Modern world appears to be obsessed with physical appearance and the cult of beauty. Our society places particular value on certain physical characteristics and distorts the true image of the human body into an ideal hard to attain, if not impossible. The blossoming beauty industry moulds the consumers’ needs and desires, taking an advantage of their ingrained and long lasting dissatisfaction with their body image and deep hidden insecurities.
An increasing number of men and women under an enormous amount of pressure to look perfect decide to go ahead with more or less invasive aesthetics treatments to rejuvenate and enhance their looks or drop weight. So, what is the main driver behind this vanity fair? Is this yet another fad? And why people don’t like themselves and don’t feel good in their own skin? Why they don’t accept and embrace their imperfections and their individuality which in fact makes them special and different from everybody else?
Every person may have their own reasons to strive to look good, perform well and be socially accepted. However, if we zoom into this issue, we can clearly see that what’s hidden behind the facade of artificial beauty and a thirst for acceptance is lack of self love and a cry for self acceptance. Anodea Judith in her bestseller Eastern Body Western Mind points out quite rightly that “there is nothing more devastating than lack of love. Love is the primal glue of the universe”, the universal healer and unifier. Love has the power to reconnect us with our most vulnerable, hurt and often rejected parts of ourselves to explore their meaning and heal them so we can become whole again.
Getting to know various aspects of yourself at the deepest level as well as exploring your desires, fears, hopes and boundaries helps to discover a sense of self, honour it and hopefully love it. Without accepting and loving yourself you cannot offer love and acceptance to another person. You cannot offer another human being something that you lack of yourself. You cannot respect your partner if you have no respect for yourself and treat yourself abusively. Self love and self acceptance are key in the self healing process which opens an opportunity for you to start offering yourself to other people in a relationship.
Lack of self love is very often a result of childhood conditioning and comes from the context of family relationships. As young children we carefully observe our environments and absorb patterns and beliefs from our parents and caretakers. Bruce Lipton stresses that between birth and six years of age the child’s brain operates at the lowest EEG frequency, initially delta and then theta waves which puts him in an extremely suggestible and programmable state. Children at that age are quite literally like sponges absorbing a massive amount of information into their subconscious mind to help them adapt to their environments as best as possible. This is how from very young age children get programmed by their parents’ wisdom, their belief system as well as their fears and limitations.
This intense downloading and recording system similar to a computer has one major downside- it lacks a critical analysis element which would help the child to make a distinction between what is true and what is not. Thoughtful and loving parents or caretakers support not only the child’s physical development but also nurture positive behaviour patterns in their child.
However, if the parents are uncaring and feed the child with sentences like ‘you’re stupid’, ‘you always fail’, ‘you don’t deserve that toy’, it will impinge on the child’s development, shape their behaviour and affect future potentials. The child takes his parents “words of wisdom” as absolute truth as they have no way of knowing whether the parental statement about them is a true description of them or not. The child will then start taking on their parents’ attitude towards them and will grow up thinking that they are somewhat defective and unlovable, that there is some sort of flaw which makes them unworthy their parents’ love and deepens their shame.
Unhappy and wounded children make unhappy and wounded adults who tend to play out their learned relationship programs later in their life. Anothea Judith stresses further that the quality of relationship you have had with your mother affects the way you feel about the mother and feminine archetype in your life. Similarly, the way your father treated you will impinge on how you relate to all men you meet in your life. Your relationships in adult life will become projections of the early relationships with your parents which will recreate a scenario to keep you feeling ashamed and worthless. Your self esteem takes a plummet as a result. The heart as the seat of love closes down when it gets hurt in order to protect itself from what it believes caused that harm in the first place. Love then becomes conditional and life potentials limited.
All childhood wounds and past hurts call for ‘the universal medicine of love’ which gives a unique opportunity to embrace the most vulnerable parts of self that perhaps have previously been rejected and ashamed.
For the heart to truly heal we need acceptance for our heartaches, forgiveness of self and others and love to counteract that state of helplessness and lack of love.
You may consider to see a healing therapist to help you go through the healing process when you feel ready to address your heartaches. As your heart starts healing and opening, your self esteem will automatically go up. When you start feeling better about yourself, it will also be reflected in the way other people relate to you.