TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently asked if I would make a video on the subject of body dysmorphic disorder and if I would share my opinion on it. Actually, I’ve been asked that a few times over the years, and I have been hesitant, anxious. I saw that most extremely, oh, in the last 20 minutes as I’ve been preparing to make this video, noticing how unusually anxious I am. I usually don’t get anxious before I make a video.
Well, this is a long windup. The reason is that I sort of had that problem when I was a teenager, and it was very embarrassing and shameful. I think I still hold a lot of shame around it, and I think part of the reason I’ve avoided making a video on it is that to do it fairly and honestly, to do the subject any justice, I have to self-reveal. So here goes.
Um, well, what is body dysmorphic disorder? Well, it’s feeling like some part of your body, some part of your physical self, is not okay, very imperfect, very defective. The idea behind body dysmorphic disorder is that it’s more of like a perceived defect in your body. It’s something that actually technically is fine. There’s really nothing wrong with you according to other people, but you think that there’s something really wrong with you, some part of your body, and you hate it. You try to hide it. You think about it a lot. You obsess about it a lot. Perhaps you want to change that part of your body.
I was also just reading about body dysmorphic disorder. They said things like, what is the cause? Well, the cause is they think there’s probably a genetic cause, and it could be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. What a load of [ __ ]. Also, they said it can be caused by society’s very narrow definitions of an ideal body image. So society’s very restrictive definitions of what attractive and beautiful is, and that a lot of people aren’t just going to fit that. Some people are going to develop body dysmorphic disorder as a result.
And they said, what are the treatments? The treatments are cognitive behavioral therapy and anti-depressants, psychiatric drugs. Well, what I’m going to talk about is why I think this is all pretty much [ __ ]. I mean, some of it, yeah, there’s some validity, like society’s really intense body ideal body image perceptions and how that can really negatively affect people. That did affect me, and I hear that with a lot of other people. Back when I was a psychotherapist, I heard this a lot from people, and not just from women. Yes, of course from women, but a lot from men too.
So me, what was it with me? Well, with me, it was my ears. My ears really stuck out, and I didn’t even know this. I didn’t know that there was anything a little stuck out about my ears until, well, I was in sixth grade. I was 12, and I got teased about it a little bit. My ears stuck out like this, and people said I looked like a monkey. Not very many times, but a few people said it and laughed at me, and I felt very ashamed. It was a very vulnerable time in my life.
And so what I did for several years—I may have photographs of it, I don’t know—but I grew my hair really long to cover my ears. I remember I was playing baseball then, and I used to tuck my ears into my baseball cap so people wouldn’t see how much they stuck out. It was a very unpleasant feeling, a feeling that nobody really could accept me. Certainly that girls weren’t going to like me, that, oh, I would just never fit in. It went on and on.
And what ended up happening—and by the way, I’m going to analyze all this in a minute or two—but what ended up happening as I turned 18, I was finishing high school. It was right at the end of high school. I was going to go off to college in a few months, and I begged my parents. I was like, I don’t want any more birthday presents, no Christmas presents, I don’t need any graduation presents. Just buy me cosmetic surgery. I want my ears tucked in.
And my parents argued a little bit with me, but finally they did it. I went and had cosmetic surgery, and they cut a little wedge out from behind my ears, and they pulled them in and sewed them shut. So it was like my ears got pulled in. And, well, they swelled up for a few weeks, a month maybe, but after that I had normal ears. And guess what? I really wasn’t insecure about my ears anymore. It was like that obsession—’cause it really was an obsession for me—it was done. And I was really actually very relieved about this. I felt like I was better looking. I felt much less insecure. I wasn’t obsessed anymore.
And that’s part of why I don’t really even want to talk about this publicly, because I don’t recommend what I did. I think it’s really sad that I had to do that, that I had to, well, mutilate my body to fit some ideal body image so I could get over my obsession. That the cure for my obsession about my hated ears that stuck out was getting myself cut up by a surgeon.
Well, what’s my analysis? What really caused me to have this body dysmorphic disorder, if you could call it that, by the way, which psychiatry and psychology defines as a mental illness? What caused me to have this so-called mental illness? It wasn’t genetics. It wasn’t a chemical imbalance in the brain. It wasn’t any drugs that I took that triggered me. Oh, sometimes they say ecstasy can trigger body dysmorphic disorder. It wasn’t that for me. Was it society’s narrow view of what beauty is? That was a part of it, but that wasn’t the big thing. The really, the big thing—this is the key for me—was my history of not being loved properly in my family.
I wasn’t loved for me, for myself, by my parents. They didn’t really love me. They didn’t love their own selves. They didn’t love each other. They really didn’t have proper love to give. I got crumbs, little bits and pieces of conditional love here, bits and pieces of attention. Sometimes a lot of attention, but in a fundamental, consistent way, I really wasn’t loved for me. Sometimes I was loved for some image of me: “Daniel’s smart. Daniel’s great in school. Daniel can play sports well. Daniel this, Daniel that.” But not really for the essence of me.
And then there was the abuse, like overt abuse, verbal, physical abuse from my dad, perverse incestuous dynamics with my mom, watching her drink herself into oblivion, my parents smoking marijuana all the time and hiding it and lying about it, and my mom lying about her alcohol abuse. My parents having this subterranean war of hating each other and vying for dominance and control. This was my childhood family system. This was my world. This was the nucleus of my existence, and I grew up extremely insecure, and quite rightly so. I had no idea who I was.
And when the people whose job it was to love me properly and love me the most and teach me what love is didn’t, when I went out in the world, I was so vulnerable. And on top of it, part of the horror of coming out of the family I came from—and by the way, I see this as so common out in the world, normal even—what I went through as a child coming from a family that really didn’t have much of an ability to love or love properly. When I came out of my family, and even when I was in my family, I wasn’t allowed to talk about this. I wasn’t even allowed to think about this. I wasn’t allowed to know this. I had to believe that my parents did love me. That kept my world in some sort of order. It allowed me to keep my mind together.
I think if I had really had to look at what was really going on in my family, who my parents really were, and how they really felt about me, I would have gone crazy. I might have killed myself as a boy, and I didn’t want to do that. Some part of me, some gut part of me loved myself. I don’t know why, but I did. I think I did.
I did, and also I fought for myself. And part of fighting for myself was having to deny the truth of what emotionally was going on in my family system. I needed to put my insecurities somewhere else. I needed to put my self-hatred somewhere else because it was logical for me to hate myself. My parents didn’t love me, really. They hated parts of me. And in order to survive in my family system, to maintain my relationship with my mother and my father, I had to do as they did to me. I had to hate parts of myself—the core of my emotional truth, the beauty of who I really was. I had to hate the gifted parts of me, the special parts of me, the honest parts of me, and I wasn’t allowed to know that.
And so what I did is I took an easy way out. I displaced that self-hatred onto parts of my body—some flawed parts of my body, some defective part of my body. My ears. My ears that stuck out. And when people teased me for it, ah, it was like yes, the world is showing me what my flaw is, and I will hate that flaw with all the hatred that my parents have put on me. And that’s how I felt. And it was safe to hate my ears, my monkey ears. It was safe for me to be ashamed of myself, to despise myself, and to blame my ears for all my life’s problems.
Well, guess what? Coming out of my dysfunctional, crazy family where I wasn’t loved, no surprise, it was very hard for me to make friends. No surprise, it was hard for me to get along in peer groups. No surprise, I wasn’t ready to have any sort of romantic relationship for years. I just wasn’t emotionally capable of it. And I couldn’t blame my family, but I could blame my ears—those hated ears that made people laugh at me, that made people not like me. That’s the reason that I have the problem. And if only I can fix this problem, hide this problem, make this problem ultimately go away, then I will survive. I will persevere. I will thrive. And I will be loved.
And interestingly, a lot of my issue, if you want to call it body dysmorphic disorder or whatever you want to call it, really I was looking to be loved by the world. I was looking ultimately, at the core level, to be loved by my parents. But really, I was looking for a stand-in for them, a replacement for them. I wanted some girl when I was a boy, some young woman when I was a young man, to do and feel all the things for me that my parents didn’t do and didn’t feel.
I have a whole video on parental rescue fantasy. I think it’s one of the best videos, most important videos on my YouTube channel. I’ll link to it in the description box below. That’ll describe it in more detail. But that’s what I was after—some parental stand-in to rescue me from the horror that I went through, to make up for what my parents didn’t. And I saw my ears sticking out as the thing that was getting in my way of allowing this person to love me as I so desperately couldn’t love myself.
And so I fixed my ears. I felt no more insecurity around my ears. And guess what? What I discovered is it didn’t cure the deeper problem. It didn’t fix it at all. It did fix my ears, but it didn’t fix my lack of love for myself. It didn’t fix my denial. It didn’t fix my history of abuse. It didn’t change anything. It didn’t make me love the truth of myself more. That required a lot more work—nothing, nothing that anti-depressants were going to fix. Nothing that cognitive behavioral therapy—fixing my behavior and fixing my thought processes—that wasn’t going to fix it.
I had to go to my core. I had to look at the truth of my family system and figure out how they broke me, figure out how they tried to annihilate me and did annihilate parts of me. I had to figure out how to bring myself back to life. I had to figure out how to get away from them. I had to figure out how to grieve my losses—all these parts of myself that I’d lost. I had to figure out how to really sob and cry and bring these parts back to life. And yes, I had to get away from those people, and I did.
The more I got away from them, the more my feelings came back to life. The more the truth of me came back to life. The more my memories came back to life. The more I could actually see with clarity what had happened to me, what it had done to me, who I had become, and how I had played out my childhood history of abuse on myself through hating my ears and wanting to fix them and thinking that would correct the problem.
So that’s my opinion on body dysmorphic disorder.
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