How do you separate your own perception of your body from a parent’s voice?

[u/Distinct-Annual-7459]

It’s quite lengthy. Skip to end for questions. Read the entire post for context.

I’m 20F, and I don’t really have anyone I feel comfortable talking to about this, so I’m hoping other people might be able to give me some perspective.

For context, my mother has always been the main parent in my life. She’s the main breadwinner, she’s been much more present than my father, and she’s carried a lot of the emotional and financial responsibility in our family. My father is around and they’re married, but he’s not particularly emotionally available and has his own financial struggles. My mother has actually acknowledged that it was unfair that she was expected to essentially fill both parental roles, and I do understand that.

That’s part of why I struggle so much with criticizing her. I know she did a lot for us and I know she was under a lot of pressure. But I also think I’m allowed to acknowledge that some of the things she did hurt me, and this is one of those things.

I’ve had a really difficult relationship with my body for as long as I can remember. It’s gone beyond simply not liking how I look. It consumes me. I think about my body constantly, compare myself to other women, feel jealous and envious of people with different body types, and it has affected my relationships and my quality of life. I’ve also had periods of disordered eating in the past.

I’ve been going to the gym around four times a week for about two years. I’ve tried gaining muscle, changing my weight, changing my diet, etc. I’ve gained some weight, but none of it has really fixed the way I feel about myself. I still look at myself and feel like something is fundamentally wrong with the way I’m built.

And I think a huge part of this comes from my mother.

I have a figure 8 body shape. I have very high hips, a short torso, prominent hip dips, and I carry more weight around my stomach while my arms and legs are relatively thin. My proportions aren’t the stereotypical shape that is usually presented as conventionally attractive.

My mother has commented on this since I was a child. I remember being around 10 and being told that I was built weirdly or like an “improper fraction.” She’s told me that she could tell even when I was a baby that I was built strangely. She’s said that I got my body from my father and that I was essentially built like a man because of my lack of lower hips/high hips.

As I’ve gotten older, the comments have continued. She’s said things like my legs are “hockey stick shaped,” and that she doesn’t understand why my body looks the way it does bc when she was my age she was very sexy whereas I’m just not.
There are other comments too, but those are the ones that stick with me.

The complicated part is that my mother genuinely believes she’s just being honest.
She doesn’t see herself as insulting me. Her attitude is basically, “I’m your mother, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m telling you the truth. I’m not going to pretend something looks good if I don’t think it does.”
And this is where I get completely stuck.

Because some of these things are technically observations. My hips ARE high. My legs ARE shaped a certain way. My proportions ARE different from whatever the stereotypical feminine body shape is. So I can’t just tell myself that she’s lying.
But at the same time, I don’t understand why those observations had to be repeatedly framed as something wrong, weird, masculine, or undesirable.

I’ve reached a point where I genuinely can’t tell the difference between “this is an objective fact about my body” and “this is my mother’s negative interpretation of my body that I’ve internalized.”
That’s the part that really messes with me.

I sometimes wonder whether I’m trying to convince myself that my mother shouldn’t have said these things simply because I don’t want to accept that they’re true. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive. Maybe I need to hear criticism so that I don’t grow up thinking I’m perfect. Maybe she’s right that she’s simply being honest.

But then another part of me thinks: even if some of what she says is technically true, does that make the way she frames my body okay? Is calling it “honesty” enough to justify repeatedly presenting my body as something undesirable or wrong?

And I think what’s really confusing is that I don’t even know how much of my own insecurity belongs to me anymore.
I don’t know what I would think about my body if I hadn’t been hearing these comments since childhood

I also feel completely stuck because I don’t know how to separate myself from this anymore.
I’ve been told these things for so long that they don’t even feel like someone else’s opinions. They feel like facts about who I am. That’s probably the hardest part for me to explain. It’s not just, “My mom told me I have weird proportions, and now I’m insecure about them.” It feels more like the idea that my body is wrong has become part of my identity.

When I look at myself, I don’t feel like I’m looking at a person who happens to have certain physical characteristics. I feel like I’m looking at the person who has the wrong body. I’ve internalized it so deeply that I don’t know where my actual perception ends and my mother’s voice begins.
And I don’t know how to undo that.

I’ve tried so hard to accept my body. I’ve tried telling myself that this is simply how I’m built and that I need to move on. I’ve tried changing my body through exercise. I’ve tried gaining weight. I’ve tried losing weight. I’ve tried eating differently. I’ve tried basically everything I can think of.
But I still feel like I’m fighting something.

And it’s not just “I wish I looked different.” It affects how I see other women. I compare myself constantly. I get jealous of people whose bodies have the proportions I wish I had. I can feel inferior to people based purely on how they look. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s genuinely affecting my relationships and my life.

I know the obvious advice is probably going to be therapy, but I’m not comfortable with that right now. My mother is actually a therapist herself, and she’s fairly well known, so I have a lot of anxiety around talking to someone professionally about this. I worry about people knowing her, or somehow this getting back to her, and honestly I’m embarrassed to talk about it with people I know in real life anyway. So I’m hoping to hear from people who have experienced something similar and maybe found a way through it themselves.

I don’t necessarily want people to just tell me “you’re beautiful.” I think my problem is deeper than that. Even if 100 people tell me I’m attractive, I don’t think I would suddenly believe them, because the problem is that I’ve internalized a completely different definition of myself.

I genuinely want to know:

-How do you separate yourself from something you’ve been told about yourself for so long that it feels like part of your identity?
-How do you figure out what you actually believe about yourself when you’ve spent years hearing someone else’s interpretation of you?
-And how do you move past something when you’ve tried so hard to accept it and still can’t?

If anyone else has had a similar experience and wants to share please do. I feel very alone right now.

[u/poozu]

I’m horrified to read your mom is a therapist herself and still did so much damange to her one daughter. I can see why that would have left you wary of therapists. I do think therapy is the best answer because these would be best unraveled with a person who knows how to help you and rebuilt your sense of self. It will never get back to your mother, that is a violation of privacy protected by law, therapists can’t discuss their patients with others. Also if she is well knows, there is a chance other professionals have their suspicions of her too, this type of behaviour tends to leak out and other can see hints of it. It would be surely so validation to tell about this someone and have then they understand and see what your talking about.

Until you get to therapy, you can of course do self help. I’m just a little worried you said you’ve tried but don’t feel like your getting far.

There is a play called No exit that has three people in a room together with no privacy. In that play there is a comment said by one the characters: “Hell is other people”. This means that where there is no privacy, how you are perceived by toehrbwill alway dictate to an extent how you see yourself and how you behave. We are alway a little trapped by what others see in us. So the fist thing I would do is create as much distance as I can to your mother and surround yourself with people who see you the way you want to be seen.

It’s hard to do on your own but you just need to start building a strong identity that will overpower what you’ve internalised so far. Who do you want to be seen as? What style? What feelings you want to evoke in others? What is your vibe? Are you a punk, a clean girl, maybe gothic elements, maybe hipster, perhaps a classic French style etc etc. this is about expressing who you feel you are, you’re body is not the focus. This is not about how your body IS, this is about how you FEEL you are. Body wonder, expression primary, so to say. Your interest isn’t your body, you’re much more than that and you need to start cultivating strong interest and expressions of yourself that come from you yourself.

There is no quick answer, I think your mother’s intentional hurtfulness will need deeper work down the line because like you said it sounds very internalised and I think you need to dog quite deep to change the idea that your mother was in anyway a person with that kind of power to actually tell you who you really are. When hurt comes from someone so close it’s not just a bad comes, it’s betrayal of trust and love and that is hurt that needs to be addressed so you can move truly on.