The Connection Between Touch-Deprivation and Body Image



“Fatty, fatty two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door.”
Nursery Rhyme

I was a pretty skinny kid until around the age of 12 or 13. It was then that my sugar craving really kicked-in as a means of medicating away the emotional pain that I wasn’t willing to face. Lots of sugar and chips and little exercise, aside from walking to and from school, meant that my slim figure began to expand. And expand it did.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right at the age when you are becoming self-conscious about your body, which is already changing in multiple other ways with the onset of puberty. All I heard from family was razzing over having become the fat member of the family. And of course, we know how merciless other kids at school can be.

My family was so emotionally unavailable that we never hugged, kissed or touch, and so I already was suffering from touch-deprivation—and feeling completely untouchable and unlovable. Now that I was fat, I saw myself as a completely hopeless case. The body that I was now so keenly aware of as a teenager totally disgusted me. I didn’t want to even leave my room. And I tried everything I could to try and cover-up and hide my shameful body fat. I wore sweaters as much as possible, hoping that they would make me look slimmer. I also learned to walk and stand with my arms folded around my chest and stomach areas as much as possible, again hoping to hide the fat.

But nothing really worked and I felt miserable with shame. Finally in the summer between grade school and high school, at 14 years old, all of the fat fell off me. I entered high school with a 28 inch waist, but the damage was already done. Sure, I felt some better, but I still found my body to be unacceptable. Years of feeling untouchable—even as a thin kid-- combined with two years of being Fatty Fatty Two-By-Four were devastating. I compared my body to everyone else’s and always came up short in terms of physical attraction. I was so touch-deprived that I had become rigid. Even if someone tried to hug or touch me, I froze-up and pushed them away. I became an Ice-King whose very eyes glared “Don’t touch me! I’m unlovable and untouchable! Go away!”

Since high school I have remained mostly thin, but have struggled day in and day out with my weight because sugar is still a means of medicating away the emotional pain which I now believe is tied to my childhood touch-deprivation.

Today we hear a lot about the sexual abuse of children. I think the flipside of that coin is touch-depravation, which is something that is never talked about; and I think that touch-deprivation is every bit as devastating to a child as is sexual or physical abuse. Either way you learn to hate the skin that you are in.

For those of us who were abused either way as children, we need to learn to take our emotional power back by realizing that whether we were touched inappropriately or we were never touched at all, we aren’t to blame. We need to let go of any shame we feel about our bodies and we need to start being kind to our bodies. We need to nourish them with love, not sugar or any form of overeating. We need to be willing to hug and love ourselves. We also need to look at our bodies honestly and learn to love them as they are by believing that we are indeed touchable and lovable in all of the right ways.

Hopefully the more we learn to love our bodies, the better care we will provide for them. We’ll learn to eat better, exercise more, dress them in ways that are flattering and appreciate them as gifts from our Higher Power.

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