Unshaming Your Aging Body

❊ This is a guest post by Emma Caronna, coach and co-author of my upcoming book on living a vibrant life as we age.❊

Our bodies and brains are all similar and yet beautifully unique.  Image by Jonas Frei Image by Jonas Frei, a naturalist, landscape architect, documentary filmmaker, photographer, and author, from his beautiful book about walnuts, Die Walnuss: Arten, Botanik, Geschichte, Kultur.

Happily, as we grow older, lots of people report growing more self-accepting and not caring so much about what others think. At age 72, Italian actress Isabella Rossellini says: 

"People never talk about the freedom, the lightness, that comes with aging."

How delightful!

But for many of us, the way we feel about our bodies can be complex and shifting. In some ways we feel lighter and freer, and in other ways we have new and different body image challenges and disappointments to contend with as our bodies change. Looking at ourselves naked (if we dare) can sound something like this:

“Ughhh..I’m looking flabbier. I don’t look the way I used to. I feel bad about how my chin looks these days. And, wait, do I have bingo wings now? And what’s going on with my hair? And look at my posture - ouch, my hip is hurting.” 

Soon enough, we are feeling pretty bad about ourselves. We notice all the ways we’re falling short and the ways we could have done better. As if that’s not bad enough, we can get disappointed with ourselves for not being more evolved - for still caring about what we look like and forgetting everything we’ve learned about self-compassion.

If you ever go through this mess of feelings, I’m sorry. It’s not fun. Wouldn’t it be better if none of us ever has to experience this? And yet we do. 

What does this have to do with brain health? 

Feeling embarrassed or frustrated with your body from time to time is a very normal human experience, and isn’t going to be a problem to your brain health if you can soon shrug it off. But if you go down a rabbit hole of self-criticism or worry about your body, it can be distressing. Our brains are sensitive to the stress hormones that are released when we feel this way, and over time that can begin to put stress on our brains. 

And our bodies are always with us. 

For better or worse we walk around all day long with a sense of how we look. There are photographs, and mirrors, and changing rooms, and bathroom scales and clothes, and doctor appointments to contend with. If you’re critical of your body, it can create a kind of low-grade dissatisfaction or sense of inadequacy that hangs around for years. That’s not ideal for your brain (plus, nobody deserves to suffer because of how they look).

Embarrassment can also get in the way of taking part in activities that would otherwise be great for your brain. Thoughts about our bodies can cause us to, say, avoid the gym, or opt out of dancing at a party, or pull away from intimacy, or decline an invitation to swim in the ocean. 

The fear of being self-conscious about your body can stop you doing the very things that are so good for you.

Thoughts about our bodies can even prevent us getting the medical help we need. It’s harder to go to the doctor (or the dentist, or the optician or audiologist) if we’re feeling vaguely ashamed of how we’ve been taking care of ourselves. Even doctors describe putting off seeing their doctor because they’re afraid of feeling embarrassed.  

Subconsciously, if we feel bad about our bodies, we might even feel less worthy of getting the support we want and need.

What a relief it would be to look at our bodies, exactly as they are, and feel only acceptance and appreciation.

I’ve seen people get there. It’s possible. On a good day I’m there too. 

But for most of us, dropping the shame about our bodies is a journey that evolves over time and may never be entirely complete.

If you feel badly about your body sometimes, welcome to being human! It can be so very challenging to stop believing that a body that is sagging or flabby, or wrinkly or “ugly” is somehow bad or not good enough.

Your body is fine, but it makes sense that we can have trouble believing this. We’ve been absorbing ideas about what makes a body acceptable ever since we were babies, in ways we can’t possibly remember or appreciate. In the same way it’s impossible to grasp how differently we’d think if we have never learned to read, it’s impossible to grasp who we were before we learned a lot of unhelpful ideas about how bodies are supposed to look and function. No wonder it can be challenging to “unlearn” old beliefs about our bodies. 

It’s okay that this takes time to unravel AND you never deserve to feel shame about your body. In my practice I’ve witnessed many clients grow more accepting of their bodies and I know that it’s possible for you too. 

You never deserve to feel shame about your body.

For today, here are a few ideas: 

1. Remind yourself, often, that all opinions about bodies are made up

Image by Magic Studio.

Seven years ago I moved into a rental house with a green kitchen. I never liked that green kitchen. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said it was dreary and old-fashioned and anyway I just didn’t like that shade of green. 

Fast-forward to today, and sage green kitchens are in vogue. I see pictures of gorgeously styled green kitchens everywhere. I look at that exact same kitchen that we’ve had for 7 years and think, “Oh! I see the appeal. I was wrong. Actually, it’s quite lovely and stylish!” 

The kitchen is still the exact same shade of green, but I went from disliking and rejecting it, to admiring and appreciating it. Only because I was exposed to different ideas of what a desirable kitchen looks like.

It’s the same with bodies. Tastes are always changing (witness the rise of the big booty). You can have the exact same body, and different people will have very different opinions about it. Your body is never inherently good or bad, opinions are all made up.

Even if we’re on board with the idea that bodies aren’t inherently good or bad, it’s useful to actively seek out people that have a healthy attitude towards bodies like ours. Just like seeing attractive pictures of green kitchens changed my attitude toward my own kitchen, seeing aging bodies being appreciated and admired helps to balance out all the subtle or overt ageism or appearance-related discrimination that we are exposed to. 

This applies however “bad” you think your body is. No matter how ugly, decrepit, broken or defective, you reckon your body is, there are people who will appreciate you and have a good opinion of you. 

Remind yourself often that all opinions about bodies are made up.

2. Practice gentle correction 

I have two kids, and when one of them is mean to the other, I try to gently correct them, reminding them to treat each other kindly. Sometimes I get cross, or I don’t bother to intervene, but neither of these strategies are effective at encouraging them to change.

We can use the same approach with our own brains. Trashing your body for the way it looks or functions or comparing and rating yourself against others (or your younger self!) can be a habit, like biting your nails or checking your phone. There’s muscle memory in place. If you’ve done it a lot before, you will no doubt have the impulse to do it in the future, maybe on repeat. 

Try and see critical thoughts as an old habit, not truth, and work on gently interrupting and redirecting your attention, just like with a child. Each time you notice yourself putting yourself down, stop. Remind yourself that you have a choice not to continue doing this. 

This doesn’t mean that you never have a single negative thought about your body again, but when it happens, you do your best to interrupt the old habit and direct your attention elsewhere. Like with kids, you might have to do this hundreds of times, and that’s exactly how you change the habit. 

A lot of us have been raised in societies that use shame as a tool to try and make us behave.  Beating ourselves up can seem like it’s inevitable, or somehow necessary. We’re afraid that if we stop doing it, we’ll get complacent or somehow let ourselves off the hook.  

When a client has this concern, I always invite them to experiment. Self-criticism usually isn’t the motivator we think it is, and there are always better alternatives. Instead, practice gentle correction. 

3. Imagine how a pet (or a tree) sees you

Stick with me. It may sound a bit hokey at first, but we can learn so much about body image from nature. 

Nothing in nature cares how you look. Not one bit. To a tree, you simply exist, part of the landscape. 

Nature doesn’t rate or rank you, or treat you differently according to how you look.

Pets love us the same, whether we’re just back from the salon looking all manicured and glowy, or in yesterday’s pajamas with dark circles under our eyes looking droopy and careworn. 

It’s how we behave that matters to animals, not how we look. And in this way, we might argue, they’re much better at judging our value than humans are. 

If you can begin to see yourself through the eyes of a pet, or something ancient like a tree, you can glimpse a different way of seeing yourself. Through these eyes, your appearance just isn’t a big deal. This shift in perspective can help us access a sense of acceptance and peace inside our bodies that was hard to reach before. Give it a shot—imagine how a pet (or a tree) sees you. 

Emma with her Puli dog. Image by Michael Caronna.

4. Come to your own decision about what beauty is

Not everyone cares about beauty, but some of us love it. I’m one of these people who gets so much pleasure from beautiful scenery, or art, or flowers, or the sunlight drifting through the window, and maybe you are too. It’s only natural we’d like our bodies to be beautiful too. 

This can create a bit of a conundrum when you believe that your body is not aesthetically pleasing. 

If this struggle emerges for a client, we often talk about how many artists through time, find beauty in what’s natural and imperfect, rather than the conventionally attractive and flawless. We have a conversation about what they’ve come to believe makes someone beautiful, how these beliefs came about, and whether there are any changes they want to make.

As for me, I want to put more energy into seeing the beauty in all bodies than into perfecting how I look. I want to find beauty in the places and people that might, on first impressions, seem ugly to me, whether that’s in myself or in others. It’s not out of reach. Our old dog was never more beautiful to me than when he was limping and staggering and infirm. 

The Japanese art of kintsugi celebrates the beauty of cracked or blemished things [Image credit: Magic Studio]

A writer I love (in general, but about beauty in particular) is Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue, author of Beauty, The Invisible Embrace. He says: 

“When I think of the word ‘beauty,’ some of the faces of those that I love come into my mind.  

 When I think of beauty, I also think of beautiful landscapes that I know. Then I think of acts of such lovely kindness that have been done to me, by people that cared for me, in bleak unsheltered times or when I needed to be loved and minded.”

This version of beauty has nothing to do with conventional attractiveness. It doesn’t matter if we have blemishes or sagging skin or bad hair. It’s deeper and more soulful, and it’s available to us at any age in any body. 

You get to decide what counts as beautiful, and what you decide will be deeply personal. Come to your own decision about what beauty is. 

5. Allow yourself to be upset about ageism

Recently, I went grocery shopping for the family. I was browsing one of the aisles with my full trolley, when a young couple in a hurry took issue with how I was maneuvering my cart and stopped to berate me for getting in their way. I hadn’t noticed them trying to pass me, and they criticised my eyesight. It’s true that I don’t see as well as I once did. 

Even though I knew I hadn’t really done anything wrong, I felt waves of embarrassment and shame and was close to tears as I rushed to leave the store with my head down. 

Image from the book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse by Charlie Mackesy

This is so often the way with shame; the person who gets treated badly is the one who ends up feeling weak and ashamed. Shame and embarrassment are social emotions. We experience them when we know or expect that other people are going to find us lacking, even if we haven’t done anything wrong. And healing shame often involves letting ourselves truly acknowledge and feel angry about how we’ve been wronged. 

If you are ever, or were ever, judged, teased, belittled, or disparaged for the way that you look, or how your body works, the problem is never, and was never, your body. This is true whether you were teased as a young child, criticized by an insensitive healthcare provider, or demeaned for how you look or act as an elder. It’s true whether you experienced direct criticism, or subtle or inadvertent put-downs. It was always someone else’s wrong, or someone else’s mistake. 

To release shame, we often need to bring it to light. We need to talk about it, get upset about it, make sense of it. Often we need to be upset with people, or society in general, and sometimes, we even need to be upset with ourselves for our part in perpetuating ageism. 

Coaching or therapy can be really valuable with this, but you can also get a long way on your own - for example by talking over your experiences with a supportive friend, or writing about your experiences. If this is something you’re interested in, you can find guidance on therapeutic journaling at the end of this article. 

Feeling upset or angry about ageism never means we need to act angrily. It’s about owning that we never deserve to be shamed, and the shame doesn’t belong to us. Allow yourself to be upset about ageism.

Coach Emma - Coaching Ideas:

1. Does self-consciousness about your body ever get in the way of you doing things you want to do? 

2. What are 3 thoughts, positive or negative, that you often have about your body? How do these affect you? 

3. Think about someone you care about who is older than you, like a parent or grandparent. Does their aging body make it more difficult for you to accept and love them? Notice if you have any internalized ageism, or if you already have the ability to love an aging body.

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