How Your Mother’s Body Image Affects Yours

If you’re a woman and your mother had her own body image issues, this will have significantly affected you, even if she never commented on your body.

When it comes to healing body image issues and growing in self-love, it is important for us to understand where our body image problems and lack of self-love come from.

Certainly, if you had parents who shamed you for your body, made fun of you, or explicitly told you that you needed to diet, watch calories or lose weight, you're going to develop body image issues from this.

But what if your parents never said anything critical about your body, and what if they didn't criticize others' bodies either?

It's important to examine things a bit deeper. Did your parents have body image issues with themselves?

Did you notice them seeming to be hard on themselves or worried about their bodies or weight?

Were they always trying to diet or lose weight?

Did you notice that they seemed to have a link between self-love and self-worth, and how their body looked?

We tend to identify more with parents of the same gender as we are in terms of these passed-down feelings, though certainly we are also affected by the body image feelings of a parent who is not the same gender as us.

Typically a young girl will automatically absorb any body image emotions from their mother, and a young man will automatically absorb any body image issues from their father.

There wasn't anything you could do to not absorb these feelings as a kid and young person; you were a sponge and there was no possibility for it to be any other way.

This is why there are many people who end up with severe self-worth, self-esteem and negative body image feelings, even if their parents never said anything to anyone about weight or food.

In order to heal and develop in self-love, it will be vital to see what emotions you automatically absorbed from how your parents felt about themselves.

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