Mothers, Daughters & Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves As We Are by Hillary L McBride
(Format used for this read: Print–paperback)
There is a podcast called “The Liturgists” that always makes my mind and heart really sit and process an array of different topics….things like sexuality, emotions, faith, relationships, racism, whiteness, history, and Christianity just to name a few that have been addressed in episodes I have heard…. from ALL sorts of angles and perspectives.
One of the voices I have heard on the show is the author of this book, Hillary McBride.
She is a therapist and I always really value what I hear her say…she is direct, honest, vulnerable and knowledgeable…plus her voice can be very soothing when she speaks spoken word of any sort. (I realize that the tone of her voice has absolutely NO relationship to her valuable wisdom… I just think her voice is super calming… and its one of the reasons I like listening to her 😆)
When I saw that she published this book, I was drawn to it IMMEDIATELY.
I will go into the whys all of that in a sec…let me warn you that this review is gonna get pretty emotionally deep and A LOT personal …but I feel like with this book it HAS to be.
Also…I’m fairly certain this will be a long one too..
So buckle up, yall. Let’s take a journey.
Here is the official summary:
“Discover why women are so often unhappy with their appearance–and how they can learn to love themselves.
When women are told that what is important about us is how we look, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to feel comfortable with our appearance and how we feel about our bodies. We are told, over and over–if we just lost weight, fit into those old jeans, or into a new smaller pair–we will be happier and feel better about ourselves. The truth is, so many women despise their appearance, weight and shape, that experts who study women’s body image now consider this feeling to be normal.
But it does not have to be that way. It is possible for us as women to love ourselves, our bodies, as we are. We need a new story about what it means to be a women in this world. Based on her original research, Hillary L McBride shares the true stories of young women, and their mothers, and provides unique insights into how our relationships with our bodies are shaped by what we see around us and the specific things we can do to have healthier relationships with our appearance, and all the other parts of ourselves that make us women.
In Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image McBride tells her own story of recovery from an eating disorder, and how her struggles led her to dream of a new vision for womanhood–from one without body shame, negative comparisons, or insecurities, to one of freedom, connection and acceptance.”
Confession: I have never ever felt comfortable in my own body.
And if I’m being really SUPER honest, I have never even LIKED my own body.
When I say never…I mean I literally can not remember a time IN MY ENTIRE MEMORIES OF LIFE–even in my childhood—when I did either of those two things.
And I mean EVER.
I don’t think I completely realized how far back this body image problem went until I came across my old diary when we were visiting my parents a couple years ago.
It’s a long story and complicated explanation…but bottom line is this:
My mom had found boxes of things in storage we had no idea she still had. The items in these boxes were from mine and my sister’s childhoods.
It was emotionally jarring to dig thru that box and go thru some of those things…and I have to say the hardest one for me was to find that diary.
I started that diary just over a month after my twelfth birthday…and two months after my dad committed suicide. I wrote in that diary off and on until about my junior year of high school.
THERE WAS A LOT OF EMOTION IN THERE, YALL.
Regular, angsty teen stuff…but dang…a lot of hard traumatic events too.
When I looked at the first few pages of the diary, I realized I was not ready to read it in it’s entirety while at my mom’s house. So, I packed it up into a box of other items (old pictures, poetry and short stories I wrote, random high school memorabilia), brought it back home with us….. and did not look at until over a year later.
Once I finally did dig into those pages, it was like all these feelings and memories came rushing back into my heart and mind like someone opened an emotional floodgate.
This is NOT the place to dig into the dramatically layered dynamics of THAT experience… BUT one very prominent thing that stood out to me as I read thru years of preteen/teen processing….
I always hated my body. And I talked about that A LOT.
I REPEATEDLY insulted how I looked….I called myself fat and ugly…and wrote about how others thru the years also called me those words…I can’t even tell you how many little boys told me that to my face, EVEN THRU HIGH SCHOOL…and even had multiple of my little girlfriends tell me that as well.
It was shocking to me that how I feel in my body NOW in my grown up, middle aged, post c sectioned body is EXACTLY THE SAME WAY I HAVE ALWAYS FELT ABOUT IT.
And I knew it was time I did something about that…because almost 40 years is way too long to have that kind of self narrative.
And I NEVER EVER want to pass along ANY of that shit to my boys.
I recently put myself on a journey to true body acceptance and self love❤
So you can see why this book would be something I would be drawn to as I begin down that complicated road.
In the intro to the book, Hillary reveals that 90% of American women are dissatisfied with their bodies.
YALL. That is ALMOST ALL OF US. 😥
And there isn’t just one reason for that.
Media images. Parental expectations. Societal narratives. Emotional abuse. The list goes on and on and on. She says this in the introduction:
“Longtime struggles with body image and weight loss are rarely about carbs and runway models. These are complex stories about old hurts, ancient scripts, and sometimes past traumas.”
Hillary dives into MANY THINGS in this book…she peels back layers, does extended research, shares mother/daughter case studies, and also gives various methods and processes on how to rewrite body narratives for ourselves and also our daughters.
The chapters deal with things like honesty in who we are, interpreting media messages, feeling power in our body, our relational selves, the role of spirituality in body image, recognizing our own true individual beauty and dealing with painful feelings.
Let me take one quick sec to say THIS BOOK IS NOT JUST FOR MOMS WHO HAVE DAUGHTERS.
I personally do not have daughters—I am a mama to two boys–but I feel like so much of what she says when she mentions things for mothers to do for daughters in this book ABSOLUTELY transfers to things boys need as well.
Also THIS BOOK IS NOT JUST FOR MOTHERS either. While she does speak about mother/daughter relationship, it is not always in the role of you the reader as the mother. It is also about the dynamic of you the reader being the daughter and how your mother influenced your own body thoughts.
And that last sentence there is one of the things that I REALLY have been processing.
My mom and I had plenty of issues during my growing up years…but she was never one of the voices that played into my body shame.
She was always very intentional about telling me and my sister how beautiful and special we were. I was never told I wasn’t pretty enough or needed to be a certain size. She was very careful to only use positive words when addressing my body image.
BUT… ..
While I never heard negative thoughts coming from her mouth about MY body, all I EVER heard her say about HER body was negative.
My mom was this precious, teensy, long- straight haired blonde, green eyed barely 5 feet woman who I thought was beautiful.
But all I heard her say was that she had horrible hair, her nose was too big, her stomach too round, her butt too flat. I never heard her say one nice word about her body.
I can remember looking in the mirror at myself around puberty. I did not favor my mom in appearance AT ALL…I looked like my wavy brunette haired, brown eyed dad. At that time I was also slightly overweight and not petite and small like my mom.
I thought my mom was pretty…and I remember thinking “If she thinks SHE is ugly…then what must I be? Because I look WAY WORSE than her”
(ugh…even typing those words out makes me cringe…because the whole phrase “actions speak louder than words” is just so relevant here…I absorbed every bit of the negative self talk and the positive body talk she tried to pour into me just ran down the drain)
Hillary speaks of several research studies where this VERY thing was evaluated.
In one study she mentions she says this:
“When mothers made comments (whether on purpose or not) about their own weight and weight loss, this was related to a decrease in her DAUGHTER’S value of HER OWN body……even the things moms don’t mean for their daughters to hear, or don’t mean for their daughters to take seriously about herself, DO IN FACT AFFECT HER.”
While I do acknowledge that my mom’s negative self talk of her own body DID affect my own body image immensely, I am not angry, upset with or fault my mom for this.
I think she was doing the best she could with the skills she had.
She grew up with parents constantly criticizing her appearance…so much so I think she eventually believed it. She tried to speak in the opposite way to me and my sister, but how we saw her treat her own body is what impacted us the most.
When I read Hillary’s words about her own different type of body image issues in relation to her mother, it REALLY hit home to me. This is what she said:
“We sometimes get stuck in this emotional drowning experience and she didn’t help me untie the rope from my ankle. She didn’t know how. No one ever taught her. I know that her mother, my grandmother, did not know how, because I learned no one ever taught her. The cycle goes on and on until someone is courageous and supported and privileged enough to make a change.”
During all this processing just on this ONE topic, I was SUPER convicted.
Because I realize I negative self talk myself ALL. THE. TIME. in front of my boys.
I do exactly what my mom did…I lift THEM up, telling them how strong and handsome they are and how special and wonderful I think they are…but then I sit there and complain about my saggy tummy or wobbly arms.
I am going to stop that NOW. I do NOT want to repeat that cycle!!
As you can see, there is a GINORMOUS amount of info and processing in these pages in SO many areas.
Something else Hillary addresses that REALLY had my wheels turning was the concept of “embodiment”. DEFINITELY something else I need to work on!
So often we as women walk around separating what we think of as our “true” selves (things like emotions and personality traits) from our physical body. We almost see them as two separate entities instead of one in the same. We even see our physical bodies just as some thing to “deal with” and control.
How tragic that so many of us struggle to view ourselves collectively and really BE in our body as much as we are in our brain.
“her body is HER, just as much as her thoughts and feelings are her….we ARE our bodies. Our skin is just as much “us” as heartbreak…”
There is TONS more info to treasure, ponder over and grow with in this book.
If you are a woman or are raising little women or have influence on women, you need this on your shelf.
SERIOUSLY.
Whether you have rampant body issues like I do or just want to ensure you have the tools available to pass along a healthy body image to your woman sisters around you, this will be a super valuable resource.
Hillary ends her book with a BEAUTIFUL letter to her future daughter…it is so wonderful and says so many powerful and heartfelt things, I am thinking of rewriting a version to give to my boys.