Mind the Body Podcast

Beyond Body Image: The Hidden Forces Behind How You See Yourself : Episode 1

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 1

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🎧 Episode 1: Your Body Image Isn’t About Your Body - It’s a Language

Welcome to the first episode of Mind The Body.

I’m your host, Yvette Vuaran, psychodynamic psychotherapist and EMDR therapist specialising in body image, attachment, and trauma.

In this episode, I explore why body image struggles are rarely about appearance. Instead, they often reflect early relationships, unprocessed trauma, and the ways we learned to disconnect from ourselves in order to feel safe and accepted.

Rather than treating the body as something to fix, this conversation invites you to understand body image as a language - one that communicates emotional truth when words can’t.

This episode also examines how the careers we choose often aren’t random. Many of us unconsciously gravitate toward work environments that echo early relational patterns - shaping how we use our bodies, appearance, and identity to belong or gain approval.

In this episode, we explore:

  • Why body image is a language, not a problem to solve
  • How treating the body as an object deepens disconnection
  • The concept of the ‘false body’ and how it develops
  • Why healing isn’t about loving your body, but listening to it
  • A simple question to begin rebuilding trust with your body

Free Resource

If you’re ready to begin gently rebuilding trust with your body, download the 7 Day Body Trust Reset - a series of short daily audio practices designed to help you reconnect with safety and compassion.

Books referenced in this episode:

  • Under the Skin - Alessandra Lemma
  • Playing and Reality - D.W. Winnicott
  • Bodies - Susie Orbach
  • Fat Is a Feminist Issue - Susie Orbach
  • False Bodies, True Selves - Nicole Schnackenberg

Take a breath, stay curious, and explore what it truly means to Mind The Body.

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Speaker

Hello and welcome. I'm so excited to bring you the first episode of Mind the Body Podcast. You might be wondering what inspired me to start my own podcast. Honestly, it happened quite spontaneously. I recently ran a poll asking my community how they wanted to hear from me, and to my surprise, the clear answer was a podcast. So here we are. The podcast got me thinking about how important human connection is in an increasingly disconnected world. I recall a particularly challenging period of my life. I was 18, first year of uni, unable to sleep at night. I had rowing at the crack of dawn, so I'd stay awake and listen to talk radio. Yes, it was the nineties, so podcasts weren't even around then, but there was so much comfort in being able to listen to someone talk in those early hours. I didn't feel so alone. I hope this podcast not only bridges the gap between mind and body, but also helps you feel more connected to yourself and to those around you. I'll share my expertise with you, but I'll also speak from my experiences and of course my heart. What if I told you that your body image isn't really about your body at all? I know that sounds counterintuitive, but stay with me. I am Yvette Faran, a psychodynamic psychotherapist specializing in body image, attachment, and trauma. For years, I've sat across from women who appear confident on the outside, but feel profoundly disconnected from their bodies underneath, especially when it comes to intimacy relationships and feeling at ease in their own skin. And here's what I've learned. When we struggle with how we see our bodies, we are rarely struggling with our bodies. And I mean this in the more concrete sense of the word. We're usually struggling with something much deeper. Something that lives in our earliest relationships, our unprocessed trauma, and the cultural messages we've absorbed even without realizing it. Today, I wanna share three fundamental truths about body image that completely shift how we understand this work. First body image is a language, and when we treat it as an object to fix, we perpetuate the very disconnection we're trying to heal. Second, many of us are living in a false body, and I'll explain what I mean by this shortly, and healing means finding our way back to authenticity and your true self. And third, this work isn't about learning to love your body. It's about learning to listen to it. So let's dive in. Let's start with the first shift. Understanding that body image is actually a language. Early in my clinical work, I heard many women in therapy talk negatively about their bodies, visibly distressed about how they looked. The narrative was. Achingly familiar. If I could just lose weight, I'd finally feel better. I can't stand seeing myself in photos. I avoid mirrors. I cancel plans because I feel too uncomfortable in my body. But the more I listened, really listened. I noticed something. Their words were not about their bodies, but their pain. Their pain was about something else entirely. The body shame would intensify after a partner became emotionally distant. It would spiral when someone was passed over for a promotion. Sometimes there was no traceable event. It was just this persistent gnawing feeling of not being enough. What was really being said was, I feel unseen, I don't belong. And of course the question, am I worthy of love? With thousands of clinical hours working with women, I've seen a pattern I can't ignore. Body image is a language. It's how the body speaks. Emotional truths that words can't always reach. And here's what's crucial. When we approach body image as something to fix, change or correct, when we objectify the body. We actually deepen the disconnection. We turn the body into a thing to be managed rather than a self to be understood, and so we lose the capacity for attunement. Okay? Think about it. When you're constantly trying to fix your body, you're standing outside of it, treating it as separate from you, but healing requires the opposite. It requires coming back inside, listening. Developing a relationship with your body is communicating. Alexandra Lemma, one of the leading voices in psychoanalytic work on the body, describes this so beautifully. In her book, under The Skin, she talks about how when the body becomes a primary presenting problem, we're often using it unconsciously to communicate psychic pain that we can't put into words. She explores how our preoccupation with appearance is driven by these unconscious fantasies, and what she's really showing us is that the motivation for being so preoccupied with how we look, it comes from our internal world, from under our skin. The body becomes this site where all our internal conflicts, our anxieties, our relational experiences get concretely enacted and worked through when we fixate on our appearance, we are not being vain, we are not being shallow. We are trying to fix something, but it's not a part of our body. It's a feeling, a fear. A wound that needs tending. So here's what I want you to consider. The next time you catch yourself in a body image spiral, just pause. Notice if you're treating your body as an object, something separate from you that needs fixing, then shift. Ask yourself, what is my body trying to communicate right now? What's the feeling beneath the criticism? This is attunement and this is how we move from self-objectification to relationship, and it's where the royal healing begins, which brings me to the second shift, understanding what we call the false body. Before I became a psychotherapist, I worked as an international model. That career benefited from me already having a false self and therefore a false body. So stay with me. This will make sense in a moment. In each job I was molded into being whoever they wanted me to be a chameleon, but it didn't start there. And here's what's fascinating. It's something I see again and again in my practice. The careers we choose often aren't random. They're frequently a repetition of sorts, uh, a recreation of early patterns. We unconsciously gravitate towards situations that echo our childhood experiences. Perhaps an attempt to master something we couldn't control then or to heal something that was never quite resolved. I chose a career where being a chameleon, having a false self, a false body, was not only accepted but rewarded where I believed my worth was determined entirely by how others saw me following their rules shaping myself into their vision for approval. Is this resonating? I I want you to pause here for a moment and, think about your own life. What patterns do you see? What career did you choose and what does it ask of your body, your appearance, your sense of self? How does your work world echo your early world? These aren't accusations, they're invitations to curiosity, because understanding our own body story, where it began, how it's being recreated, is essential to writing a new chapter. Let me tell you about a pattern I see constantly in my work, women who spent decades living in a body that was never truly theirs to begin with. And I mean this in abstract terms. The pattern often looks like this. Mother anxious about her own body, constantly dieting, criticizing herself in the mirror, measuring her worth by her appearance. The daughter absorbs it all. Her developing sense of her own body becomes shaped not only by her own internal experience, but also by her mother's discomfort. Or a child who, who learns to make herself smaller, quieter, less visible, believing that if she could just be perfect enough, should be worth staying for worth loving. These patterns break my heart because they reveal how we can spend our entire lives trying to live in someone else's idea of what our body should be. A few months ago, I had the honor of attending a full day training with Susie Orbach, the psychoanalyst and feminist author whose work includes fat is a feminist issue, and bodies both Orbach, and Nicole Schnackenberg, in her book, false Bodies True Self Built on Donald Winnicott's concept of the false self to introduce what is called the false body. Let me explain what this means. Winnicott taught us that when a child's authentic needs aren't being met with constant attunement, they develop a false self, uh, compliant adaptation that protects the true self. By hiding it, the child learns to be who others need them to be rather than who they actually are. Orbach and Schnackenberg showed how this false self becomes split off into the body itself. So in object relations terms, the body becomes the object, something we relate to rather than experience ourselves as we stand outside our bodies managing, controlling them to meet others. Needs and expectations rather than inhabiting them from the inside. Here's what all back says. That completely shifted my clinical understanding. If the false body is created in relation to the mother's or caregiver's psychology, then the false body is similarly a relational construct, the possibility of a true body. Cannot emerge until there is a relationship to receive it. And I'm gonna say that again. The possibility of a true body cannot emerge until there is a relationship to receive it. That means healing isn't about learning to love the false body. It's about dismantling it gently, compassionately in the presence of someone who can witness and hold. You are more authentic and embodied self as it emerges. So ask yourself, whose body am I trying to have? Who taught me to see my body this way? And then if you wanna take it further. Where have I recreated these patterns in my adult life? What situations have I chosen consciously or unconsciously that ask me to perform a false body rather than inhabit an authentic one? Often the answers reveal generational patterns that we didn't even know we were carrying and naming them is the first step to releasing them. Understanding your body story isn't about blame. It's about finally seeing the invisible threads that have been pulling at you all along. Now for the third shift, and this is where people often get stuck, here's what I've noticed. So many of us are trying to force ourselves to feel something we don't yet feel. We are told to love our bodies or celebrate ourselves, but if your body still feels unsafe, those affirmations can feel not only hollow, but it can feel like another way in which you're failing. Standing in front of the mirror and trying to convince yourself you're beautiful. When every cell in your body is, is screaming, discomfort that's not healing. That is performance. And the body actually knows the difference. We've come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in our bodies yet, This approach rarely addresses the unconscious meanings and relational origins of body distress. True healing doesn't start with positivity. It starts with presence instead of asking, how do I look? Try asking, how does it feel to be in my body right now? That question invites curiosity, not judgment. It invites embodiment, not disembodiment. It invites us back into relationship with ourselves. Here's the truth. You don't have to love your body to heal your relationship with it. You just have to start listening to it this week. Try that question. Close your eyes and ask, how does it feel to be in my body right now? Not good or bad, just what's true. That's where the conversation begins, because your body isn't the problem, it's the messenger. It's showing you where safety was lost, where connection was interrupted, where trauma was stored. And when we approach it with curiosity instead of criticism, we begin to heal. Not just how we see ourselves, but how we live in ourselves. Let me bring this all together. Today we've explored three fundamental shifts in how we understand body image. First, we learned that body image is a language, and when we treat our bodies as objects to fix, we perpetuate disconnection. The path forward is attunement, learning to listen to what our body is communicating rather than trying to change it. Second, we explored the false body. How many of us have spent our lives living out someone else's vision of what our body should be? We looked at how these patterns often don't stay in childhood. We recreate them sometimes in the very careers that we choose. Understanding your body story is the beginning of writing a new chapter. And third, we recognize that healing doesn't require loving your body. It requires presence. It requires asking, not how do I look, but how does it feel to be in my body right now? As Lima reminds us, body preoccupation is actually an entry point. It shows us. How we make meaning through our bodies, and that means we can use it as a pathway to healing. So here's what I want you to do. If you're ready to take the first step, I have created a free resource called The Seven Day Body Trust Reset. It's a gentle way to begin rebuilding trust with your body through short daily audio practices, just three to four minutes each, along with supportive emails and a complete PDF guide. If you've ever felt disconnected from your body, or if body image struggles have been quietly shaping your relationships or sense of self, this is for you. You'll find the link in the show notes if this episode resonated. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and share it with someone who needs to hear this message. Next time we're gonna go even deeper into the origins. How did we learn to see ourselves in this way, and what role did our earliest relationships play? Until then, remember, you're not broken. Your body is speaking and learning to trust it and listen is the beginning of coming home. Stay curious. I