From Body Judgment to Body Neutrality: A Path Back to Yourself

There's a moment after divorce when you realize at some point, someone new might see you naked can hit like a wave after divorce. If your first thought is I need to change my body before I’m allowed to date, be touched, or feel confident in myself, you’re not alone and you’re not broken. We’re getting honest about where that fear really comes from, and why it isn’t proof that your body is wrong.

I take a look at how body image after divorce is shaped by messages you absorbed long before you had the critical thinking skills to question them. Beauty standards are not universal, and history makes that painfully clear: what’s been labeled “ideal” swings wildly across cultures and across decades. When the target keeps moving, chasing it can only keep you stuck in comparison, shame, and the feeling that your worth is conditional. I also touch on how the beauty industry is constantly moving the target to keep up the multibillion dollar industry it is, and to keep you constantly feeling not good enough. 

From there, we get practical. I share how radical body love can be the destination, while body neutrality is often the bridge, using factual language to calm judgment and rebuild trust with yourself. You’ll also get two powerful journaling questions to expose the permission you think a different body will grant you, plus concrete steps to feel safer in your skin, from reshaping your social media inputs to practicing being in your body instead of policing it. 

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Transcript

Welcome And The Real Fear

Karin Nelson 0:00

Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast for divorcing and divorced women who want to feel at home in their own bodies again, and stop letting fear decide what they're allowed to want. I'm your host, Karin Nelson. I'm a divorce coach who loves helping women untangle their worth from the standards they were handed and never actually chose. In today's episode, I'm talking about why so many of us are terrified of being seen naked again after divorce, where that fear actually comes from, and how you can start feeling it more at home in your own skin, whether you decide to let somebody in again or whether you're just being with yourself. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. All of you amazing women out there. I am so, so happy that you're here. Today I'm going to talk about something that I don't think I've really covered on the podcast before. I think I've talked about body love, but I'm talking about more like I guess it is body love, just from a different angle. So I take that back. I have definitely talked about this on the podcast, but like different flavor, different angle. But I want to thank you in advance for being willing to go here with me because I think the way we think about our bodies as women, the way we look at our bodies, the way we treat our bodies or talk to our bodies, it can be a very difficult, hard conversation for many of us to have because what is happening internally in our brains and the way we question our bodies, the way we, yeah, like all the things that I just said, right? Like how we talk to it, how we think about it. Very few of us are willing to admit that or say it out loud. And I want to. I want to get it out on the table because I want you to know that you're allowed to love your body exactly as it is. And I'm going to talk about how to do that, why you think about it in the way you do, and how to feel more comfortable in the exact size, skin, shape, all of it that you're in right now. Because I I definitely think that there are many women who go through a divorce and feel this fear that someone new may possibly at some point see their body, right? So I think it's important from the aspect of like understanding that vulnerability of being unclothed in front of someone who hasn't been already in a committed relationship with you for 20 years, right? The this person has probably seen you multiple times that you were married to. So it maybe wasn't as a vulnerable feeling. But then, you know, moving into this new space where maybe you're finding a new partner, maybe you're dating, maybe you're just out there to have fun, or maybe you just want to learn to feel more comfortable looking at yourself in the mirror, being vulnerably unclothed with yourself, which also can feel very scary, especially if we're really mean to ourselves in our head, right? Learning to be okay with what we see and not fear that they are going to be so turned off with what they see. That is like a nervous system fear that's gonna pop up in any situation like this.

Mirror Avoidance And Vulnerability

Karin Nelson 3:50

And so I want to talk about it. So the fear of like having someone else have to see your body and or treating yourself really unkindly when you see yourself in the mirror, like maybe not even being willing to look at yourself in the mirror. Have you ever done that? Have you ever like gone to take a shower, you know, taking your clothes off to get in the shower and purposely avoided looking at yourself in the mirror because you don't want to feel the vulnerability of what am I gonna have to say to myself because I don't like what I see? And I don't want to feel that way because then I feel really bad. Right. So this is all about vulnerabil vulnerabilities. Wow, it's hard to say that word at like five in the morning, which is when I'm recording this. It's all about vulnerability with ourself and vulnerability with other people if that situation comes up for you as you go through your divorce, after your divorce. So it's not actually like a fear of your body, right? It's about what you're going to say or what they might say or think to you or about you, right? And that is not coming from what your actual body shape is. It is coming from the messages that you have absorbed since you were a little girl about what bodies are supposed to look like, what bodies are supposed to be able to do, whether your particular body measures up. Your divorce did not create that fear. All that's happened is it's brought it to the forefront of mind of like, oh, I might get in another relationship, I might have sex with someone else, I might get naked in front of someone else. So I need to like make sure my body looks a specific way, right? And if it doesn't, then they're gonna reject me. But what I really want, I'm trying to point out here, just with this first conversation, is you're already rejecting you by not accepting where you're at physically because of this messaging that you've received, right? Because of this messaging. And it's that messaging that's giving you that feeling of fear to be in front of someone else, to be intimate with someone else, but also the fear of I don't even want to like accept who I am because I don't think that I'm okay. So if we can think

Beauty Standards Are Learned

Karin Nelson 6:20

about it this way, like, have you ever actually just sat down on purpose and intentionally decided for yourself what you think makes a beautiful body? Have you ever done that work intentionally? And I'm not talking about like, oh, it's someone who's 5'10 and weighs 110 pounds and is on all the magazines. Because if you think about that, did you really come up with that on your own? Or were you handed that over time because of the messaging of what you've seen on every magazine since the time you were four years old until now? Right? Like, this is where we're gonna get real meta about how do I know what actually is beautiful? And how do I know it was handed to me on a platter of what beauty standards are? And I'm gonna help you like figure that out because I want to point some things out to you. Beauty standards are not universal, they are many times cultural. But even when I after I explain how it's very cultural, I want you to understand that you still get to decide for yourself what beautiful is to you and how to step into acceptance of where you're at exactly as you are. Okay, so let me talk about this cultural beauty standards. Because I think that this can be really helpful in terms of letting go or just being aware, maybe is a better word, of being aware that you didn't come up with what's beautiful on your own. Like you didn't think of it on your own. It was literally handed to you. So the beauty standard that you've been measuring yourself against, it's not universal. There's no like universal truth out there that's like everyone on earth must meet this thing to be considered beautiful. And if they don't, well, you're shit out of luck, right? It is genuinely different all over the world, all throughout history, and it has, and it's constantly changing, right? So, like in West Africa and some Pacific Island cultures, fuller, more curvier bodies have historically been celebrated as like this ideal beauty standard. It represents health, it represents posterity. In other

A Quick History Of The Ideal

Karin Nelson 8:45

cultures of the world, there is a practice of actively encouraging young women who are like getting ready for marriage, their like marriage age, encouraging them to gain weight because those fuller bodies are seen as more beautiful. But let's go through through a little bit of the history of how things have changed in terms of like what a beautiful body looks like, just in the last like 150 years in the Western culture, right? Because it's drastically changing again and again and again and again and again. And it will continue to do this because there's it's a billion-dollar industry. So we've got the like really curvy Gibson girl of the late 1800s. We've got this like boyish, flat-chested, flapper look of like the 1920s, we've got Marilyn Monroe and her and her curves of the 1950s, and women, women trying to emulate that. Then comes the 1990s, and we've got like this heroine chic supermodel, you know, like uh Kate Moss type look. And then for a little while, we've got this idea of thick bodies, curvier bodies being celebrated in many spaces. And then today, in real time, we have had a swing back to the ultra-thin, like ultra-thin is in. Think like uh Ariana Grande, think Demi Moore, like those types of bodies are like really in, and that's the the wave that we're going for. So I want you to think about this in this way. Like, if the ideal female body has changed this dramatically just in one culture over like a hundred years, that should tell you everything you need to know because that means there is no fixed, correct, and I'm putting that in quotes, right? Correct universal way of having a beautiful body. There never was, there never will be. It is a moving target. And it's not about truth and it's not about what's actually beautiful or what people are thinking is actually beautiful. It's about whatever particular culture or particular time we're in that has decided, oh, this is what makes a woman valuable. And then selling you the correct products to help you achieve this ever-changing and never quite reachable or sustainable standard, right? I mean, look at the amount of time period. It's about 20, 30 year period. So we sell this thing, we get women to that stage, then we change it up and then to the complete opposite, and then we're like, oh, you don't meet that anymore. So now we gotta like change it up again. Here, here's this product to help you get where you're going so that you can meet this standard. So it's an ever-changing cycle that is made to keep you questioning your worth, not seeing your value, but spending all the money to get you to a specific place, right? So here's the thing that I really want you to understand. You didn't go into this consciously choosing the standard that you were gonna live up to or want needed to live up to, right? It was handed to you. Like I said, it was handed to you on a platter the second you were born. It comes through television, it comes through magazine, it comes through Hollywood, it comes through what your family thought about it and what your mom said. Like she might have talked about her body a lot and always being on a diet and always thinking that she wasn't measuring up and you may have absorbed that, right? It came through what you heard at school or every single ad you've seen or heard since childhood up till now, which you're now being bombarded with even more on social media constantly. So long before you ever had critical thinking skills to question any of it, you were just handed, well, this is what beautiful looks like. And once that belief system is installed in your brain, it just runs quietly in the background of your mind for the rest of your life, unless you do the actual work to examine it, to think about it, to question it. So there's an amazing

Radical Love Starts With Neutrality

Karin Nelson 13:05

activist, author, public figure. Her name is Sonia Renee Taylor. She wrote, The Body is not an apology, and she talks about this exact thing. Go look her up. She's amazing. Follow her if she resonates with you. But she describes our negative relationship with our bodies as something that was put there by these systems, right? Not something that we arrived at on our own. And Sonia's hot take is that we need to exhibit radical love for our body that we have right now, exactly as it is. Not because you've earned it by changing it, but just because it's yours and it has carried you through every single day of your life, including the really hard ones. And I totally agree with that idea. I think that is a beautiful uh thing that we as women definitely need to work on embracing. I love the idea of radically accepting it. You're totally capable of doing that. But as a coach, I know that our brain is really, really stubborn at times, right? And so I do think that sometimes stepping immediately to that radical body love can be difficult because we've got that very ingrained neural pathway, right? And so something that I often teach my clients is that starting from a place of neutrality for your body is the first step to getting you to that radical body acceptance. So I'm gonna have you sit with

Two Questions That Change Everything

Karin Nelson 14:40

these two questions that I'm gonna give you, like two main questions. There's some like smaller breakdown questions that come along with it, but two main questions that I want to give you to just get you thinking about this aspect of like accepting your body exactly as it is, so that you can feel safer being with you and safer being vulnerable with someone else if you want, if you choose to at some point. So if you need to write it, write them down in a journal and think about them, journal on them, write on them, just whatever, whatever works for you. But don't like just rush past this because this is really good work that is going to change things for you. Okay, so the first question is what do you think would actually be different for you if your body was different? Like, don't just answer, well, I'd feel better. That may be true, but I want you to go deeper, okay? Would you finally give yourself permission to date? Would you finally wear the thing that you've been wanting to wear but avoiding? Would you finally believe that someone could love you? Would you finally give yourself permission to love you? Would you sit with the specific thing that your brain is promising that you can have on the other side of your body looking different? Answer those questions. And then I really, really want you to answer this honestly. Is having a different body actually required to have any of those things that you just answered? Or is there another path to it that doesn't depend on changing your physical self at all? Because it truly just comes down to the way you think about yourself, the way you talk to yourself, the way you think about your body and what's acceptable and what you think is not acceptable. And then the second question, I know there's a lot of questions in that one, but like the second main question is what is it that you imagine you'll have permission to think and feel about yourself as a person if you love your body? What is it that you imagine you'll have permission to think and feel about yourself if you love your body? Like this one is so opening. This one is so expansive if you will allow it to be, right? Because maybe the answer is permission to feel confident, permission to take up space, permission to be desired, permission to rest, permission to love myself, like whatever comes up for you, maybe all of those things and more. I just want you to notice that you do not actually need to like change anything about your body to give yourself permission to do that thing. You can give yourself that permission right now in the body that you currently have. You do not have to wait.

Practical Steps To Feel Safer

Karin Nelson 17:30

All right, so we're gonna get practical here. I'd love to give you the practical steps that you can implement in your life right now. So actually do these because it will change how you see yourself, how you think about yourself, and how you feel in terms of being with yourself and possibly being with someone else. So, first we want to get curious about where your beliefs came from. Like, literally, I want you to sit down and make a list. Where did you learn that? What do I believe about what makes a body attractive? Where did I learn that? You're likely gonna find that almost none of those ideas actually came from you. It came from somewhere else. And just being aware of that can help you loosen your grip on it. The second thing I want you to do is I want you to practice that neutrality, right? I want you to practice factual language about your body instead of very judgy language. Instead of, ew, my stomach is disgusting, or my thighs are so giant, or my butt is so huge, or I feel fat every second of the day. Fat's not a feeling, by the way. Just wanted to throw that out there. Not a feeling. Uh I want you to get really factual. Like this is my stomach. This is what a human stomach looks like. Some human stomachs look like this. This human stomach carried two pregnancies. Right? We get very facty. Because facts are where we find the neutrality. It's the emotional story outside of that where we feel the judgment. I've talked about this in many episodes. I just talked about it in the comparison episode, but separating like what's the neutral objective fact from the story. That's where we want to get to with our bodies if we want to go into acceptance of them. The third thing I want you to do is I want you to spend time, especially on social media, following people that widen your definition of what beautiful is rather than narrow it. Because if you were to scroll right now, what beautiful is, my guess is any of the influencers that you might follow, they probably look very similar. They probably look a beauty standard that you're holding yourself to that you maybe don't meet. So we want to expand that. Because when you follow accounts that show like real, varied midlife, even or all kinds of bodies, I want you to notice that your brain is gonna try and number one, rank those bodies from better or worse. But I just want you to see that, like once you can separate from that old conditioning, it will stop doing the ranking and it will start accepting more variety as normal, as the normal way that women and the world is, and which will allow you to open up to accepting yourself exactly as you are without needing to change something. The fourth thing I want you to do is I want you to practice being in your body, not just like looking at it. Maybe you don't even look at it, like I said earlier, right? So I just want you to practice like being comfortable looking at your body without judgment, but being comfortable being in your body. Take a bath and like notice your body. Notice the skin, notice the roles, be okay with them if you have them. Maybe you don't. I have some. So just like, I don't know what you look like, but I know that I have roles, so I'm just gonna mention that. Um, stretch, dance around your kitchen without judgment of what you might be looking like in that moment, right? Put your hands on your skin without immediately critiquing it. Caress yourself, love yourself, practice looking at yourself in pictures and like finding something to love about that person in the picture. Practice looking at yourself in the mirror and instead of immediately judging her, find something that you love about her, even if it's one thing that you have to repeat to yourself every single day. This is how we get better at loving the person that we are, the person that we see. And then come back to that physical sensation. Like, what does your body feel like on the inside, and what does your body feel like on the outside? And just get comfortable with being with you without the judgment. And then finally, the last thing I want you to do is when that fear comes up, like if you're thinking about dating, if you're Worried about looking at yourself in a picture, if you're worried about how

Dating Without Auditioning Your Body

Karin Nelson 22:05

mean you can be to you, I want you to know that like you can accept you, you can learn to accept everything about you exactly as you are. It's totally possible. Women do it all every day, all the time. They're learning these skills. But also, if there's a person out there who is right for you, and I'm not saying there's just one because I don't think there are, I just think they there's like, you know, if you know anything about me, I follow this. I I don't date, but because I have a partner. But if I were to date, the dating method that I would recommend to any of my clients who wanted to date, or if they, if I was gonna go date again at some point, it would be the burn the haystack method by Jenny Young. And so I think there are good guys out there who you are not gonna feel like you're auditioning for or you're just an object in their eyes. They're the they're the ones. They're the needle in the haystack, right? And they're out there. They just might be hard to find. But if you're in that space and there's the right guy that's that needle in that haystack, he is not auditioning you against a magazine cover, right? A guy who's doing that is not the right guy. A guy who's doing that doesn't see you as a human, as an individual. He sees you as an object, right? So and he probably also may have some of these same fears. So you get to decide in advance that your body is not something that you owe an apology for. Like that decision comes from you and accepting who you are. And it doesn't happen overnight sometimes. Maybe it does for some people, but for most of us, it's like practicing, it's like getting it's like remembering that we can show up without judgment. It's like doing all of these steps that I just went through so that we can learn to treat ourselves with kindness and then look for that person who's also going to look at us with the same like kindness that we have learned to give ourselves. You're allowed to take up space in your own body without earning it first. You are allowed to be seen exactly as you are right now, as valuable and worthy. This is something that I think is important that we all need to work on. It's something that I still have to work on. And you're allowed to do it for yourself as well. All right, my friends. That is what I have for you today. I love you so much. I will be back next week. Hi, friend.

Coaching Offer And How To Support

Karin Nelson 24:28

I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.k-ar-in-n-l-s-o-n coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.