Body Dysmorphia And Women: Psychotherapy For Your Artist By Jeraline George

When you see yourself as something else in the mirror, imagining the way you look and your features are not what they are in reality, you might be suffering from body dysmorphia. If you feel that your face is not perfect, your arms are too short, or anything else that should not be ideally, body dysmorphia is probably you are suffering from. Let us look at this a bit more closely to understand what it is.

Over the last few years in my London Birmingham psychotherapy practice I have seen a marked increase in the number of enquiries mostly from women in the artistic and creative field with this personality disorder, where they are going through life and artistic dual career issues and feel their appearance is not suited to what it should be for the best results. Its worrying to think creative individuals and eating disorders may go hand in hand as perfectionism is what these women strive for. They often go all-out to find faults with their appearance, and invent imperfections in the way they look, even when there are no imperfections in reality. As the dis-ease with their body may have started in their teens and as they reach late 20s early 30s becomes worse, which may be linked to not having reached the career success or relationship expectations that they desired.

What Can Be Done?

Such a disorder can have serious setbacks in your life and career. Depression, anxiety, emotional and interpersonal difficulties are just some of the effects you can see from this sort of an emotional problem. There have been many arguments that the rise in this disorder by men and women is due to the idealized beauty standards which we are fed by the media, yet I wonder if individuals hadnt experienced some form of trauma in their early life, were taught to understand their own cultural norms on the body and had been fed a healthy sense of self and body image by those close to them, then maybe this disorder wouldnt be on the increase. As in my therapeutic work for many of the clients presenting with female body image issues standard beauty images being fed by the magazines when explored in-depth although a factor is very small when we start to look at their belief around their body image issues.

Psychotherapy for your artist can support creative and performing women to focus on how to have a healthy concept of themselves, eliminate self defeating behaviors that often lead to feelings of depression and other psychological problems which they project onto their body. More than often it becomes very hard to even recognize the problem. This is primarily why the symptoms should be studied as although there are a number of very effective ways to work with a healthy body image, if you are bulimic or anorexic then it would be advisable to see a specialist who deals with eating disorders as you may need more than holistic artistic psychotherapy under such circumstances.

Body dysmorphia often shows a number of problems. Consider getting some support if you feel that you may be suffering from this problem so you can learn to get a hold of those issues which you maybe unconsciously projecting onto your body.

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