One of the greatest difficulties in eating disorder recovery is overcoming body image issues. And, while I cannot say that my body image issues are “cured” they are certainly healing. The beginning of my healing of body image issues actually began with a nightmare. Last year in this blog post I shared that I had this dream:
… I dreamed I was in two places at once: on the ground and in the air. On the ground, I was a corpse, a body without a soul. And in the air, I was a ghost, a soul without a body.
Both visions of myself disturbed and disgusted me. In the dream I felt that the separation of my body and soul had to be the result of a great evil since in each form of myself, a corpse and a ghost, I had lost my human nature. Without my human nature, I had lost my ability to truly live. As a corpse, I could not feel or emote love. As a spirit, I could not show or express the love that I felt. Without the union of my body and soul, I could not truly be myself…
At the time of the dream, I was struggling with loving my body. I had heard that to heal body image issues it was important to focus on the good things your body could do. In therapy I was told to make neutral statements about the body parts I struggled with accepting such as, “These are my arms. They help me hug,” While I know these statements are helpful for some people, they were not helpful for me. In my moments of struggling with feelings of “dirtiness”, depression, and worthiness of life, I didn’t care if I could hug or not. Statements such as, “These are my arms. They help me hug,” did no good if I thought or felt (deep down I knew it wasn’t true) that my hugs contaminated everyone with the dirtiness I felt was inside and on me.
But this dream got me thinking that maybe there was something good about my body, and that maybe it was not as contaminated or bad as I had thought. It dawned on me that if this is what death is, the separation of body and soul, then when Jesus died and rose from the dead, he didn’t do it just for our souls. He died and rose for our bodies too. It made sense. After all, Christ rose from the grave body and soul, not just soul. And, if we are going to rise with Him on the last day, then, just as Christ will make my soul clean and will renew it, so too will Christ clean and transform my body. Philippians 3:20-21 confirms this:
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
Through Christ’s life on Earth and through the resurrection of His body and soul after death, God shows us that no matter what has been done to us and no matter what we have done to others or to ourselves, Christ has already made us, our bodies and our souls, clean. He has promised us a perfectly whole resurrected body at the end of the world.
By taking this dream and this scripture in the context of the entire Bible, I realized that all bodies are made by God for the purpose of expressing the love of God in this world and the next. My body and your body have a unique purpose in God’s dream for us on Earth and in Heaven. Without our bodies we cannot fulfill our role of being a part of the body of Christ. It was only when I realized this that I was and am able to let go of the dirty feelings about my body when they come. I hope this helps you too.
Thank you for writing so compellingly.