Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 14 Why You Hate Photos of Yourself — And How to Finally Feel OK
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: You know those moments when you're taking a family photo, everyone's laughing, you're having fun. You might actually feel pretty good about yourself. And then you see the pictures afterward and all you can think is how you hate how you look. Or maybe you find yourself avoiding being in photos altogether because you simply don't want to deal with the awful self judgment your mind likes to dole out when you see yourself in the photo. Well, in today's episode, we're talking about why photos of yourself can trigger so much shame and self-criticism and how you can start experiencing them in a completely different way. Let's dive in. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right. and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. It's really common for many women to feel okay about themselves when they look in the mirror, but then hate seeing photos of themselves. It's not to say that they always like how they look in the mirror, but maybe you've experienced this. You've been doing some work on accepting your body. You look in a mirror and you're like, okay, I think I look pretty good. And then you see a photo of yourself later and all of a sudden the self-judgements and the criticism come flying through. I often refer to this as the final frontier of body acceptance because it's often the last shift that happens for someone when they've been working on making peace with their body is seeing themselves in photos. That seems to be the last thing that makes a shift for them. And I really think that there's a good reason for that. When you're looking at yourself in a mirror, it's different than seeing yourself in a photo. When you're looking in the mirror, you are still here rooted in your body. Yes, the mirror is a reflection, but it's present moment time. You're having the experience of seeing yourself here and now. You can feel yourself breathing, moving in real time. You're adjusting your clothes or looking at yourself. So there's still this connection to yourself, to you being here. But when you see yourself in a photo, it's static. It's already from the past. So even if you took the photo and then you're looking at it two seconds later, it's now the past. It doesn't exist anymore. It's not real time. So you've kind of lost that connection to you. It's just an image. It's a snapshot. It's kind of devoid of life in that sense because it's not real. It's not you. It's an image of you and you're not connected to it. And that disconnection makes it a lot easier for the mind to start to come in and judge it. I want you to consider that the mind is a judgment machine. It's like this computer in your head. It's not actually you. I know we hear the thoughts in our mind and we think it's ourself, but you're actually separate from your mind because you can hear your thoughts. If you really start to pay attention, you can witness or observe thoughts happening in your mind. Now, sometimes those thoughts will start with I. I look terrible. I look bad. And we start to think, well, that's me saying it. But sometimes those thoughts actually say you. You look terrible. You shouldn't have done that. Well, if they're saying it to you, what's it that's saying it? It's actually separate from us. It's not really who you are. I like to think of the mind as like a computer in a way. It's been imprinted with information from experiences, messages, beliefs, ideas that we've grown up with from our culture and got stored into this database. And then it runs a program. It tells us what's good or bad, what's right or wrong, because the mind is meant to analyze, compare, categorize, judge. It's actually a really useful tool for us to navigate this world, but it's never meant to be in charge of our life. And that's what's happened. We have this computer mind that's running. We think that it's who we are. We see a photo of ourselves and it takes everything that it's learned and thought and believed to be true and now runs its program of comparing, analyzing, judging this photo. based on all of the things that it's learned. So if the mind learned that fat is bad and your mind is looking at this photo and perceiving it as being fat, then it's going to say that it's bad and it's going to make all of these judgments and assumptions about you as a person. It's taking a photo separate from you, analyzing it, judging it based on all of its data from the past, and then making an assessment. And that's what's actually happening. It's this comparison thing that's going on. It's judging, it's analyzing, and then making it mean something about you. But all it is is ideas, assumptions, beliefs that we then decided to buy into. So the mind spits out this program, everything that it's learned, and then we said, yes, mind, you are right. Of course you are. I am terrible, I am ugly, I don't look good enough. Even when we might have proof to the contrary, because I'm sure you've had many circumstances where somebody looked at the same photo as you and said, I think you look great. And you're like, no, no, I don't. Because they're not looking at you through the same mind. They're not looking at you through the same lens. They're not feeling or having a visceral experience of your nervous system getting activated when you're experiencing thoughts like, I'm terrible, I'm not good enough, I'm not valuable. Those are actually the beliefs underneath those surface level judgments like, I'm too fat, I look old, I'm too ugly. Embedded in that is the deeper beliefs of, I'm not good enough, I'm not valuable, I don't belong. That stuff is what's actually running. And so we take it, we internalize it, and we think this is what it means about ourselves, and that's why it feels so awful. But you're not actually seeing yourself in that photo. You're seeing the mind's interpretation of it. And if we really look at a photo, it's actually neutral. It's an image. There isn't really much life. Sure, it represents a moment in time, but We're then remembering that moment in time that existed in the past when we were there and then projecting that onto the photo. Ultimately, what we're seeing is coming from us because a photo can't generate an emotion. We do. So we're looking at it through the lens of our mind, through our own experiences and story. The photo itself has no inherent meaning. accept what we give to it. And again, that's why different people can have different interpretations of the photo. Why somebody else can say, look great and you think I look ugly. Well, if it was really true that you looked not good or terrible, then everybody would agree with that, but they're not. Why? Because they're seeing it through different minds. When you're seeing a photo of yourself, again, you're not connected to it. It's in the past. Your mind has now gone into comparison mode, analyzing, judging something that's not even connected to you anymore. You're just believing it. You're believing the story of the mind because it's been conditioned that way and we've been listening to it over and over again. Even if other people agree, because I'm sure there might be some people who agree and say, yeah, that's not as good as it could have been, still an interpretation. It's still a belief. It's something that we're projecting onto the photo. What you're actually reacting to in the photo is not how you look. You're experiencing your judgments. You're experiencing your conditioning. You're experiencing your beliefs about what you think the image means about yourself. So in that sense, seeing yourself in a photo, if used appropriately, can actually be a really useful tool. because what it does is it's going to reveal to yourself what is in your mind. It's going to reveal the programming of your mind. And if you don't like the programming, if what it's saying about yourself doesn't feel good, well, it's not you, it's a program. So you have the ability and you have the choice to see it differently. Some people may say, go ahead and change the programming. positive thoughts in there. Make whatever you're seeing mean something positive about you. And you can do that. And that's totally fine. I like to take a slightly different approach. I like to look at and say that the programming, you don't need to try and change it. You need to be able to see that the programming exists outside of you, that it's not you, that you are here observing or witnessing or becoming aware. of the programming. And that's really important because I think that's where you get your power back. Now, I'm going to use a little example here that is going to be easier for people who are watching this on YouTube to see than people who are listening to it on audio. But I'm going to do my best to explain it to you so that you don't have to see the visual. Although you could go and watch this on YouTube to see the visual I'm going to use because I'm using my hands here. If you can take one of your hands, say your left hand, and make a little fist with it and hold it upright. and imagine that you as a person. And then you take your right hand and the fingers are spread out wide and start wiggling your fingers around. And if you can imagine that these wiggling fingers are like the thoughts in your mind, they're your computer program. And now these wiggling fingers, they go ahead and they clasp on over top. They grip that fist on your left hand. And then all of a sudden when those wiggling fingers are gripped against your hand, your hand starts moving around with it and it gets whipped around. So when you have thoughts like, I'm not good enough, I look terrible, you're whipped around by these thoughts and it feels kind of out of control and you feel bad like you're in this storm. But when you can see that your thoughts are not you, that it's a programming, it's like all of a sudden the wiggling fingers have released from your fist and now they're just wiggling on top. So you can see thoughts like, I'm not good enough, I look terrible, I look ugly, but you are grounded in that fist. You are grounded in that hand watching it. And when you can create space, you can have some awareness that the thoughts are going on in your mind, like a program in a computer, conditioned with the culture and your experiences of the past, but it's not you, you can start to remain centered in yourself. and the thoughts don't bother you as much. And that is actually at the core of what I help my clients do when we work together in our co-chain. We don't try to change the thinking. We try to see that the thinking is not you and get connected back to who you really are. That's where your power lies. That's actually the truth and the essence of you. Before all of these thoughts and these conditionings lock. onto you. So that's the approach that I take and what I'm aiming here for you to see is that all of those thoughts that come up when you see a photo, that's how a photo can be so useful. It's going to show you, hey, this is your programming. These are the thoughts that are going on in your mind right now. I want you to be able to see them. You don't have to get so sucked into them and listen to them. You can actually see that that's your programming. So when you can identify that thinking, and I would even encourage you to write it down, what are all the judgments that you have about yourself? What do you think it means? You're be able to start to separate yourself from that. Because the truth is, is that the only way that those thoughts, those wiggling thoughts have any power over you is when you have no awareness that they exist. And you end up essentially feeding them, giving them energy by believing them. So you gotta take your power back from those thoughts and you gotta be able to be grounded back into the root of you. That's actually what meditation is all for. Meditation isn't just a nice way to calm yourself. The reason why meditation calms you is because you start to get rooted back into the essential nature of yourself, which actually is calm and peaceful. The flurry of thoughts in this hand, the right hand that's wiggling over here is what causes all of the stress and the chaos and the disruption. Meditation helps you to see your thinking and ground back into the core of yourself. So if you don't meditate, and I know a lot of people are hesitant to do it because the active mind will always tell you, you don't have time to do it, or it's not worth your time. I have a few. guided meditations on my YouTube channel, I recommend that you go to my YouTube channel and check them out. I've got four up there right now and I'll add more in the future as I record them to help you experience that, to start to separate yourself from the judgmental thoughts that are coming up around these photos because it's not true. It's just a flurry of habitual conditioned thinking that makes you feel like crap. Now there's another aspect to seeing yourself in photos. why they feel so bad. It's that, well, photos can be seen publicly. Photos can be seen by other people. If you took a photo of yourself and you knew that nobody else ever would see it, how much would you care? Now, you might say, I'll still care. I'll still think I look terrible. Okay, fine. Well, those beliefs are present, but I'm going to guess it might not feel as bad is if you knew that other people were going to see it. Because that's why you don't post the photo, right, online, is because you're like, ⁓ my God, what are people going to think about me? It's all about perception. Will they think I look bad? Are they going to judge me? Well, the truth is that most people aren't going to judge you like you're judging yourself. It's funny, when I've worked with clients, most often than not, they'll be really concerned about people judging them, except They have no proof that anybody's ever judged them. It's just, I'm afraid they're going to judge me because, well, they're already judging themselves. And we're all doing this. When those judgemental thoughts are present, we then think everybody else must have them too. And they don't, not necessarily. Now, will some people have them? Yes, they will. You're like, well, my mother said something, or I know for a fact my uncle said something. Okay, so they judge you. Then what? What's so terrible about that? Why do we need to protect ourselves so much from the judgment of other people? Because guess what? People are judging people all the time. You're judging people all the time. I'm judging people all the time. In fact, we're not really doing it, but our mind is. Because our mind is a judgmental machine. That's actually what it's designed for. Our minds are designed to help us navigate this world so that we can see things as separate, so we can compare, so we can navigate living here on Earth. That's a function and mechanism of the mind. But we've taken an on to believe that the mind is us. It's a tool that is actually taken over our lives. So we're not really judging. We have judgmental thoughts. And we all do, because the mind is designed to judge. People are judging. Minds are judging all the time. If you know that and also know then it's not personal to you. And that one can feel really hard to understand because it's like, well, somebody said directly to me that I look terrible. Okay, well, they said a judgment to you, but guaranteed they would say that judgment to somebody else who also looked similar to you. So is it really you or is it that they're judging an idea that they have in their mind that says you shouldn't? be over this certain size or looking this way looks bad. It's an idea that is being projected onto you or onto somebody else, but it's not actually personal to you. The only way it becomes personal is when we take it on. It's when we say, ⁓ this is personal to me. It's not. It's like imagine somebody's just spraying a fire hose and the water's just spraying anybody who's wearing blue. They just spray it on everybody who's wearing blue and you happen to be wearing blue that day. That's what it's like. It's because the mind has a judgment and then it compares and looks for anybody who might be displaying and matching that judgment and then it judges. So it's not really personal to you. It's actually just showing whatever's in the mind of the person. It's just that our survival system gets activated in those moments and so we feel afraid. We think I'm not gonna belong. I'm gonna be ostracized. I'm risking death if I don't fit in. That's actually what's being activated and why we don't like it so much. It's also that we're trying to protect this sense of self that we have. If we need to always be looking good to somebody, to be perfect, to be put together in a certain way, if we have a judgment ourselves that says it can't be perceived in this way because that feels bad or dangerous, well then that's what's getting activated. Maybe you learned when you were young, you always have to be this certain way and if you're not, you're bad or you're wrong. Well, then you're never going to want to appear that way to other people because it feels like you're going to be cut off from love or approval. That's what's going on. But what ends up happening is, is if we need to meet the opinions in order to receive approval from other people, we're always trapped by that. And while there's 8 billion people in this world, there's a really good chance that we're going to run into somebody who doesn't agree with us or thinks we're bad or wrong. You might be listening to this and not agreeing with what I'm saying right now, but it's going to resonate with somebody. So. We're also not meant to be for everybody. We don't need to please everybody. We don't need to meet the approval or standards of other people. If we feel like we can't be seen negatively in the eyes of somebody else, that's a prison that we have innocently put ourselves into by believing that about ourselves. You can't just be yourself. You can be perceived as ugly. You can be perceived as fat. It's fine. It's not going to hurt you. Accept what you've come to believe it mean about yourself. And that's another reason why we don't like photos is because we're trying to protect an image. We're trying to protect an identity. And we're really feeling afraid when that nervous system gets activated. So it's a fear of rejection. It's a fear of not being accepted. But if somebody rejects you, well, that actually still doesn't mean anything about you. But we take it on personally to mean something about ourselves. But it doesn't. And that's where the deeper work to find out, well, what's that belief that we have? What's really going on underneath the surface and freeing yourself from that? That's the deeper work. That's the work that I do with my clients because that's where the freedom is. As we gotta find that, we gotta dig that out so that you don't have to be worrying about how other people are perceiving you. So you can just live your life as yourself free. And so photos are a really good way of being able to bring all of that stuff up to the surface. Because the truth is that somebody else's opinion of you does not determine your worth. And in fact, even your mind's own judgments of yourself doesn't determine your worth either. Those are just thoughts. You are already worthy. You can't not be worthy. You can pretend you're not worthy. You can hear a thought that says you're not worthy, but that's actually not the truth. By virtue of you being born here on this earth, congratulations, you are worthy. You are valuable. You can't escape that. Another reason that photos can feel so tough, particularly for women, is that we have been conditioned to value ourselves for our appearance. I mean, that's actually... One of the whole reasons of this podcast starting is that women in particular have been heavily conditioned to believe that our worth and our value is in how we look. And so this is gonna show up a lot for photos because it's all about an image. It's all about an appearance. In a photo, we don't get to see the depth of the person. We are literally viewing them based on an image. And when we give that image value or worth, then all of a sudden the stakes are gonna be raised for ourselves and we're gonna feel, ⁓ my gosh, my value and worth that's in the reflection of this photo is what's being judged. Well, it's not, it's judgments based on appearance, but it's that connection that we have made of my image and who I am that feels like it can be under attack. If somebody doesn't like a photo or it's deemed as unattractive, it's. what we've made other people's opinions mean about ourselves. So there's this cultural pressure to constantly maintain attractiveness, particularly for women. And the only way that that really matters for ourselves is if we've tied our sense of value and worth to our appearance. There's also the fear of somebody thinking you've let yourself go. Well, again, that's this feeling of needing to maintain a certain identity. I can't be seen as letting myself go. Well, why? Why not? What happens if somebody thinks that about you? What are all the terrible things that are gonna come up? Well, nothing really, except somebody just has a judgment or what we've made it mean. When we think that our value depends on how I look to other people, then it's going to feel threatening and we're gonna feel the pressure to keep it up. But your appearance does not create love. It does not create belonging and it certainly does not create meaningful relationships. know, people are not in love with or friends with a photo. They are in love with or friends with or in relationship with the human. And so we need to be able to start to extract the meaning that we've put on it because it's not you, that's not the human, it's an image that the mind has decided to judge based on its beliefs and conditioning from the culture. And just because the culture thinks a certain way, does not mean that it's true because ideas about beauty and acceptance and appearance have changed over time and cross-culturally. So none of it is a fact. And the photos that you're looking at, you can't even really know that what your mind is saying about it is the truth because how many times have you looked back on an old photo of yourself that at the time that you took it, you thought I look terrible. And then you look at it five years later and you're thinking, What was I thinking at that time? I look great. I certainly had that experience. When I gained weight after I stopped dieting, I looked back at photos of myself when I was actively suppressing my weight. I never thought I looked that way. I always thought I looked bigger than I was and that I didn't look good. And I look back and I'm like, whoa, my gosh, like it was shocking to me. All you're seeing when you're looking at a photo is the thinking that's going on in your mind. It's like a lens that you're looking through that's coloring. the photo. We aren't actually really seeing ourselves in the photo. We're seeing the story that our mind is telling about ourselves when we're looking at the photo. And your nervous system that's getting activated is making you feel like it's real. Look at this feelings that I have. Yeah, I really am terrible. Look at how terrible I feel. No, you're just feeling the result of the thinking. We're always feeling the result of whatever thinking we have. And so when we realize that it's thinking, we can start to choose not to engage with it, not to attach with it. Or again, if you want to change the thinking, think a thought that makes you feel better. Because it really is that difference. It's a thought. You can think a positive one or you can think a negative one about it. And we're not actually in control of what thoughts pop up into our mind, but as soon as you have the awareness, if you notice a terrible thought coming up in your head about seeing a photo, you can actively say, huh, I don't really like how I feel when I think that. What's a different one that I can think? What's a more positive one that I can think? Try that on. It really is that simple. It's a thought, it's not real, it's just coming into your mind. Well, if that one doesn't feel good, choose a different one. You have that power to do that. And if it really feels like a thought is true, then I invite you to question it if it feels bad. And I know in episode 10, I walked you through a really powerful process called the work that you can. take these thoughts that come up when you look at a photo, the ones that make you feel bad, and question them. I mean, this is for your peace. Those thoughts that hurt are not actually true. That is a mantra that I will hold until the day that I die because I've yet to find that statement to not be true. Every time I question a thought that hurts, I find out that that thought has some misunderstanding or untruth in it. So, Take those thoughts to work. You want my help to do it? Book a session with me. We'll go through it together. But this is for your own peace. Free yourself from this. You can free yourself from this thinking. The thinking is not you. When you are judging yourself in a photo, it's not you. Those are thoughts. They're conditionings. They're habits. So another way that you can start to look at these photos when they come up is see a photo of yourself. Try some of these thought experiments. Look at the photo and then ask yourself, What would I see if I had no negative belief about this photo? If no negative thought about this photo was present, what would I see? And contemplate that. Another question you can ask yourself, how would someone who loves me deeply see this photo? What would they see? And try that on. And then another question you can ask yourself, if I saw myself through the eyes of love, what would I see? What would love see? So those are three powerful contemplations that I... invite you to try and see what you experience. In fact, let me know. me an email or DM me on Instagram and tell me what happened with that. So to wrap this all up, I want you to remember that a photo is not you. It's an image. You are the one with the life looking at an image. Whatever you're thinking about it is whatever your mind is thinking about it. The mind is not you. It's just revealing the thoughts that you have in your mind and those thoughts can be questioned. And when you start to see that they're thoughts and not the truth, you start to experience some freedom from that. And that is the deeper work that I do with clients in my one-to-one body piece coaching. If you want to be able to start to really make a shift and free yourself from this, there is a link in the description below. Book a free clarity call and we can talk about working together so that you can start to feel so much better about yourself. when you're looking at photos. Work often needs to be done to really get to that place. And I want to say that the goal isn't here to force yourself to like yourself in photos. You don't need to do that. We just need to see that the thoughts that are going on in your mind are not the truth and slowly be able to question that. When you do that over time, you're going to naturally start to see photos of yourself in a different way. It's going to be less harsh and it's going to be less of a negative impact. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I hope that there was something in here for you that made a little shift and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help the show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember. You're already everything you've been trying to become. Enough worthy and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.