen one’s appetite for just about everything in the hopes of being chosen and kept safe. And it keeps an almost 300 billion dollar industry humming.
It goes something like this:
Pretty + Thin + Youthful = Being Loved, Chosen, and Secure
In other words, if you want a good life (and want to have/keep a partner), you have to follow this formula. (We only have to look at celebrities and models to know that is 100% not true (constant breakups, multiple divorces, and many tragic stories), but we are still sold this…)
Our great grandmothers were taught this equation, who then taught it to our grandmothers, who taught it to our mothers who then taught it to us.
Sometimes explicitly, sometimes covertly.
Sometimes it was taught by them telling us our bodies and our hunger were wrong and needed to be fixed. Other times it was taught by them telling us or showing us through their actions, words, glances (as they passed a mirror or passed another woman on the street), or the various diet books they owned that their own bodies and hunger were wrong and needed to be fixed.
No matter how it was translated, we got the message. Any chance of it leaving our psyche was made impossible by the culture at large that made sure it seeped into our very being, leaving no room for us to escape.
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