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Body Image Quotes

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Body Image Quotes

“When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsEmotionSelf EsteemHeartbreakReflectionSelf AwarenessNervousShyFlowersBody ImageScrutinyPersonalNervousnessReflectiveSelf AwareSelf Observation
Author:Margaret Kennedy
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“I knew that girls made fun of each other, but talking about someone’s body like that seemed so wrong. You can’t choose your body! I was suddenly aware that I was under-performing in ways I didn’t even know existed. From then on I always showered in my swimsuit, changed clothes in the outhouse (which defeated the purpose of showering), and worst of all, I developed the habit of swimming in a t-shirt.”

GirlGirlsMisogynyBody ImageGrowing PainsBody DysmorphiaBody Dysmorphic DisorderInternalized MisogynyBody Image Issues
Book:Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir
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“No one has to tell her that her body makes her irrelevant to that entire conversation. Grace has never questioned her body's place in the world. She's always believed the laws of movies and TV shows: Chubby girls are sidekicks, not romantic leads; sometimes they get to be funny, but more often they're the butt of jokes; if they're powerful, they'e evil- they're Ursula the sea witch from The Little Mermaid: they are not heroines and they are certainly not sexy. These are the rules. This is the script.”

LoveGrowing UpSadGirlsBody ImageOutrageExclusion
Book:The Nowhere Girls
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“Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”

WomenBeautyFeminismBody Image
Book:On Beauty
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“Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.”

WomenShameSocial MediaBody ImagePerfectionismEating Disorder
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“Numerous patients with eating disorders refuse to eat with their families and friends, even insisting on eating only in private. Many of the practices that are seen as essential for creating and sustaining relatedness - the sharing of food, living together, sexual relationships, and even reproduction - are consistently negated by anorexic and other eating disordered practices.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Each internal representation of the mother has its corresponding self-representation - the first as bad, empty, and guilty and the second as passive, compliant, and good. Working together, these internal objects undermine patient’s journeys toward adulthood, which is compatible with the symptoms and behaviors of the disorder.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“One of our central tasks with patients with eating disorders is facilitating the capacity to postpone action in favor of reflection. We inevitably find especially early on, that this is challenging: the pull to binge, or purge, or restrict is difficult, often impossible, to resist. To understand this fact, in this chapter we begin with a discussion of Freud’s (1914) notion of the compulsion to repeat and then formulate the eating disordered patient's symptoms as repetitions against traumatic themes from childhood, never-ending (because never fully successful) attempts to magically undo the pain of the past.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Patients with eating disorders typically report little power to stop their eating disordered behaviors (i.e., reversibility), are often unaware of the thoughts and feelings they have when engaging in them (i.e., self-observation), and, by definition, their behaviors are self-defeating and fail to forward their development in constructive ways (i.e., appropriateness).”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“We all need to feel safe, that the world is predicable, that obstacles can be overcome, and conflicts resolved -in short, to maintain narcissistic equilibrium. When such conditions are met, infants can pleasurably engage with their environments. When faced with overwhelming experience, internal or external, they must find a way to restore their fragile self-esteem. Some infants, especially when faced with overwhelm that cannot be overcome, turn away from reality and toward omnipotent solution. This learned response feels dependable and, over time, takes on an addictive quality, restricting her access to other solutions and pathways to further growth.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Mourning is the vehicle of transformation through which traumatic themes can be acknowledged, disillusioned wishes for an ideal object relinquished and painful early relationships transformed into aspects of the subject’s character that are carried forward in constructive ways.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“In her article, Williams (1997) describes a class of "psychically porous” patients who suffer from eating disorders, most frequently bulimia nervosa, and suggests that they had parents who themselves suffered extensive traumas and as a result were either frightening or frightened or both in relation to the child.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Patients with eating disorders contend with an emotional landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. Help with these struggles will never be found in a pill or a set of therapeutic exercises, in spite of the potential usefulness of both. It is only through a meaningful emotional connection that we can help patients begin to "bear the unbearable and to say the unsayable".”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“In families of eating-disordered patients, the narcissistic use of the daughter by the mother is often immediately striking. Throughout the literature the degree of enmeshment or symbiosis between mother and daughter is remarked upon. Daughters are torn between the urgings of their own developmental strivings and their need to meet their mothers' narcissistic needs.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Eating disordered patients often grow up in families that place an inordinate amount of importance upon bodily appearance, including weight, and focus upon particular parts of the body: protruding tummies, thunder thighs, and tree-trunk legs. We see these same pathogenic qualities in much of the advertising that is directed toward women and girls.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“When eating disordered symptoms arise in men, Schoen (ibid.) writes, they may signal difficulty integrating dependency needs into a masculine identification. Sands (2003) notes that men are more likely to express disavowed needs and wants through projections onto others - witness the preponderance of compulsive sexual behaviors in men - whereas women are more likely to use their own bodies to contain disavowed desires.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“Object relations theory is concerned with how the patient's early relational experiences have been intemalized as a psychological structure that continues to organize and give meaning to her experiences in the present. Are her objects "whole," reflecting both the good and bad aspects of important early relationships, or are they ''parts," representing of "all good" or "all bad" experiences of intense gratification, longing, or deprivation? The objects that populate her psyche shape the anxieties with which she struggles, the longings she feels, and the defenses she erects to manage the intensities of both. From this point of view, it is the underlying psychological structure -not just the eating disorder symptoms that manifest because of it – that are a focus of treatment. The eating disorder, in other words, is a result of dynamics that are woven through the patient’s personality.”

WomenMental HealthBody ImageAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBody Dysmorphia
Book:Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction
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“We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.”

MenCultureBoysShameSexual AbuseBody ImageEating DisordersChild Sexual AbuseMale Sexual Abuse
Book:Healing from the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: The Journey for Women
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“Right/Wrong Things To Say To A Client About Shape Don’t Say… We need to get you looking like an hourglass figure, which is considered the perfect figure. Do Say… Let’s find your body shape and work with styles to define the look for your desired effect, as we are all precious works of art, each unique and amazing.”

InspirationalFashionStylePositiveCommunicationAppearanceSelf ConfidenceBody ImageCindy Ann PetersonImage Consultant
Book:Cindy Ann Peterson's AICI CIC Accelerator (℠): Peterson's Power Prep Primer
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“Proper posture sends a positive message since 90% of all communication occures through body language and how you carry yourself.”

InspirationalAttitudeBeautyStylePositiveCommunicationConfidenceBalanceOrganizedBody ImageGood HealthPostureBody LanguagePoisePunctualCindy Ann PetersonReliableHealth BenefitsYouthfulBusinesslikeNon Verbal CommunicationAuthor Cindy Ann Peterson
Book:My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today
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“You can change careers, friends, and even partners, but the body always comes with you. You cannot emigrate from your body. Cosmetic surgery may be capable of removing the pockets from under the eyes—at least for a few years. […] The body is the house that we always reside in. […] When we talk about self-worth, we are not just referring to some inner “ghost in the machine.” We include hands, feet, legs, belly, chest, and shoulders. Whatever age these parts of us may be, whether they are too big or too small, too long or too short, even healthy or sick, when can we make peace with each vital part of ourselves and recognize its intrinsic value?”

HomeSelf WorthBody Image
Book:The Self-Worth Safari: Valuing Your Life and Your Work
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“What if the shape we grew into was just accepted as the natural shape of our bodies, as lovable each new day as it was on the day we were born? What if the body we aged into—those of us lucky enough to grow old—was as beautiful in our own eyes, when we looked in the mirror, as worthy of love and protection, as the body we had on the day we were born? What if the shape of our bodies was peripheral to our relationship with our bodies, and we could pay compassionate attention to our body’s needs without assessing whether it “deserves” food or love?”

LoveChangeSelf LoveBody Image
Book:Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
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“Even more than I hate commodifying myself, I hate men judging me as a commodity. For thousands of years, women have been throughout their lives reduced to their worth as sexual objects (slash domestic workers). We learn very early on to go to great lengths to increase our sexual value in the eyes of men, without even realizing that's why we're (for example) agonizing over whether our one snack for the day should be a pear or a seventy-calorie sugar-free yogurt. For years- much of my childhood and early twenties- I spent the largest portion of my conscious thought on food and how much I hated and was terrified of my body. It has taken a lot of work to divorce my view of my body and my feelings of romantic worthiness from outside sources. I'm afraid apps would undermine that effort.”

DatingBody ImageGender Roles
Book:How to Date Men When You Hate Men
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