Or is it “When A Woman Doesn’t Feel Good About Herself, She Won’t Feel Well”? The real question is this: is there a link between how a woman feels physically and her self-worth? The answer is an emphatic YES.
I spend all day long in our clinic sitting across a desk from women listening to their physical complaints. Occasionally I’ll ask, “So, Sarah, tell me how you feel about yourself.” Then the floodgates open. The tears come. They feel down on themselves. They compare themselves with every other woman they see everyday and end up not matching up. They cut themselves no slack. In some there is even intermittent self-hatred. Does this affect their health? Absolutely. Does it affect literally all their relationships? Of course.
The problem begins in the head with a thought. Thoughts are electrical in nature. That’s about it--just a spark in the brain that is very short-lived. So a woman that has a thought like, “I’m such a terrible mother. If I had only read more to Timmy, he wouldn’t have failed 7th Grade math.” So that is the thought. Now a thought, if entertained long enough, can turn into an emotion. Emotions become chemical. Those chemicals start throwing little hormonal switches all over the body and there is a whole cascade of things that begins the downward spiral into the black hole of self-deprecation and self-loathing.
Then it seems that what I call “Comparison Sickness” comes on the scene.
Marvin J. Ashton said, “There is a natural, probably a mortal tendency to compare ourselves with others. Unfortunately, when we make these comparisons, we tend to compare our weakest attributes with someone else’s strongest. Obviously these kinds of comparisons are destructive and only reinforce the fear that somehow we don’t measure up.”
These tendencies must be overcome if the woman is ever going to start feeling better physically. As the brain goes, so goes the body. I feel so strongly about this, and see it so much in my practice that I have teamed up with another expert to start helping women in this area. If readers need more information on the connection between the mind and the body and how it is literally ruining women’s lives, go to www.healingthefemalemind.com. We are doing a series of workshops in Utah to give women some valuable tools to overcome these problems. Most women tell me that they can’t talk to other women about these problems because the other women don’t have the problem. Recently we got a focus group of women together to discuss it all and the participants were astounded that they weren’t the only ones with the same “I-cant’-stand-myself” thinking.
So if you have these self-destructive thought patterns and need to learn how to deal with them on a very practical basis, go to the website and read more to get better both physically and mentally.
www.healingthefemalemind.com
--
Dr. Robert Jones is the Clinic Director at the Utah Wellness Institute, 801.576.1155
www.utahwellnessinstitute.com.