Lent 2022 - Week 3 Wednesday

Week 3 - Wednesday
Releasing Self-Criticism
It’s all the ways our culture has made you think…

Self-Criticism is: My stomach is too big, my butt is…
It’s all the critical thoughts about your body that make you hate yourself.

Silence it: Realize that you’ve been brainwashed!

In Brene Brown’s research on shame, she found that while the experience of shame and what triggers it is highly individualized, the one thing that 90% of research participants had in common was body shame.

It’s no wonder that most of us are critical of every little part of our body.

When we talked about shame in week 1, we talked about how we’re heavily marketed to (brainwashed) into thinking…
We’re too fat…our skin is flawed…our lips need to be bigger…our butt…our boobs…

There isn’t any part of our body that Corporate America, through diet and beauty culture, hasn’t convinced us is flawed in some way and needs to be fixed.

And even worse than handing over all our money to fix ourselves is the amount of time and energy we spend obsessing over all the things that are wrong with us and hating ourselves and NOT enjoying life!

It’s time to give the body critic a new job, which we’ll do in weeks 5 & 6 of Lent.
In the meantime, every time the body critic has something to say, remind yourself…
That’s diet culture talking…that’s beauty culture talking…that’s the voice of the patriarchy!
Those systems don’t want you to love yourself!
It’s an act of resistance to love your body!

Let me know what you think in the comments.
Are you one of the 90%? I know I am.