Do you discuss your appearance with T?

I was thinking...

I've always heard "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

If I meet someone in RL - I may not perceive them as attractive however , if I get to know them and discover I LIKE them, they become more attractive to me. The opposite is also true, a person I see as beautiful who is a jerk and I DON'T LIKE becomes uglier to me. If I HATE them, they are ugly to me no matter what! But if I LOVE that person , I find them to be beautiful even on a bad hair day.

So it stands to reason,
As I perceive most of us dont LIKE ourselves or parts of ourselves, until we learn to overlook our flaws and LIKE ourselves then LOVE ourselves we will never see the true beauty of US , what our loved ones see... The true us.

Ugh. That just makes me feel kind of sick. I am not overweight and haven't been, but I do struggle with anorexia/bulimia and my body image and that is just so sad to me.

A very good point!

once i asked my T if I could be a convincing man, she said "i don't think so. you have a pretty face." i thought to myself, huh? what? shut the heck up! you're such a liar! I didn't respond to what she said directly. I still think she was just being kind and supportive of my present appearance, or maybe her love for me has blinded her to my obvious fugliness

I always liked the book Fat is a Feminist Issue and I find the notion that women are expected not to take up space in the world or be big enough to take care of themselves to be a compelling reason to try not to (I still do) worry about whether I am too large or too small. Women (I know men have weight. body issues too but they are not as targeted as women) get to eat and be healthy and be strong enough and big enough to take care of themselves. It is sort of like the clothing and shoes for women (dainty, fragile, not good for running or walking etc but instead constricting and deforming etc). I don't know, this kind of winds me up.

Profound truth.

I never talked about how I look - just how I dress.
My psychologist said that might be a reason why people stare.

Just this reminded me of something Gerard Way said

"Hey girls, you’re beautiful. Don’t look at those stupid magazines with sticklike models. Eat healthy and exercise. That’s all. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough. You are good enough, you are too good. Love your family with all your heart and listen to it. You are gorgeous, whether you’re a size 3 or a size 14. It doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, as long as you’re a good person, as long as you respect others. I know it’s been told hundreds of times before, but it’s true. Hey girls, you are beautiful."

One of my all time favorite quotes. I have no idea who said it, but, well, it's just the truth.

"You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”."

I'm a new member to this board (although a longtime lurker) and I just have to say, "wow". The wisdom and love and acceptance here never fails to blow me away. Thank you.

I just want to thank everyone for contributing to my thread. I didn't know it was going to generate such interest! I'm sorry it makes some of you sad, though. I'm not going to reply individually because it's not specifically about me anymore, which is okay, and there are too many posts! They are all interesting to me.

Who is Yalom? Remind me never to work with the knobhead. Sunrise, most people aren't that way.

Irvin yalom taught at stanford (i think that is the university), has an md and is a therapist who has written several books. I read two of his books and thought he was a total ***, but he seems to have many fans.

Yeah, actually I was freak out and immediately started to doubt my T. So I cannot recommend reading him. Its a good read, he is honest but ...
However, as being already mentioned here, it shows you that Ts are human. Which is stg. I hate to be reminded of. Cause how can you trust a human being?

actually I don't remember reading that he worked hard (or at all) to overcome his prejudice against the woman who was overweight; on the contrary, she was the one who did a lot of hard work to bring her weight down, and as she did he was amazed and delighted to discover that she was a real person.
well guess what, the woman who walked in his door on the first day was a real person too.

That story brought home to me the irony of clients' agonizing over pleasing their Ts.

We all have prejudices to varying degrees, and not all are negative. What I admired about that Yalom story is that Yalom was self-aware, or he might not have realized his prejudice. He was open to his own flaws.

I just re-read this vignette in Love's Executioner. I will admit, Yalom was very open, brutal, about his intense dislike of his patient's obesity.

It's easy to stop at that. HE could have easily stopped at that. It stings and makes me wonder about what my therapist may have disliked about me at first.

But he didn't stop. He kept on. She did do a lot of work, both on the emotional side, and with the weight loss, but he empathized and struggled with her (read the vignette again).

I think that's true of therapy in general. When you bottom line it, we do all the work. Our therapist's help us, of course, but it's up to us.

Yalom may be a knob for a host of other reasons, but this story, I think, shows the struggle of a therapist and a patient who are both trying to grow and be better people.

He helped her to get to the root of her problems, and she helped him to understand himself and the world around him better.

My therapist always says that he is a better person for knowing me. I wonder what I helped him to overcome.

Probably his blind trust in the police

That certainly doesn't paint him in a good light.

Don't mind me, I have a thing about guys with beards. His photos creep me out. but hey, he's probably got friends and everything, lol

I have spoken with my T about how ugly I feel. I cannot be in photos, either. I cannot bear to see myself in pix. We've talked about that, as well, but haven't really delved into it.

Do others feel that way, as well, regarding seeing themselves in photos?

I haven't seen this before sorry rainbow I've discussed it with both T's and neither really gets it at all. For me though, my appearance does matter and gets in the way of everything, with T and with everyone else whether on or offline, seen or unseen it's still an issue that colors every relationship I have.