Yet More Thoughts About Body Image: Getting Lost in the Mirror

When we first produced PURE Reflections, I had learned about a site called The Belly Project, which seeks to create some perspective about that most preoccupying body part -- the belly.

"Our bellies," the site creators, Karen Rayne and Midwife Christy Tashjian, observe in the blog's "About" blurb, "are intimately related our sexuality and to our reproductive lives. ... So, with that in mind, this blog is a place to come and put our bellies in perspective and to share them anonymously with the great wide Internetz."

I contacted Dr. Rayne and told her about PURE Reflections, and she very kindly posted an article, Dancing Through Body Image, on her personal blog.

In it, she quotes Dr. Rita Freedman, whose book Bodylove had provided a cornerstone for the show's development: "A mirror can be a friend or a foe, a source of bodylove or shame, depending on how you view your image."

A few days later, a comment appeared: "Thinking about that quote... Maybe we’d be a little healthier if we didn’t pay so much attention to ourselves, negative or positive?"

This got me thinking about our culture of self-help, self-image and self-obsession. Is the "mirror" more harm than good? And does it serve us to resist it's pull on our consiciousness?

Many months later, I posted the following response:

Alice, your comment reminds me of the old joke about the guy who tells his doctor, "It hurts when I raise my arm." And the doctor says, "Then don't raise your arm."

Ideally, it would be great if we (meaning young women, in particular) were not so preoccupied with body-image. But the fact is that we are -- because our development of a healthy self-image is severely impaired in adolescence.

During the very time of life when our sense of identity should be most flexible, most adventurous, we are bombarded by over-sexualized, unrealistic and rigid images of what a female body should look like in order to be valued and loved.

While some of us are lucky enough to have friends and/or family to sufficiently "mirror" our essential selves as our personalities boil, seethe and ultimately solidify into an internally-based, healthy sense of identity, many of us do not.

Without an authentic, internal self-image, many of us are left forever searching the world around us to tell us who we are and what we should be, and forever condemning ourselves for not living up to impossible images.

This is the psychological equivalent of missing huge chunks of skin or musculature which, on the physical level, provides our viscera containment and definition; it is organ through which to relate to the world.

Without a sense of identity, we are helpless and in pain.

And denial of pain -- as you suggest -- does not heal the injury; it merely covers the wound to leave it fester.