Trying to explain dysmorphia to people in the only way I can explain it for myself:
• loving your body parts intrinsically, but hating yourself on a whole image.
• it’s feeling beautiful inside and catching yourself for a moment at the wrong angle in a mirror and the neurotic thoughts come back in.
• it’s knowing something was a certain way once and you don’t know if you’ll ever see yourself the same again.
• trying to distinguish which is your real face/body: the mirror, the camera, someone else’s view, is the lighting natural or not, inverted or not - which is your true self? Everyone questions this, but with dysmorphia it’s an uncontrollable mental obsession that we never really know what the “true self” looks like. Our mind changes the perception too often and can morph your mind to think you see changes that aren’t there - negative or positive.
• it’s a battle of self acceptance for what is new, but wasn’t controlled.
• trying to settle your brain when it remembers that something changed.
• people questioning why you’d have any reason to feel the way you do, but they don’t know the feeling in the same way. It’s not the same type of feeling that it is with mental health where it’s the self esteem/worth.
• hoping you can have one day without one of the thoughts breaching.
• saying affirmations that have no affect because of how the brain processed what happened.
• trying not to let dysmorphia ruin any positivity that can happen.
Everyone who suffers with dysmorphia will have their own version of how it affects them, but this is just a few of the ways how I can explain how it affects me.
They’ll be different circumstances to dysmorphia whether it’s gender, medical, body, face etc. My dysmorphia came from an accident.
I’ve only been able to open to one person fully about this because it makes me extremely emotional and I don’t trust many people with my vulnerability.