[trigger for SI mention]

Rainbow, I haven't read through these responses, but I do want to respond to what you said about, how can your T understand you when she's so thin?

My best friend is overweight. And once or twice, she and another overweight friend of hers made comments to me about how I "can't understand" and how "it's easy for you, because you're small."

Here are some objective truths about me: I wouldn't call myself skinny, as I'm not underweight, but I have a below average (but healthy) BMI. I used to be skinny as a kid. My entire life people have been telling me I am beautiful. Strangers actually stop me in the street just to tell me this. I have never lacked male attention.

But guess what? I look in the mirror, and see fat and ugly. None of the above truths have stopped me from feeling this way. It makes no sense. It would have to be a worldwide conspiracy of vast proportions for it to be true that I'm fat and ugly. Yet this is the way I feel about myself. In fact, I might still be what I call "skinny" if it weren't for the fact that I went ahead and starved myself for a year when I was 17-18, and my metabolism has never been the same since. I can still get away with eating almost nothing (but I don't... I like food, so sue me ).

So no, I don't what it's like to actually be overweight. But I do know what it's like to want to tear up all of my wedding photos because none of them look right and I look bad and not-perfect and awful. I do know what it's like to feel powerless against the self-loathing I feel surrounding my body. You wouldn't know that just by looking at me. But you would know it if you were there when I scratched the words "I HATE YOU" into my belly with a pushpin on one particularly bad night.

And that's why it hurts every time my friend dismisses my attempts at empathy when she's upset about her appearance. I would never tell her I know EXACTLY how she feels... but I know more about it than she thinks. And for the record, when I look at her, I don't see "fat", I see my best friend.

SO. Don't assume anything about your therapist. Of course she doesn't know exactly what it's like to be you... but if she's a good therapist she can probably find a way to empathize better than it appears she could.

And to ACTUALLY answer your question, as you can see, this is a serious issue for me so I do talk to my T about it. I don't like it, though, because I worry that if I point out something I don't like about myself, he will notice it more than he did before and think I'm ugly. Plus, he's a guy so it's easy for me to dismiss him for the same reason you might dismiss your T as skinny. Yet he's always been very kind and gentle about it, even if there are some things that, as a man, he doesn't experience.

Lots of luck to you!