“For a long time, I had a hard time finding things I liked about myself physically.” Janet Jackson
“How is your creative flow impacted by shame you feel about your body?” Therapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz
“And the only way out of that pain of the absence of self-acceptance was to claw, study, fight, beg and inch my way toward it.” Elizabeth Gilbert
What do actors and other artists say about unhealthy body image attitudes and feelings? How do these affect being confident as a performer, and how can these feelings be changed?
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Controlling young women in entertainment: bodies and finances
Actor | Producer | Writer | Director Amber Tamblyn writes in her op-ed:
“One of Ms. Spears’s most disturbing claims this week was that she was forced to get an IUD to prevent her from having more children; it was not just her money they wanted to control, but also her body, because in entertainment, for young women, the two are almost invariably intertwined.
“I’ve experienced my own version of this dynamic. Growing up, my weight was openly discussed by everyone, from family members to Hollywood creatives.
“I’d grin and bear it, because staying silent — and thin — meant I would get hired again; getting hired again meant people would be proud of me and that I would have the money that was needed to keep the ship afloat.”
From her NYTimes article “Britney Spears’s Raw Anger, and Mine.”
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Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz helps creative people in TV/Film, performing and fine arts with “life struggles, depression, anxiety, creativity, relationships, PTSD, and addictions – to become their own best version.”
In an article on her site about body shame, she asks:
How are you getting in touch with your artistic expression through the messiness of challenging feelings about your body?
How is your creative flow impacted by shame you feel about your body?
At times, your feelings about your body become the obstacles to your creativity.
You feel filled with the imperfections of a figure full of flaws. Perhaps this is the fallout from the way you were abused, bullied, assaulted, or rejected in the past.
Maybe you simply never felt you measured up to societal standards.
All you know now is that your body feels, many times, awkward and not good enough to honor it, to feel its energy, to create from within.
Maybe odd and heavy. Or weak and thin. Or beautiful but not connected to your heart.
Whatever the case and however you came to this perception, your own body feels the shame and unrelenting self-rejection.
So. What now? What do you do when you love sharing your art or performance with your audience but feel held back by a body that feels wounded or unworthy?
EMDR Can Help You Tame Your Body Shame
At some point, the impulse to hide your body can interfere with your creative mind.
You may disconnect with how you feel in your body, leaving yourself unconnected to you as a whole, trapped in an intellectualized place to make your art.
Thus, the solution is to rewire your powerful mind-body connection so you can show up more fully in your creative pursuits.
Art that speaks to others has to come from a whole inner and complete self – with all the richness of your humanity and the beauty of your complex feelings – to tell the story that touches your audience.
EMDR can heal body shame and allow you to become whole again.
- See more in her article
When Body Shame Blocks Creativity: How EMDR Helps
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Janet Jackson: “I don’t see myself as a sexy person…
“For a long time, I had a hard time finding things I liked about myself physically. I’d never look in the mirror…’cause I didn’t really like what I saw.
“One day I looked in the mirror because I wanted to find something that I liked about myself — and I started crying. I didn’t see anything.
“I would always wear clothes that made my butt look smaller because I was so self-conscious about it.”
She was asked where her body issues came from:
“Childhood. My brother Michael used to tease me.
“We’re very close, but he was very adamant about the way I looked, the way I should look. He thought my butt was too big. Maybe he wasn’t completely happy with himself, so he put it on me?
“I’m just guessing here, but looking back now, I know that in adolescence your body changes, and he would always tease people left and right about something.
“When his own body started to change…he became a lot more introverted.”
[From Janet Jackson Tells All, Giant mag. giantmag.com Sept 14, 2006.]
According to Wikipedia, singer-songwriter, producer, dancer and actress Janet Jackson ranks as the ninth most successful artist in the history of rock and roll and the second most successful female artist of all time.
[Photo is from her Instagram.]
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Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the presenters at the Self-Acceptance Summit.
The Summit is produced by Sounds True, and the site notes:
“Best known for her New York Times bestsellers “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Big Magic,” Elizabeth Gilbert is a renowned author, traveler, and fearless spiritual adventurer.
“To kick off The Self-Acceptance Summit, Elizabeth speaks with Sounds True founder Tami Simon about the ever-deepening journey of self-acceptance, and how we are sometimes asked to go against the norms to be truly who we are.”
From the video:
Tami Simon: “Let’s start right with self-acceptance as a topic that you care about – why is this an important topic to you personally?”
Elizabeth Gilbert: “Well, I mean I’ve kind of been a student of it my whole life because I’ve had to be, because its absence – it’s moments of absence – in my life have brought me the darkest pain I’ve ever been in.
“And the only way out of that pain of the absence of self-acceptance was to claw, study, fight, beg and inch my way toward it.”
Read more and find link to recording packages in article
The Self-Acceptance Summit
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Another resource: List of books on Healthy body image
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My original title for this article – “You don’t have to look genetically superior to work” – was inspired by a comment by Katherine Heigl [“Grey’s Anatomy” etc], who said she used to weigh herself “every day at a certain time of day.
“Then I would write down the number and measure my body fat. It wasn’t a healthy way to live.
“Now I can tell if I’ve gained or lost weight just by the way my clothes are fitting.”
She added, “When I see some of the people who are glorified in magazines these days – who are so thin it’s bordering on sickness – I just feel exhausted.
“I would hate to think that young girls in high schools across America think that’s what they’re supposed to look like.”
She thinks “Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry are both in amazing shape. They look phenomenal but they don’t look sick.
“Then there’s Kate Winslet: She’s confident, beautiful, talented and sexy and she owns it.
“Early in my career, I read an interview she gave about how the industry wanted her to lose weight; she basically gave them the finger and said no.
“I remember thinking, I can do that too. I don’t have to look like one of these genetically superior people in order to work.”
[From Glamour mag. interview, June 2007.]
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Sara Ramirez, who also worked as an actor on “Grey’s Anatomy,” says she “always felt like I stuck out..
“I was a lot taller and bigger-boned than most girls my age.
“My mom did a great job of raising me.. But I think she was very critical of her own body and projected that onto me.
“There were times when she felt she needed to lose 20 pounds, and therefore I also needed to lose 20 pounds.
“The mentality was, we should lose weight. As a result, I grew up wanting to look like someone else rather than appreciating the body I had.”
In tenth grade she got cast in her first musical and was “suddenly catapulted into this place where I was getting a lot of attention, admiration and praise.
“I even got accepted to The Juilliard School, a prestigious performing arts school in New York City.
“The school was full of actresses, singers, dancers… and a lot of them had eating disorders.
“For me, the body-image issues came in waves. I would diet hard-core, lose a lot of weight and feel really good about myself. Then I would have moments of unhappiness.
“My way of dealing was to eat and eat and eat; I’d gain lots of weight and feel really crappy. Somewhere along the line, all the self-esteem I’d felt went out the window.
“My weight constantly yo-yoed – at my slimmest I was a size 6; my biggest, a 14.”
In “Grey’s Anatomy” there was a scene for Ramirez (as orthopedic surgeon ‘Dr. Callie Torres’) to “dance around half-naked in my underwear,” she noted.
“Doing the scene helped me get over a lot of my issues. I had to accept my body.”
[Quotes are from article in Glamour, Dec 2006. Photo from article ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Star Sara Ramirez Comes Out as Non-Binary, By Liz Calvario, etonline.com August 28, 2020.]
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Not only women can have body image issues
“No matter what I do, I never feel like I’m strong enough, or muscular enough, or big enough…” Justin Baldoni
The images are from his TED Talk: Why I’m done trying to be “man enough”
The description includes: “Justin Baldoni has a challenge for men: “See if you can use the same qualities that you feel make you a man to go deeper.
“Your strength, your bravery, your toughness: Are you brave enough to be vulnerable? Are you strong enough to be sensitive? Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life?”
A Teen Vogue article notes:
‘A common misconception about body dysmorphia is that it only happens to women, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
‘When asked about his TED Talk on toxic masculinity, Jane the Virgin’s Justin Baldoni told Cosmopolitan last year that he has “muscle dysmorphia,” and that “no matter what I do, I never feel like I’m strong enough, or muscular enough, or big enough, and that comes down to being the super skinny kid that was picked on and bullied.”
‘Justin said he used to put a ton of pressure on himself to do shirtless scenes, but during the last season of Jane the Virgin, he figured out how to give himself a break. With two kids and multiple businesses, he was forced to give up his overly intense workout schedule.
“So what I decided to do was, I’d work out like three weeks, two weeks before [my shirtless scenes] and do my best and didn’t go crazy, and I was also a lot happier this year,” he shared. “I don’t think I personally looked as good as I did in previous seasons, but I think emotionally and mentally, I was a lot happier.”
From article: 7 Celebrities on Coping With Body Image Issues By Sammy Nickalls, Teen Vogue October 29, 2019.
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Melissa Gilbert Shares Her Struggles With Body Image In Hollywood
“While Melissa Gilbert says she never felt pressure to look a certain way as a star of “Little House on the Prairie,” her perspective changed as she ventured into the film industry at age 17. Gilbert details how she had a nose and breast implant surgeries before deciding to accept her body.”
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Kelly Clarkson has been very successful as a singer, including winning Grammy Awards, and admits she struggled with her body image at one time.
In a CosmoGirl! interview, she revealed she became bulimic after she was passed over for a role in her high school musical.
“I thought… If I came back and I’m cuter and thinner… then I’ll get the role.”
Clarkson was bulimic for six months.
“One of my guy friends caught on to it, and I just felt so ashamed and embarassed,” she tells the mag.
“I literally went cold turkey and snapped out of it… I’ve got a butt, I’m Greek – I can’t help that. And I think it’s good for people to see normal.”
[US Weekly usmagazine.com June 21 2007. Photo from her Instagram.]
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Scarlett Johansson has commented about the complex emotional pressures on actors:
“Any time that you are involved in a field that’s revolving around vanity of some sort with a high rate of failure, it can breed a desperation in people that doesn’t always have a happy ending.
“I think that kind of ambition with no end can really make for a lot of nastiness…”
[From article Scarlett Johansson for “The Black Dahlia” By Garth Franklin, Dark Horizons, September 14th 2006.]
For many women who are actors – and performers in music, and modeling or other professions – the “nastiness” can include demands to be size 0 or close to it.
But Johansson – and many of us men who appreciate feminine beauty in a wide range of features and sizes – thinks the really skinny look is “unsexy.”
Celebrating their natural appearance
As a man who isn’t an actor or model, I don’t have an inside experience of body image pressures.
It just seems to me responding to those pressures in unhealthy ways, and being overly obsessed with appearance, can limit your abilities and energies.
Thankfully, women like the above who are so well-known and visible, seem to have chosen to respect and celebrate their natural appearance. And to use ways other than food and dieting to deal with the kinds of emotional challenges many, if not most, gifted and talented people experience.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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