Your Body Image Inner Critic Comes From Your Parents

As adults, our inner critic is made up of the way our parents talked to themselves about their own eating and bodies, as well as the way they felt about ours.

What does your self-talk surrounding your eating and your body look like?

Is it condescending, pressuring, dismissive? Is it sarcastic, angry, blaming? Are you gaslighting or abusing yourself?

The way you talk with yourself is no accident, and it is unrelated to your personality or nature.

Rather, it is a combination of two factors:

1) How your parents/caretakers talked to themselves about their own eating and weight

How did your parents feel towards themselves about their eating and weight?

Did you notice self-judgement in their remarks?

What feelings could you pick up in the off-the-cuff remarks they made about themselves?

Did they try to mask negative self-talk with jokes about themselves?

We all pick up self-talk from our parents, even if our parents claim that they don't want us to judge ourselves like they judge themselves.

It's just osmosis -- you will adopt your parents' example of how to treat oneself around food and body image.

2) How your parents/caretakers felt about your eating and weight

How did your parents feel about your eating and your weight?

Did they make comments about it? Did they make "suggestions" about it?

Some people grow up with parents who "just want to help" their child eat better and lose weight, but due to the lack of self-reflection in the parents, this typically is actually a form of criticism.

Judgemental feelings can still come along with comments that seem reasonable.

Others grew up with parents who didn't SAY anything out loud but still had thoughts and feelings of criticism and judgement towards you.

If you are hard on yourself, this doesn't come from nowhere.

Who taught you a lack of self-love?

Who has been fine with you being harsh towards yourself?

Photo by Zack Dowdy via Unsplash