Who Taught You to See Yourself That Way?

Have you ever stopped to wonder when you first became aware of your body?

Not the first time you looked in a mirror...

The first time you wondered whether what you saw was good enough.

In this episode, we explore the messages many of us absorbed long before we were old enough to question them. Messages from playgrounds, kitchen tables, magazines, doctor's offices, and everyday conversations that quietly shaped the way we learned to see ourselves.

This isn't an episode about dieting.

It isn't about body positivity.

It's an invitation to become curious.

Together we'll explore how inherited messages become lifelong beliefs, why changing your body doesn't always change the story you tell yourself, and how God invites us to see ourselves through a truer lens.

If you've ever struggled with comparison, shame, or feeling like your worth depended on what you saw in the mirror, I hope this conversation reminds you that your story began long before those messages arrived.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Have you ever stopped to wonder when you first became aware of your body? Not the first time you looked in a mirror, the first time you looked in a mirror and wondered if what you saw was good enough. I don't think we're born doing that. I've never watched a toddler run past a mirror and stop because they were worried about how their stomach looked. Little kids don't usually spend their days comparing themselves to everyone else around them. But somewhere along the way, we learn that. Sometimes someone may say something directly. Sometimes it may be something we overhear. A magazine cover in the grocery store checkout line, a television commercial, a doctor's appointment, a conversation around the dinner table, a joke maybe, maybe a compliment. Sometimes even the silence says more than words ever could. The messages don't usually arrive all at once, they accumulate little by little, year after year, until one day we realize we're no longer looking just in a mirror. We're looking at the mirror through years of messages we've absorbed without even realizing it. And maybe that's why mirrors can be so complicated. We think they're reflecting our bodies. And sometimes they're reflecting decades of stories that we've believed about ourselves. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Not because I finally figured it all out, quite the opposite, actually. I've just started asking questions I never thought to ask before. Questions like, who taught me to see myself this way? Because if I'm honest, I spent years simply believing that I had body image issues. Now I'm not so sure. I wonder if what I really had were inherited messages. Messages that started long before I was old enough to decide whether I believed them or not. Before we go any further, I want to tell you what this conversation is not. This isn't going to be an episode about weight. This isn't going to be an episode about body positivity. This isn't even going to be an episode about dieting, or shame, or trying to convince you that suddenly you should love everything you see in the mirror. Instead, I simply would like to invite you into a little curiosity. The truth is, every one of us experiences life through a body, unless you've somehow figured out a different arrangement, in which case, congratulations. But email me your secrets, please. The rest of us are trying to navigate in life in these wonderfully complicated bodies that we've been given. Which means every one of us has received messages about it. Your story may be completely different from mine. Perhaps yours wasn't about weight at all. Maybe yours was about height, or the braces you couldn't wait to get off, or the scar that made you want to cover something, maybe wear long sleeves, or put a band-aid over it. Maybe it was acne or a birthmark or losing your hair, or the way your body changed after an illness, or maybe after bringing a child into the world. Our stories are different. But I have a feeling most of us can remember the first time we became aware that our body didn't quite match whatever picture of normal we were carrying around in our heads. And maybe that's where this conversation begins. Not with the mirror, but with the messages we were carrying long before we ever stood in front of one. I don't remember the exact day I became aware that my body was different. I don't think most of us do. Those moments rarely announce themselves. They simply become part of the story that we tell ourselves in our own head. For me, I remember being in elementary school at recess, kickball, two captains standing in front of everyone, one name after another being called. And if you've ever stood in one of those lines, you probably know the feeling. You're trying to act like you don't care, like it doesn't matter when your name gets called to be on the team. But inside, you're hoping it comes sooner rather than later. Mine usually didn't. I can still remember hearing the whispers. Don't pick her, she's fat. The funny thing is they weren't leaving me last because they knew I wasn't athletic. That came later. At that point, they hadn't seen me miss every kick or completely misjudge where the ball was going to land. They'd already decided based on what they could see. Looking back now, I don't think I wanted to be the fastest kid or the even the best athlete. I just wanted to be normal, to blend in and to stop feeling my like my body entered the conversation long before I ever did. And somewhere along the way I developed a strategy. If I could laugh first, maybe it wouldn't hurt as much when everyone else laughed. If I made the joke, maybe no one else's joke could surprise me. It's funny how those little survival strategies begin. No one sits you down and teaches you them. You simply discover what seems to hurt a little less, and before long it becomes part of your personality. Years later, I would realize that self-depreciating humor had become one of mine. Not because I actually believed most of those things about myself, but because if I said them first, it somehow felt like I stayed in control of the story. I think looking back, I don't think I was even trying to be funny. I was just trying to belong. And I don't think that I'm alone in that. When I think back to those playground moments now, I realize that they weren't really even the beginning of the story. They were simply one more place where those messages found me. Because if I get really real, I think that message had already been quietly taking shape long before I ever stepped onto the kickball field. When I think back to those playground moments now, I realize they weren't really the beginning of the story. They were simply one more place where a message found me. I think that the message became part of my story, but one of my earliest memories takes place around a kitchen table. It was one of those slow weekend mornings, the kind where breakfast wasn't rushed because nobody had anywhere else to be. I honestly can't remember exactly what was on my plate. Maybe it was pancakes, maybe it was cinnamon rolls, maybe it was biscuits and gravy, I don't know. It was one of those breakfasts where butter wasn't just an ingredient, it was practically its own food group. Hello, Paula Dean. There was sugar, there was laughter, there was the comfort of being surrounded by family. And if you've ever been in a kitchen like that, you know exactly what I mean. Some of life's sweetest conversations happen around a table, and some of our deepest messages arrive there too. Somewhere in the middle of that breakfast, someone that I know loved me looked across the table and said, You'd be so beautiful if you lost weight. I've thought about that sentence many times over the years, not because I believe it was spoken in cruelty. I don't. Looking back, I think that it was probably spoken with concern, maybe even with the hope of protecting me from a world that can sometimes be unkind. But intentions and impact are not always the same thing. As a little girl, I didn't hear concern, I heard a condition. Beautiful if looking back now, I don't think one sentence shaped me. I think it was hearing the different versions of the same message over and over again. Sometimes it sounded gentle, other times it sounded much harsher, like you'd better back up from the table. Different words, same message. One comment rarely becomes a lifelong belief. Repeated messages though often do. Little by little, I wasn't just learning how other people saw my body, I was learning how to see it myself. Children don't usually stop to analyze comments like that. They just simply absorb them. And once a message settles in, it has a way of showing up everywhere. Not because everyone is saying the exact same thing, but because once you've learned a language, you start hearing it everywhere. As I grew older, I started noticing something I had never really stopped to think about before. So many of the moments that matter the most happen around a table. Think about it. Birthday dinners weren't just about eating, they were about celebrating whoever was sitting at the head of the table that year. The menu changed depending on whose birthday it was. Sometimes it was hibachi because then dinner came with the show. Sometimes it was a favorite comfort meal. But every birthday ended the same way. A cake, a pie, a cookie cake, candles, and to this day there's something about the smell of freshly blown out birthday candles that immediately tells my heart someone is being celebrated. When someone got sick, love arrived in casserole dishes. Chicken and dumplings, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, chicken fried steak with a tomato gravy. Nobody showed up and said, I don't know how to fix this. Instead, they quietly said, I brought dinner. Sometimes love sounds an awful like like a awful lot like someone knocking on your front door carrying a warm casserole. Funerals look different. But somehow they looked exactly the same. Tables of food, people making sure no one had to think about grocery shopping while they're grieving. I smiled the other day because I realized something. People have a funny way of showing love sometimes. Apparently, we often show care through carbs and sugar. Christmas, tables covered with family favorites. Recipes that had names attached to the people instead of agree uh ingredients. Gami's cookies, Mimaw's cookies, Mimi's strawberry jello. Somewhere along the way, the recipes became people, the food became the memory, and the table became belonging. And then there were vacations. Every trip in my family somehow developed its own tradition. Washington, D.C. became our search for the best key lime pie. Santa Fe turned into what I'm convinced was an unofficial family guacamole competition. It really wasn't about the pie or the guacamole. It was another memory waiting to happen. Years later, I learned something unexpected. During a season when I was following a very structured eating plan, I found myself carrying little packets of food everywhere I went. Birthday parties, baby showers, bridal showers, family gatherings, church events. I wasn't thinking about calories. I was watching the people, watching the celebrations, watching traditions, watching love, and it suddenly hit me. Nearly every meaningful moment in our lives somehow gathers people around food. Think about it birthdays, graduations, weddings, baby showers, Christmas, Thanksgiving, funerals, church fellowships, even ordinary Sunday lunches after church, food wasn't just something we consumed, it had become the languages that love spoke. And that's what made the messages so confusing. Because while one part of the world or my world kept teaching me that food meant celebration, another part kept teaching me that my body needed to become smaller. And I don't think anyone intended to hand me those two messages that would spend decades fighting each other. But that's exactly what happened. The more I thought about it, the more I realized something else. The confusing fusing messages were not only happening within my family, they were everywhere. And once I started noticing them, I couldn't stop seeing them. The older I became, the more I realized these messages weren't only coming from home. They seemed to be everywhere. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and if you're around my age, you probably remember it too. Workout videos, playing in living rooms or on infomercials, magazine covers promising you to lose 10 pounds before summer, low fat everything, fat-free everything, the newest diet, the newest miracle, the newest promise that this one was going to be the one that would finally work. It was everywhere. Not because people were cruel, it was simply the language our culture spoke. And the interesting thing about languages, the more often you hear it, the more normal it sounds. I don't remember thinking this is ridiculous. I remember thinking, well, I guess that's how life works. Smaller meant better, smaller meant prettier, smaller meant healthier, or at least that's what I thought I was supposed to believe. But life has a funny way of reminding us that things are rarely that simple. One of my closest friends in high school couldn't have have had a more different body than mine. She could eat whatever she felt like and anything she wanted, and she never seemed to gain weight. From outside, you might assume that she had won the genetic lottery. Except she heard the comments too. Different comments, the same feeling. People told her that she needed to eat more, asked if she was sick, commented on how thin she was. And I remember thinking something that has stayed with me all these years. Maybe this isn't really about weight. Maybe it's about the fact that people always seem to think that someone else's body should be different. That realization changed something for me because suddenly I wasn't looking at two different bodies. I was looking at the exact same message wearing different clothes. Apparently, our culture has an opinion no matter what your body looks like. Too big, too small, too tall, too short, too muscular, too thin, too curvy, not curvy enough. It's almost as if the target keeps moving. And if the target keeps moving, maybe it was never really about our bodies in the first place. Maybe it was about the messages we learned to believe about them. And that's when another realization began quietly taking shape. The mirror had never been the real issue. The mirror was simply reflecting a story I'd been hearing for years. For me, that story eventually collided with something I never saw coming. Not another message, a diagnosis. And suddenly I had to ask entirely different questions. Was my body actually failing me? Or had I simply misunderstood it all along? For years I simply assumed that I wasn't trying hard enough. If everyone else could do it, why couldn't I? That seemed like an obvious conclusion. Maybe I needed more discipline, more willpower, more exercise, a different diet, a little more determination. If it never occurred to me that my body might actually be working differently. Because when you're young, you usually don't question the assumptions. You question yourself. It wasn't until I was 18 years old that someone finally gave me part a name to that part of my story. PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome. Up until that point, all I really knew was that my body seemed to play a very different set by a very different set of rules. There weren't questions or there were questions I couldn't answer, weight that seemed incredibly difficult to lose, hormones that never quite seemed to cooperate, a future that suddenly included conversations about infertility before I had even begun thinking seriously about having children. I remember sitting there trying to make sense of it all, and part of me felt relieved there was finally a reason, an explanation. Another part of me wondered, why didn't anybody know this sooner? How different might those earlier years have felt if someone had recognized what was happening inside my body instead of assuming everything out was happening outside was them a matter of effort. That diagnosis answered some questions, but it also created others. Because while it explained my biology, it didn't erase the messages. The diagnosis didn't suddenly quiet the playground or the kitchen table or the magazine covers or the comments I had already been carrying for years. It simply gave me another piece of information. And information by itself does not usually rewrite a story. In some ways, it actually made the story more complicated. Because now I wasn't only carrying messages about my body, I was carrying a diagnosis too. And if you less listened to episode 29, you already know how I feel about labels. A diagnosis can describe something real, it can explain, and it can guide treatment. It can answer questions that have gone unanswered for years. But it should never become the title of your life. I didn't know that at 18, and honestly, I'm not sure many eighteen year olds would. Instead, I spent years trying to solve what I believed was a character problem, when so much of it may have actually been a biological one. And even then, biology wasn't the whole story either, because my body wasn't my enemy. The messages I'd attached to it, those were proving much harder to untangle. Years later, something happened that completely surprised me. My body changed dramatically. The mirror changed dramatically, but the story when I looked in the mirror hardly changed at all. Years passed and life happened. There were seasons of trying every new approach that promised to work. Some helped and some didn't. Some left me more discouraged than when I started. Then there was the season when my body actually did change. People noticed, they celebrated, my clothes changed, the number on the scale changed. Photographs looked very different. Everything around me seemed to be telling me that I looked different, except the person looking back at me in the mirror didn't seem all that different. One day I ordered a whole box of clothes online. When the package arrived, everything was too big. Not because I'd clicked the wrong size by accident, because I was still ordering the sizes that I had worn since junior high. I had honestly it had honestly never occurred to me that I needed to shop somewhere else. My body had changed, my assumptions hadn't. There were other little moments too. I'd sit down in a chair with arms and instinctively wonder whether I'd fit between them, and then I'd realized that I already had. The chair had become the question I'd asked myself for so many years that I didn't even realize I was still asking. The first time I flew after losing a significant amount of weight, I quietly wondered whether I'd need a seatbelt extender. I didn't, but what stayed with me wasn't the seat belt, it was the expectation. My body had changed, my story hadn't, and that fascinated me because I realized something I'd never thought about before. Mirrors don't simply reflect bodies. Sometimes they reflect beliefs. If you've spent years believing something about yourself, your circumstances can change long before your story does. I had spent so many years learning to see myself one way that when my appearance changed, the story I believed was so slow to catch up. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this probably isn't just true for people who've struggled with weight. I think that we all experience some version of it. The person who was bullied as a child may still brace for rejection decades later. Someone who grew up believing they weren't smart enough may still hesitate to speak up even after years of success. A man who spent years believing he had to be strong all the time may still struggle to ask for help even after discovering that vulnerability is not a weakness. Our circumstances can change our whole while our stories remain remarkably familiar. Maybe that's why healing sometimes feels slower than we'd like. It's not because nothing has changed. Sometimes it's because we're still learning to see ourselves differently. And that kind of healing does not happen overnight, it happens one truer thought at a time. My body has continued to change over the years. That's part of being human. Bodies change, health changes, seasons change, but the lesson from that season has stayed with me. Healing isn't measured only by what changes on the outside. Sometimes It's measured by learning to tell yourself a truer story, no matter what chapter you're living in. That realization changed the way I look at my body. But it also left me with one final question. If I wasn't born believing those messages, and if my body wasn't actually the enemy, then what would it look like to begin seeing myself the way that God already does? The more I've thought about all of that, I've learned the more I've realized something. I spent years believing my body was the problem, but now I'm not so sure. My the problem wasn't my body. The problem was the story that I had learned to tell about it. Those are very different things because bodies can do amazing things. They heal, they adapt, they survive, they carry us through ordinary Tuesdays and extraordinary tragedies. They recover from surgeries, they grow babies, they fight illnesses, and they keep showing up for us in ways we rarely stop to appreciate. And yes, sometimes they struggle. Sometimes they carry diagnoses, sometimes they carry scars, sometimes they simply don't function the way that we wish they would. But struggling doesn't make a body less valuable, it makes it human. I think about all that my body has carried over the years: PCOS, infertility, diabetes, brain surgeries, weight gain, weight loss, weight gain again, recovery, grief, joy, and hope. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, my body has faithfully carried me through every single chapter, not perfectly, but faithfully. And I don't know that I've thanked it very often. Instead, I've criticized it, compared it, expected it to be something different, measured it against someone else's story. And I'm beginning to wonder what if stewardship sounds a little different than criticism? What if caring for our bodies isn't a punishment for how they look, but gratitude for all that they've carried? What if movement becomes thanksgiving instead of payment? What if nourishing ourselves becomes an act of kindness instead of an act of guilt? What if rest isn't laziness, but stewardship? Those questions have changed the way I think about health. Not overnight, because I'm still learning. I'm still untangling old messages, and I'm still catching myself believing stories I don't that don't deserve to stay. But now when I hear one of those old voices whispering that I'm somehow less because of how my body looks, I've started asking a different question. Who taught me to see myself that way? And is that voice actually one I want to keep listening to? Because not every voice that shaped us deserves to keep leading us. Sometimes healing begins with thanks thanking the people for the love they gave us while quietly letting go of the message, messages they unknowingly passed along. I think that's what I'm learning to do. Not to rewrite my past and not to blame anyone, but to tell myself a truer story, one that has a little more grace and a little more gratitude, a little more curious curiosity, and a whole lot more love and hope. Maybe today isn't looking about looking in the mirror and suddenly loving everything that you see. Maybe it that's too much to ask for one day. Maybe today is simply about becoming curious. Curious about where your story began, curious about which messages you've been carrying for years, curious about whether you're they're actually true. Because here's what I know you were created in the image of God before anyone ever commented about your appearance, before anyone compared you to anything else, before anyone handed you a message about your body, before you learned to compare yourself in a dressing room or a playground or in front of a mirror, your worth was never waiting on the other side of a smaller size, or a clearer skin, or younger features, or a different reflection. Your worth was established long before any of those messages arrived. Maybe that's the truest story of them all. If today's conversation stirred up memories that you haven't thought about in a long time, you're not alone. One of the things I've learned is that healing often begins with paying attention, noticing the message, naming them, and deciding whether they're still true. If you'd like to keep exploring this conversation, we will be creating a resource of some sort to help you trace some of those messages, recognize where they may have come from, and begin replacing them with a truer story. You'll also find previous conversations on identity, labels, belonging, and health because none of those stories stand alone. They all connect. You can find all of the resources available at HealerHopegiver.com. Thank you for spending this time with me today. I know conversations like this bring back memories that maybe you haven't thought about in years. Some of them are warm, some of them are painful, and sometimes they're both at the same time. If there's one thing I hope you take away from today's episode, it's this. You don't have to believe every message you've ever been you've ever been given. Some messages deserve our gratitude, others deserve our curiosity, and some we can quietly let go. Because your body has never been the whole story of who you are. It has simply been a place where your story has unfolded. Next week I want to continue the conversation from a different perspective. Instead of asking how we learn to criticize our bodies, I want to ask what it looks like to care for them. Not because we're trying to earn our worth, but because our health has never only belonged to us. It becomes one of the gifts we give the people that we love, and I can't wait to explore that together with you next week. Until then, be gentle with yourself, be curious, and remember healing rarely begins with having all the answers. Sometimes it begins with asking a better question. I'll see you on Thursday.