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An attractive, well-dressed, and recently divorced client told me that she knew she was looking “old, fat and ugly. What man is going to be interested in me now?” she asked. I wondered about the discrepancy between how I saw her and how she saw herself. (I also wondered, as I often do, why these three words so often get lumped together in our culture. But that’s a question for another post.)
I believed that the words had little to do with her physical reality, but were reflective of something that she felt about herself and about the world.
But I have learned that it is pointless to argue over someone’s physical self-perception. Instead, I asked her to tell me what she meant when she said that she looked “old, fat and ugly.” She said, “Unattractive. Invisible. Worthless. Nobody looks at me when I walk down the street.“
I had suspected that the physical experience she was describing was a way that her body and psyche had of capturing the complex feelings she had about herself, her ex-husband and her life. Although she wanted the divorce, and could speak rationally and even lovingly about her ex, she was also sad, confused and angry with both herself and him. But now I had more of a sense of how her feelings about her body connected to these confusing emotions.
“So you feel like no one is interested in connecting with you anymore?” I asked.
“When I was younger, even after I was married, guys would check me out. They don’t do that anymore. Even the construction workers ignore me.” She had been looking down at the floor, but she looked up and gave me a tiny smile. “Those guys have always driven me crazy. I never thought there would be a day when I missed their cat calls and whistles.”
I was struck by the way her smile changed not just her face, but her entire body. I said, “You know, I have a different perspective on what you’re saying. Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course,” she said.
I told her that I thought she might be translating the lack of feedback she was getting from the outside world into something that it was not. “You think the lack of response has to do with how you look, right?”
She nodded, so I went on. “So for you ‘old, fat and ugly’ is a way of explaining why you’re not getting the connections with other people that you used to take for granted. I think it doesn’t have anything to do with how you look, but it might have something to do with how you are acting; or maybe more accurately, what you are communicating with your body language.”
She nodded again. “I know. One of my direct reports at work told my supervisor that she feels like I’m always critical of her. I’m not, but when I asked her about it, she said that I always look like I’m mad at her. And a guy at the bank the other day told me to smile – things couldn’t be so bad.” She was silent for a minute. “But what am I supposed to do? I don’t mean to look this way. But I’m not always happy, and I guess it shows. I don’t have any control over that.”
You are probably familiar with research that says that smiling, even when you don’t feel like it, can actually make you feel better (see below for a link to some of this research). Marcia Linehan, the founder of Dialectical and Behavioral Therapy (better known as DBT) has developed an exercise she calls “half-smiling.” Often done in conjunction with breath work, this technique involves relaxing your face and letting your lips turn up into a tiny half-smile. Linehan suggests that this exercise, which you can do in the privacy of your own room, can help you relax not only your face, but your brain and your body.
I am not a DBT therapist, but I often integrate the half-smiling exercise into my psychodynamic work. What this means is that I am interested in understanding some of the hidden or unconscious meanings behind thoughts, feelings and behavior; but I have also learned that how we act and present ourselves to the world can silently impact those thoughts and feelings. It’s a kind of feedback loop that works simultaneously in two directions at once – our mood impacts our behavior, and our behavior impacts our mood. Talking about and understanding our feelings can change our mood and our behavior; but tiny shifts in behavior can also change how we unconsciously present ourselves to the world, and this can actually change some of our feelings.
I suggested to this client that she try practicing the half-smiling exercise, which includes not only relaxing the face and lifting the lips in a tiny smile, but also breathing in and exhaling evenly for three breaths. At first she did it at home. But gradually she began trying the half-smile as she walked down the street.
To her surprise, she stopped feeling unattractive and invisible. “Men look at me all the time,” she said. “Strangers on the street smile at me.” Her supervisor reported that she had gotten excellent feedback from previously disgruntled staff. “You’ve really made some important changes,” her supervisor told her.
I asked my client what she thought had changed. “I just started smiling,” she said.
For further reading:
DBT® Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition Spiral-bound – October 21, 2014 by Marsha M. Linehan PhD ABPP
Smile! It Could Make You Happier: Making an emotional face—or suppressing one—influences your feelings by Melinda Wenner In The Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-make-you-happi…
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