Body Image: Not Just About Your Body | Jessi Kneeland | TEDxOnondagaCommunityCollege

the first time I was sexually assaulted I was seven years old when I was about nine it had different situation different person but the message was the same you want this I can tell then when I was about 11 I developed breasts and became known as what is called fair game for advances from older boys and men and became aware that I was surrounded by danger pretty much all the time I was called things like jailbait more often than I can even count and even though that is such a disgusting term it was always said to me as a compliment later on when I was about 18 I fell into a manipulative and abusive emotionally abusive relationship with a man who blamed me for how much I made him want me now all of these experiences and so many more added up to me that I couldn't think about my body without thinking about danger I considered my body a liability something I needed to hide and protect not just for my own good but for the good of everyone around me and I was left with this sense that all those boys and men who sexualized objectified assaulted and violated my body in various ways over the years that they almost have known something true about me I felt sure that they could just tell that I was the kind of girl you sexualized and objectify that I must have been the kind of girl you violate now I didn't call that belief shame at the time although that is what it was I just called it my identity and I spent years and years with the belief that there was just something about me something that everyone could see just by looking at me that made people want to violate and hurt me when we talk about negative body image we are not just talking about bodies we are talking about our histories both cultural and personal of shame and fear we're talking about the sense that we have to constantly hide and protect ourselves and we're talking about the belief that deep down there is something wrong with us something dark or bad or fundamentally broken I want to tell you a little story if you poke in amoeba once it contracts to defend itself but then after a little while it relaxes and it returns to its original expansive state if you poke it a few more times it stops returning to its original expansive state and it takes longer and longer for it to relax at all if you keep poking into me but eventually it loses trust in its environment it feels unsafe and it shrivels up and it dies the reason I'm telling you this is because we are all exactly like the amoeba when we experience pain and fear we contract both physically and emotionally when something pokes us when something makes us feel unsafe we shrink and we hide and we wait until it's safe to come out plus since we're so much more complex than the amoeba we have the added bonus of getting able being able to blame ourselves for getting poked in the first place so I believe that girls and women in our culture due to the many many ways in which we feel unsafe just being here in our bodies after a certain point most of us lose trust in our environment and my environment I mean both the world at large and our own bodies and when this happens we spend all our time on the defensive we spend all our energy shrinking and hiding and trying not to get poked and the things that make us feel unsafe it's not all about trauma and violence in fact one of the biggest ways that I think women and girls in our culture feel unsafe is based on this idea that there's an expectation for girls and women to earn our sense of love and worthiness and belonging from the time that we are little girls we are fed the programming that other people's experiences of us is not only more important than our own experiences of ourselves but it's also our responsibility the two most important things that a little girl can be called is pretty and nice and you'll notice that neither of those two things actually has anything to do with the little girl herself being pretty is about being looked at and being nice is about making people feel good the highest praise that we can get as a little girl is is that we have given somebody else a positive experience and that messaging it grows up with us and it gets more complex as we become adults but the premise is still the same that in order to be worthy of praise and approval and love that we have to both look the right way and make other people feel good but looking the right way is really tricky because we live in a world with endlessly conflicting beauty standards you have to be sexy but you can't be sexual because that's threatening and inappropriate I mean you want to look hot but I'm still kind of virginal and innocent and you definitely have to be skinny and youthful but still with huge knockers Kardashian lips and a squat booty and all this has to be done without ever inconveniencing anyone with the knowledge that looking this way takes work our bodies and our appearances determine how we come across to a world that feels entitled to a positive experience of us a world that feels entitled to judge us and comment on us and tell us what to do if you're skinny you're gonna be told you need to eat a cheeseburger and relax if you're fat well that's disgusting you need to cover up if you're too soft everyone will tell you to go to the gym and tone those triceps but if you're muscular now you're scary and masculine the message that we grow up with is that other people have both the ability and the right to determine whether we're good or bad whether we're valuable whether we're lovable whether we're worthy and how we deserve to be treated all based just on looking at us and since we live in this environment in which there are so many ways to mess that up that means that no matter who we are no matter what we do no matter what we look like we are constantly getting poked and that is why it is so important to learn how to love your own body it's about reclaiming your autonomy and your self-worth from a world that is always going to passionately disagree about how you should look it's about deciding that your experience of yourself is more important than anyone elses experience of you we have been seeing some recent push back and because of how bad the negative body image epidemic has become among girls and women in our culture we've been seeing some pushback against that negative judgment and hate most of that pushback comes in the form of body positive messages like love your curves and embrace your imperfections and I'm grateful for these messages and for this pushback because I think it's a step in the right direction even if it is just one more person telling you how you should feel about your body I'm grateful for it but but the thing is it just it doesn't work anyone who's ever lost weight using willpower or or transformed her body using grit can tell you that there's always more you can hate there is always some new imperfection that can make you miserable and that's because it's not really about your body that hate is misplaced the things we really hate are so much bigger and more powerful we hate feeling living in fear that our our boundaries will be violated and our our bodies will be violated our boundaries will be ignored we hate that a given structure of our lives as other people telling us that their experience of us is both more important and more true than our own you want this you like that you're overreacting you're being too sensitive am i though am I being too sensitive to the fact that so many people seem to consider my boundaries and my rights optional am I being too sensitive to the fact that I could pretty much be physically overpowered by about half the population at any given moment I mean I'm I'm not saying that everything comes down to physical violence and a saw but the knowledge of who would win if it did as a girl or a woman that knowledge is always there and that's actually one of the reasons that it's so empowering for a lot of women to focus on lifting weights and getting physically strong not feeling vulnerable not feeling breakable this is a huge part of the healing process for a lot of us it definitely was for me in fact I even became kind of obsessed with both getting and looking physically strong the same way a lot of women become obsessed with getting skinny it was my way of protecting myself it was my way of saying to the world of broadcasting that I am NOT weak and that I am NOT the kind of girl you violate the problem it isn't with our bodies the problem is with the stories we believe about ourselves that we think our bodies are broadcasting to the world we blame our belly rolls for exposing the fact that we're secretly bad girls with insatiable appetites and we blame our selling printer fect and unlovable we blame our bodies for betraying our deepest and darkest secrets to the world and unfortunately we live in a world that actually supports that idea a world that is willing to debate whether or not she might have been secretly asking for it when she was unconscious imagine you lived with someone and this person was always getting you into dangerous situations and making you feel unsafe and costing you the love and approval of everyone how would you feel about that person I'm guessing probably not very friendly and in fact I might dare say that you would see that person more as your enemy and that that is how we feel about our bodies that is why we hate them and that is why it doesn't work to just suddenly decide one day to start loving your curves but the thing is the stories we believe our bodies are broadcasting it's not true the only thing our bodies are really broadcasting is that we feel unsafe in our own skin now the the ways in which each of us deals with feeling unsafe in our own skin it varies dramatically from person to person and it's mostly unconscious but we all do it for one person that might mean losing enough weight becoming obsessed with getting smaller and being a smaller target of attack and maybe becoming invisible or even literally disappearing for someone else it might be gaining enough weight that she doesn't have to deal with the same kind of unwanted attention and for someone else it might be fixating on how to fix every single flaw in order to finally look perfect and hopefully deserved someone's love and approval we all do it my personal brand of armor my way of feeling safer in my skin was about physical strength and toughness after my emotionally abusive relationship experience I started defending my boundaries with fire I like to think that some primordial part of my brain knew that if I was going to avoid shriveling up and dying like an amoeba who'd been poked too many times that I was going to have to get angry so angry I got and I took that anger and I went to the gym because I was personal trainer and I built a body that was a body that both looked and felt like it could kick your ass and I was really proud of that unfortunately building a body out of anger is not a super sustainable training method and I ended up getting pretty hurt I her knee ated some discs in my spine and I had to spend the next couple of years trying to get out of pain and heal my body through rehab and bodywork and during that period of my life I was just overwhelmed with the thought of like why is my body so mad at me like I was young and healthy technically but everything hurt all the time and I just I felt tight and tense and bound up and rigid and it just seems like everything falling apart but that injury was the best thing that ever happened to me because in the healing of it I came up against this deep old well of shame and fear that needed to be dealt with one day in particular my my body worker was kind of digging into a muscle somewhere in my groin and it hurts so much and I was sort of trying to distract myself so I said casually like wow it's so weird that it's really tight down there and he looked up at me and he just said in a gentle voice really you can't think of any reason this area of your body would have to work overtime to protect you and all the sudden it just came rushing back the the assaults the manipulation disbelief that there was something about me that encouraged people to violate and hurt me and I I just suddenly clearly saw that I had been wronged it wasn't me versus my body we were on the same team my body all this time had been protecting me from a story that I believed about myself and that was the first moment of a really long journey for me to return to my original expansive state and it was also the very first moment that I ever really truly loved my body and I don't mean love like well now everything's perfect I mean love like love like unconditional trust and support and this understanding everything that I ever thought was a flaw or was a problem was actually a blessing and a gift if you want to achieve a positive body image you you can't get it by just changing your body and you can't get it by just deciding one day to love your curves you have to heal your personal relationship to feeling unsafe you have to shine a light at the deepest darkest stories that you believe about yourself and expose shame for the imposter that it is you have to find trust and forgiveness and you have to recognize that your body has always been fighting for you and not against you when you do that then and only then do you have the option to truly love your body [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 66,376

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Body, Change, Women

Id: cWESkMNPams

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2017