I avoided this before now. I really don't have the situations so many mentioned. When I was a teen I spent an hour a day putting on makeup every day and the purpose was to make sure we could "pass for normal" that day. Passing for normal was one of the big goals at all times, mostly to avoid any abuse we could avoid.

Now we struggle with shame issues and when we look in the mirror it triggers loathing and lies about how horrible I look and how disgusting I am in an older and heavier, unfit body with gray hair. We did not want to have a body at all and spent much of our time being anywhere but aware of our body if we had any choice.

We find we have a thing where we start looking at pictures of our lives from babyhood on up - the pics we do have we tend to stare at very intensely like we are trying to see who we were back then and what was going on inside that little girl. We know her life was damn near unbearable and we look for evidence of that because we also have alts whose job is to deny all the abuse and misery. We are not repulsive to look at but we''ve always felt ugly.

Leah