What relationship do you have with your body
Accepting your body is the first step to living peacefully.
The relationship that a person has with his own body comes from the whole range of experiences that, in the course of his growth, have concerned his body. The outcome of a series of sufficiently positive situations leads to the ability to identify with one’s body and its sensations.
When the individual, starting from early childhood, experiences many unsuccessful experiences regarding his corporeality, his ability to identify becomes problematic. We are estranged from the body, for example, because it has become an unbearable source of discomfort. Repeated experiences of pain, illness, or humiliation, incompetence and shame in the social context – especially if they occur in early childhood, when the subject is still too vulnerable – cause a withdrawal from the body, a lack of identification with it.
Accepting your body: two behavioral strategies
If the identification process is not fully successful, the body will represent – towards the subject – something foreign, therefore a source of anxiety: the person has nothing left to do but make an effort to keep this threat under control. How Two behavioral strategies
are usually used .
The first is to carefully avoid engaging in all those activities that could revive the negative experiences experienced in the past. For example, a child made fun of by schoolmates for being judged “clumsy” in physical activity could choose to avoid any sport for the rest of his days.
Or, on the contrary – and this is the second strategy – the person could unknowingly use physical activity with a “compensatory” motivation. Many people who are hyper-involved in training reveal that they have what I jokingly dubbed “the fat ex-baby syndrome”.
That is, they refer to a past full of discomfort or failed experiences in the relationship with one’s body, a past where it was not possible to fully identify with one’s own corporality. In these cases, sport has an evident counterbalancing function. As long as I feel fit, handsome and successful – whatever the cost – I take away the possibility of reliving those experiences of discomfort, shame or vulnerability that my own body made me experience.
Personally I am convinced that a little compensatory motivation is completely healthy: fighting to change a reality that you don’t like, taking care of yourself, improving nutrition, trying to control weight, increasing physical efficiency has a function of growth. It is a process that allows me to strengthen self-esteem , to free myself from the influence that the past had on my self-image and to identify more with my body and its sensations.
When acceptance turns into compulsive need
A danger – in this type of motivation – is that self-care easily ends up turning into a compulsive need, a sort of constraint that the subject is unable to resist. The discomfort caused by the compulsion (for example, working out even when you are tired or injured) is still a better prospect than reliving the painful experiences of the past. Anything better than going back to feeling like the old fat kid he used to be.
In this case, involvement in physical activity becomes self-destructive and all-encompassing. Because I define such an attitude “destructive”
Because whoever behaves like this has lost the sense of limits. Let me explain: it is one thing to hate getting old and do everything possible to slow down the process. Another thing is not to accept the passage of time or to become pathetic by pretending that it does not take place. It is one thing to look for physical fitness to live a fuller life, another thing is to live a life full of physical fitness only. It is one thing to try to improve your physical appearance, another thing is to live a life totally centered on your miserable vanity.
What then is the practical distinction that can help us distinguish healthy behaviors from those that are not
I believe that a famous prayer by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, commonly known as the “saying” of Alcoholics Anonymous, can help us: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ”
This means that some things inherent in our corporeality we will never be able to change them. And that it is healthy and right to learn to accept them: the fact that we are perishable goods, that we are not omnipotent, that time passes, that we will never be perfect. In other words, accepting your body and having a peaceful relationship with itit presumes to accept its limits: the real ones, those over which we have no power, those over which it is useless to struggle and waste time. While it is healthy to work hard to positively change the things we can change.
Accept your body to maintain serenity
Of course, it is not easy to maintain a calm mood and a balanced approach in a society that continually sends completely opposite messages. Who denies limits, which he continually proposes as real imaginary models, unattainable and omnipotent. Which pursues as its maximum value the fact of always appearing beautiful, young and seductive and which – by doing so – in the end sows an incurable sense of inadequacy and despair. It is therefore up to us, in the end, to have enough awareness and serenity to choose between what is accepted and what is worth fighting for.
