It's hard to ignore the constant media drip feed of the 'perfect' look, and make ourselves look and feel better by getting other people's approval. Here, Sue Thomason explains why you'll be a lot happier when you learn to please yourself!
You are great just as you are!
It’s accepted as normal these days that you are supposed to work towards impressing people. Status is in and we’re all trapped in the act of acquiring the approval of others. For many of us this is our sole reason for living, and every part of our lives is geared towards winning friends and influencing people. Image consciousness and constant effort to improve how we’re coming across and how we seem to other people has become not only accepted as a normal way to live but it seems to be the only way to live.
Approval seeking isn’t just about appearance but you have to admit that a large part of our attempts at impressing others is dedicated to altering our looks in order to ‘fit in’. Magazine articles and TV programmes give us advice on how to look good so that people will find us attractive. While there’s nothing wrong with this in itself and looking good is a fun part of life, what we’re actually led to believe is that attractiveness will give us the life we dream of. It is the key to our happiness.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
You only have to talk to a woman to see the levels of anxiety that trying to fit into the ideal look creates. Conversation will almost always drift towards how awful she thinks she looks and how much cellulite she has or how big her nose or her bottom is. This is often joked about and is the source of much modern comedy and it’s become so prevalent that this has even become a female stereotype. But is it really funny?
The reality is that women wake up in the morning and go to bed at night criticising themselves, feeling imperfect and flawed, hating their bodies, their hair or their faces and unable to escape the twisted anxious feeling of inferiority and alienation that comes from not being ‘perfect’.
Image anxiety can be a destructive force that can not only take over your life but distinctly lower your quality of life. And the worst thing is because this has become so normal, you won’t even notice it! You think life is supposed to be like that!
Like me, please!
And it’s not just appearance – it’s even worse than image consciousness! Yes, you might dress to impress, but you also try to make people laugh, your conversations with others become opportunities to ‘show’ your best self and you work on it, sometimes not even listening to then because you’re too busy thinking of the funny, interesting things that you can say to them that will make them agog and wide-eyed at how great you are. All your relationships become dominated by what other people think of you and how you come across.
How does all this affect us?
By giving us the opposite of what we really want. When we seek approval we want love but the very act of seeking approval stops us from getting it.
Imagine you are talking to a very good friend. You’ve taken great care about your appearance before you met up with her and your feelings while dressing and putting on your make up may have had a competitive edge. You’d hate for her to see you looking a mess. You are enjoying making her laugh and having a good time. She talks to you but you’re not really listening or if you are it’s only because something she’s said has triggered a memory of something you want to say so you wait impatiently for her to finish so that you can show her how funny and clever you are. She laughs and you are rewarded.
But is this really a good friendship? Think about it. You like her because she makes you feel good about yourself. When you’re with her you’re really looking into a mirror and not at her at all. In fact, you hardly know her. It is quite possible that she loves you deeply but you’ll never know that and never feel it because all you’re thinking about is how she makes you feel about yourself. She might love you despite this (and she probably does) but imagine what your relationship would be like if you stopped needing her approval and smashed that big mirror between you and approached her with real curiosity about who she is and what she feels?
Lonely in a crowd?
Approval seeking blocks real love and creates distance between you and other people. You’ve heard of being lonely in a crowd and lots of people feel lonely even though they are part of big groups of friends or families. Approval seeking is responsible for the loneliness that you feel. It blocks friendship and it blocks love. It can destroy relationships and end marriages and create rifts between parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours.
When you seek approval the only person you’re trying to protect is your own view of yourself and that means everything is personal and you have to keep your defences up in case anyone should threaten your self image.
When you stop seeking approval you can look outwards at life and you’ll notice that there’s so much more to life than how you look and what people think of you. When you look outwards instead of focusing on yourself, you begin to live for real.
Sue Thomason
Sue is a qualified and experienced motivation coach, she worked as a journalist for 20 years on women’s magazines, such as Woman, Woman’s Own, Cosmopolitan, Now, Mizz, Closer, B, Elle, Essentials, Chat, Bella, Best, That’s Life and many more. She wrote for The Daily Telegraph about body image and worked as a broadcaster for ITN.
It was during her years as a journalist that she was exposed to the stories and case histories of thousands of women who suffered from compulsive overeating, failed dieting and failed weight control. From this information and her extensive research she developed The Food Philosophy, curing herself after 25 years of overeating and bulimia, then going on to help many others to stop. She now teaches The Food Philosophy full-time and devotes her life to eradicating the problem of overeating and all of it’s side effects for women all over the country.
