Letting my defences down

This is the third post in a series where I'm sharing my ongoing lessons about body-image and body-acceptance. Part one set the scene. In part two, I shared about how it's helped to become aware that the way I view my body might be distorted and not reflect reality.

Today I want to talk about obsolete defense mechanisms and letting go of them.

Baby elephant image by Manjesh ambore
CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons

Many years ago, I heard a motivational speaker explain that when baby elephants are trained for work in South-East Asia, their handlers restrain them at night with a piece of rope tied around one of the elephant's feet. The other end is tied to a wooden stake hammered into the ground nearby. As the story goes, the baby elephant initially tries to escape by pulling at the rope but soon learns that it isn't strong enough and eventually gives up. Years later, as a fully-grown adult elephant, its handlers still secure the animal at night with a similar piece of rope. The four-tonne animal could easily escape but it doesn't even try because it learned long ago that it wasn't strong enough to do so.

I've tried unsuccessfully to verify this story. For now, let's think of it simply as a fable intended to illustrate a deeper truth: that we all carry with us things that might have been true once upon a time, but reality has moved on while our beliefs about ourselves and about the world have not.

Getting specific

My psychologist has been leading me to become conscious of the specifics of my fears. For example, if I were to go shirtless at a pool or beach, what specifically am I afraid will happen? And why do I expect that?

Before working with her, my fear would have been vague: I'd have said that I'd feel really embarrassed and self-conscious without a shirt. Now, the challenge was to notice and become aware of what was really behind that fear. 

This particular example was an easy one for me to analyse: up until very very recently, my experience of being shirtless at a pool was that of the fat kid at swimming lessons at school being taunted and jeered at by other school kids. This was a horrible experience and I quickly created behaviours to avoid it. Primarily, I avoided swimming lessons. I would feign illness on swimming day so I wouldn't even have to be at school, or I would claim I'd forgotten my swimming gear (whether I actually had it with me or not) and have to sit out while everyone else swam. One direct consequence is that I never learned to swim; to this day, I still haven't learned yet. People who learn this about me often ask incredulously how it's possible to grow up in Queensland and not have learned how to swim. This is how.

As I touched on in the introduction to this series, another consequence is that I've spent decades avoiding any situation where my bare torso might be visible to other people, even by accident. To recap, these don't just include swimming pools and beaches, but trying on clothes in stores, having medical examinations, and passing through security checkpoints like at airports (which have equipment to see through clothes and people who might pat me down).

As a strategy to avoid repeating that childhood experience of being taunted, this behaviour has been 100% effective. I never again had that experience. The defence mechanism is tried and true.

The problem is, it's based on experiences that are very old and relevant only to a specific context.

Getting specific about what I was afraid would happen if people could see me without a shirt allowed me to question whether the risk of being taunted and jeered at was still a credible threat.

Rationally, I can predict that if I were to take off my shirt at a pool or beach today, the most likely outcome is that nobody would notice or care, and that even if somebody did have a negative perception or opinion of my body, it's very unlikely that they would come up and share it with me. The risk is not zero, but it's incredibly low, in line with other low-probability risks that we're all exposed to every single day and have no control over.

Therefore, I can understand my behaviour (always cover my torso) as a safeguard I developed to protect my feelings against something that, while once undeniably real, is not a valid current concern.

My life-coach describes these obsolete beliefs that cruft up our lives as "hyper-stabilised beliefs" that become self-fulfilling because we have an innate need to be right about the world. We therefore avoid challenging these beliefs (so we remain right) while at the same time remaining hyper-sensitive to anything that reinforces the belief (see also confirmation bias and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon). Nothing catches my eye faster than a news story about air travellers invasively searched by overly zealous airport security agents.

This is the mechanism, she says, by which the belief gets reinforced further and further and further.

My own experience tells me this is true: if anything, my fears, left unchallenged, have indeed grown more intense over time. About eight years ago, the prospect of passing through an airport security checkpoint intensified from uncomfortable and unpleasant through to intolerably terrifying.

At least at the pool I can always wear a rashie...

Letting my defences down

As the quote beloved by motivational speakers and writers goes, there's one way to challenge these beliefs:

"You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it."

— Aline Brosh McKenna and Cameron Crowe, We Bought a Zoo

Putting this principle into action and slowly chipping away at my fears has been having results.

A few weeks ago, I attended an aqua-fitness event, and as I was putting on my rashie, I stopped and chose to notice my feelings. The organiser of the event is someone I trust utterly and completely; and the energy that suffuses her events is incredibly positive and supportive. In turn, this energy attracts positive and lovely people. I asked myself if I was afraid of anyone at the event, and when I affirmed for myself that I was not, I took the rashie back off and replaced it in my bag.

I still felt very queasy stepping out of the change room. And while it took a little more than a literal twenty seconds for that sick feeling to evaporate, it wasn't more than a couple of minutes. And... hypothesis proven: there was no taunting or jeering. I don't think I ever completely lost consciousness of being shirtless, but the sense of alarm definitely dissipated.

This fear isn't completely dealt with yet; but for me, this was a huge step forward. Someday there will be another opportunity for another twenty seconds of insane courage, and I'll see if I can push the boundary a bit further.

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Next post: Being grateful for what my body can do

Questioning my body image

This is the second post in a series where I'm sharing my ongoing lessons about body-image and body-acceptance. Part one set the scene.

The immediate need that took me to seeing a psychologist was that by late 2015 my eating had become very disordered. For a large part of the year I was living on only a few hundred calories per day. I was frightened of food and frightened of regaining the weight I had lost up to that point.

Articles like Gina Kolata's "After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight" in the New York Times are not reassuring: six years after their participation on the show, thirteen out of fourteen contestants regained weight, and four were now heavier than before the competition. Kolata presents some of the research describing the metabolic changes that drive that outcome, which makes it sound even more inevitable.

Regaining significant weight is still something that worries me to some degree today, but in late 2015 and early 2016, it was seriously interfering with my eating.

And, as I shared last time, I still wasn't happy with my body anyway. I wanted to be still thinner.

My psychologist took a functional approach to this concern, asking me what I would be able to do if I were thinner that I couldn't or wouldn't do at my current body shape. I talked about the situations I described in my previous post: about my terror of being teased or ridiculed about my body if anybody could see or feel it.

This led to a very interesting exercise, where she presented me with a series of silhouettes and asked me to identify my body shape among them. (The "BMI-based Silhouette Matching Test (BMI-SMT)" is a similar instrument to the one my psychologist used, if you want to investigate further.)

Recognising distortions of perception: in myself...

This isn't exactly the test my psychologist used,
but it's similar. Figure from Abbas et al (2010)
"Pictogram use was validated for estimating
individual’s body mass index", Journal of
Clinical Epidemiology 63: 655–59

I selected the silhouette that I thought was my body shape, and was very surprised when the psychologist revealed the proportions that corresponded to it. The silhouette was of a far squatter body shape than I knew mine to be by the numbers.

This made sense to me because of another phenomenon I was experiencing at the time: my body fitting through spaces that I didn't think it could. For example, when I couldn't open a car door fully because of other cars parked close by, I would be expecting a difficult squeeze to get through the partial opening but instead would step through easily. Or I would often pause at a doorway to let someone else step through it from the other direction because I "knew" we wouldn't both fit through at the same time — I got a few puzzled looks from that at work! It took maybe 18 months for this effect to subside: for my brain to re-align to how much space I was actually taking up in the world. (And even today, it still very occasionally crops up!)

Reality is on the left. I
sometimes see what's on the
right

Finally, my logical brain accepts that the huge variation in how I react to my body in photos and mirrors means that my perceptions are suspect. If I perceive exactly the same body as upsettingly, distressingly "too fat" in some photos and reflections, but not in others, then my perception has to be unreliable.

...and in others

Another thing that has helped me realise the unreality of my perceptions of my body has been the sad experience of listening to and reading other people's negative assessment of their bodies.

Taryn Brumfitt's amazing documentary Embrace (Watch it if you haven't seen it — I promise it's worth it. Here's the trailer) at one point presents people describing their normal, healthy-looking bodies as "disgusting"; it's a shocking and very sad juxtaposition.

Since becoming involved in fitness, I've had the unfortunate opportunity to hear similar things first-hand myself. Two such conversations have stuck with me because of the physiques of the people who held these opinions were physiques that I think most other people (including me) would be envious of: one like a fashion model and one like a lean endurance athlete.

I find it easy to recognise these distortions in other people's assessments of their bodies, which helps me remember that my image of my own is suspect.

What I do now

Reflexive, negative assessments of my own body still sometimes catch me by surprise. When they do, I consciously remind myself of the things I've shared in this article: remembering photos in which I don't think I look fat, or mentally replaying conversations that reveal others' distorted body images.

This doesn't always work for me, and certainly not immediately, but as one layer of defence, it helps.

If you're unhappy with your body shape, I suggest questioning your own assessment: how realistic is the image in your head?

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Next post: Letting my defences down

Losing weight didn't make me love my body

This post is a little bit different for me because I don't have the answers to this stuff yet — I'm sharing it as a work in progress, a snapshot of where my thoughts and feelings are right now.

I've already written about how I developed a sense of shame about my body and ended up hating my body. And specifically, what I felt ashamed of and what I hated was being fat. So, a little over three years ago now, I resolved to change that; and succeeded. I lost 63kg (139lb) and ended up with a body that sits neatly in the "normal" band on height-weight charts and fits into clothes sized "Small" or "Medium" in most labels. I got exactly what I set out for.

The outcome I wasn't prepared for is that... I still hate my body.

The conventional narrative told in thousands of before-and-after photos is that "I was fat and unhappy, now I'm thin and happy". That's how it's supposed to work, right? And it's unconsciously what I expected to happen.

But it turns out that body-hate, as a learned pattern, has a life of its own that's completely separate from reality. So when I removed the original focus of that hate, my mind just settled on new focuses.

This hate has some very real repercussions on my life, some obviously connected to body image, others not-so-obviously. Some are minor annoyances, some have bigger impacts.

Photos and mirrors
For example, I'm sometimes, unpredictably, upset by what I see of myself in photos or in a mirror. This issue is unsolved and still sometimes hits me when I least expect it. A glimpse of myself in the mirror at ballet a couple of months ago left me feeling down for days, even though I use these mirrors constantly in ballet and barre classes. But just this one time got me and I don't know why.

Swimming
I'm also still not OK with baring my torso in public; so this means always wearing a rashie at the pool or beach. I've made very slight progress here: I actually went shirtless to an aqua-fitness event a few weeks ago because the environment felt safe and supportive enough.

Trying on clothes
A similar one that I've recently overcome is that for years, I would not change clothes or shower anywhere that didn't have floor-to-ceiling walls and doors, and a sturdy lock. Trying on clothes typically meant buying them, taking them home to try on, then bringing them back to the store if they weren't right. I'm OK with typical change rooms now, but it was a major inconvenience for a long time.

Medical exams
Some effects are more than mere annoyances, like avoiding any medical examination that requires removing clothing; although I did get as far as taking off my shirt in this context recently, so that's progress.

Air travel... what?
And some effects are much less obvious: one of the biggest is that it makes me incredibly anxious about air travel, to the point where I just don't do it. I haven't flown domestically for eight years now, and internationally for fourteen years. As a lover of history, art, language, culture, and technology, I'm painfully aware of how much of the world I have never seen for myself and remains inaccessible to me. Work-wise, I seem to avoid around one opportunity for overseas travel per year. And more recently, my family is going on holidays, having adventures, and building memories that I'm unable to share in. But how is air travel connected to body image?

When I tell people I don't travel by air, they assume that I'm frightened of flying; but the reality is, I'm frightened of airport security. I'm frightened of machines that can show people my body through my clothes (backscatter X-ray or millimetre-wave scanners), and of people who might feel my body through my clothes by patting it down. My greatest air-travel fear of all is that some over-zealous security agent might decide that I'm acting suspiciously (maybe because I'm so freaked out and scared) and exercise their right to strip-search me in some horrifying self-fulfilling prophecy. These fears are enough to keep me confined to south-east Queensland.

What has helped?

Not all of these affect me as much as they once did. The most fundamental piece of advice I can give anyone dealing with issues like this is to get help. I am being supported by a wonderful psychologist and I've also had some sessions with a life coach who has given me some valuable practical exercises and some "tough love".

Over the next few weeks, I want to write about the approaches and techniques that have helped so far:

• Recognising distortions of perception: in myself and in others: Questioning my body image
• Re-examining old data and challenging "hyper-stabilised beliefs": Letting my defences down
• Gratitude for my body and what it can do
• Breaking it down: learning to like parts of my body

On the value of small kindnesses

Sunday 11 February should have finished well for me. That afternoon, I'd been to an awesome and fun fitness event; one full of movement that made my body feel good, and attended by an upbeat crowd of friendly, positive people. And even better, as it ended, the skies over Brisbane opened up with a summer thunderstorm, which always makes me feel invigorated and refreshed.

But that evening, some other pressures and tensions in my life came to a head, and left me feeling really low. For the purposes of this post, it really doesn't matter what they were; only that the effect was by the end of the night, I felt completely worthless. It had been many, many years since I'd experienced anything like this, certainly with this level of intensity. I wanted to withdraw from everyone around me because it seemed that their lives would be better without me in them.

The next day was my birthday, and I awoke feeling like that was nothing to celebrate; I wasn't even grateful to be alive that morning. My morning ballet class helped a bit. Even though I felt on the verge of tears throughout a lot of it (especially in the slow movements), the mental focus of dance demanded attention on something other than my feelings.

A few things really helped me over the next 24 hours; most particularly the love of my incredible wife and family.

But while that's an uncontroversial observation, the purpose of this post is to acknowledge the way that social media helped as well. It's fashionable with some commentators to take a really cynical view of this part of our modern lives. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter "likes" come cheap, we're told. What happens on social media isn't "real" they tell us.

Cynics be damned: that day, when I was feeling at my lowest ebb, the sixty-something people who left me a birthday message, even if it was often only three words, helped to turn things around for me with their small kindnesses:

And then came an Instagram post from a friend that spoke to me exactly what I needed to hear that morning:

The picture of a caterpillar dangling from a stem was captioned "Hang on" and continued:

"Sometimes it’s all we can do - and we need to know what a huge and brave thing it is. Just showing up in the most difficult of times allows our inward transformation to keep ripening. We can describe this ‘hanging on’ as ‘holding the tension’ without collapsing things into right or wrong, success or failure, black or white. The truth is that we have no idea who we are about to become because it’s beyond our mind’s capacity to understand something truly new. Indeed our minds would even rather decide that “all is lost” - because of the mind’s difficulty with uncertainty. If we can be kindly courageous with ourselves and allow the unknown, healing is always possible."

On a morning when I did indeed feel like "all is lost", these words gave me the courage to show up despite my hurt and shame and to receive love and healing. 

So, thank you Emma, for your wise post that morning. And to everyone who wished me happy birthday on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere: it was a little gesture on your part, but you made a huge difference in my day, and I'm very lucky to have you in my life.

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Emma's Instagram image and post reproduced with her kind permission.