We all can be wrong sometimes, but it’s different when somebody feels that it’s not about what they did, but about who they were – that their own being was wrong.
Many clients come to me to learn how to improve self-confidence. It still surprises me to hear their stories and understand the impact little almost insignificant things had on them – to make them feel unworthy in their childhood.
A person does not have to have experienced childhood trauma, to develop a sensation that they were and are still not good enough. Sometimes it’s enough to have heard certain remarks a few times, or to have been ignored. These small experiences can have a big impact on someone’s self-esteem.
She told me that no matter what she does she feels wrong in this world. She felt that her face had the elliptical shape of an egg, her ears were small, her eyes were the deep blue color of the sea, and her nose was wide and flat and somehow didn’t fit the rest of her face. We talked a little and quickly realized that her parents had always told her the way she looked was wrong.
It wasn’t about what she was doing, it wasn’t about the marks she achieved in school, it was about the way she looked. She was too thin for them for a while and then later too fat. She was not beautiful enough, her clothes were not the right ones for her and her voice was too loud. Both her mother and her sister invested their time in the way they looked; they loved buying clothes and spending time in front of the mirror with make-up they just bought.
It had never interested her though – she would rather wear comfortable clothes, run outside and climb the trees they had around the house she grew up in. However, they persisted trying to change her. When they dressed her up and used their makeup on her, it never felt or looked right. It was as if her face rejected any color, or attempts to make her into somebody she was not.
She was thirty when she first came to me for a session, telling me that she felt wrong, that she felt like she didn’t belong, that she felt that everybody else knew how to be part of society but she never understood the ‘game’. She wanted to create a personal development plan where she would start feeling better about herself.
When we figured out that the feeling of her being wrong was given to her through looks, discussions, or gestures, it became clearer to us; now it was something we could work with. We could give it a name, look at when it was triggered, make peace with the fact that even if her mother and sister never intended to hurt her this way, their words and looks did the work. They rooted in her a certain self-image that never went away and with it an emotional trauma she carried with her long past childhood.
I touched her face. I let my hands talk directly to her skin. I touched around her eyes and ears; I touched her cheeks and moved them around. I touched with my entire palm letting my fingers, my hands, and my words work together in clear collaboration.
“Let’s give your face the freedom to be exactly as it is. You are uniqely beautiful and I feel that you constantly do what you can to hide your face.” She agreed with me without saying a word. My hands explored each part of her face; we laughed, we cried and we asked questions about how her face felt, rather than how it looked.
She started noticing new sensations that had been buried for so many years. She became aware that her nose could breathe and smell. Yes, I know that this is something a baby learns, but until that moment she only knew that her nose could smell, she never consciously felt it doing so. She suddenly noticed the way her ears listened – not the technicality of them, that this was one of the purposes of that organ – but how the sounds entered, how they became part of her and how what she heard could deeply affect her emotions.
Her face became softer under my hands and she became fascinated about the new way she experienced it. She could enjoy the feeling of her senses – the feelings as the world comes in, the feeling of absorbing things from the outside. The skin on her face came to life – it became a layer that connected with whatever was around her rather than a wall between her and her surroundings.
It was a session (and some more followed it) of exploring, of playing, of learning together. When she looked at me at the end of the session, I couldn’t help myself but to take her to the mirror in the waiting room. The big smile on her face was the answer I was looking for – that she saw what I was seeing – she looked different. Her reflection was of the same woman, but her face had changed. Her ears were still small, her nose still wide, her eyes like small buttons, her hair the color of coal, but now everything felt completely right together. Her face had become perfection to her in its own unique way.
In the next session I couldn’t stop smiling when hearing about her week. She had not even once felt wrong or out of place and she had enjoyed wearing clothes that she hadn’t worn before. She felt more comfortable talking to people and whenever the feeling of ‘being wrong’ snuck in, she didn’t push it away. She gave it a moment, knowing that it was a very old idea but not the right one – one that she had carried with her since childhood.
Self-image is something innate and it changes as we grow. Negative reinforcement sticks with us from a very young age. A child can adapt the way they look at themselves from a gesture, from a game, or from a behavior. One of the first steps in changing self-image is to acknowledge the existence of the real thoughts against those that have been learned or perceived and identify from what age they were learned. When the person does so, they can also start to separate their image of themselves, from their own truth of their life, their body or their way of being.
