I grew up in Brazil, a country where physical appearance is valued far beyond what is healthy. Combine that with an upbringing that left me deeply insecure, and you have the story of many years of my life. I did not just dislike my body. I hated it. And I went to extreme lengths to change it: training, substances and procedures that, looking back, were nothing short of abusive. All of it was in pursuit of a standard of beauty that could never be reached, because it was never designed to be.
Today I have the best relationship with my body that I have ever had. I love it exactly as it is, with its scars, its softness, its cellulite, its wrinkles, everything that is true to it. It is the body that allows me to live a human experience and to meet the world through my five senses.
As the acceptance became real, so did my access to pleasure. I became devoted to my physical body as the way into sensations and experiences that are impossible to put into words. Self-acceptance did not just make me feel better about how I look. It changed how much of life I could feel and how I experienced orgasmicness.
This is what I want to explore here: where our beliefs about beauty come from, what they cost us, and how we can begin to question them.
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Where Beauty Standards Come From
Beauty standards feel personal, as if the voice criticising us is our own. But these ideas are learned. They come through family, culture and media, layer upon layer, long before we are old enough to question them.
It also helps to look at who profits. The beauty and appearance industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It is fair to ask whether a system built on selling solutions has any interest in encouraging us to feel beautiful and enough exactly as we are.
Notice how the ideals keep shifting:
Body fat was admired in the Middle Ages and is avoided in many places today.
A tan is considered beautiful in Australia and Germany, while in Japan, China and Indonesia many people go to great lengths to lighten their skin.
Eyebrows are plucked, tattooed and transplanted, depending on the decade.
Skin bleaching and spray tans sit on opposite ends of the same pursuit.
Bigger and smaller breasts and butts take turns being the ideal.
Gym culture has its own version, with hormones and supplements used to reach a particular look.
If an ideal changes with the century, the country and the trend cycle, it cannot be a truth about bodies. It is a belief, and beliefs can be examined.
This is not only a women’s experience. Many men carry quiet pressure about muscle, size, stamina and being “enough,” measuring themselves against a picture they were never shown how to question.
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The Layers That Shape Us
The conditioning rarely comes from one place. It arrives in layers:
Cultural: what your country or community treats as attractive.
Familial: what was said at home about bodies, weight, food and appearance, including offhand comments that stayed with you.
Media: the images, filters and ideals you see every day, which keep changing so that we keep chasing them.
When we start to see these layers, a useful question appears: who taught me to believe this, and why?
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The Cost of Believing We Are Not Enough
When we are taught that we are not good enough, we pay for it. We pay in money, in time, in pain, and sometimes in our health. Procedures and chemicals can go wrong. The pursuit can also branch out in many directions: burnout, addictions of different kinds, social media comparison, debt, and an inability to be present with what is.
I think of this as a widespread, quiet epidemic of self-hatred. Of course, taking care of the body in a healthy way is good and important. The difference lies in the motivation. Care comes from respect for the body. Fixing comes from believing something is wrong with it.
There is also a cost to our connection with others. When people tie their sense of worth to how they look, what they own or what position they hold, they are building on things that are external and removable. These things cannot hold a person steady, because they can change or be taken away. Feeling “better than” others can sometimes be a way of covering a deeper uncertainty about our own value. When we feel secure in ourselves, we have less need to compare.
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How This Shows Up in Intimacy
The way we relate to our bodies follows us into intimacy. When attention goes to how the body looks from the outside, there is less available for how it feels from the inside. Thoughts like “Do I look okay?” or “Am I doing this right?” pull us out of the experience and into watching ourselves.
Some recent research on body image and intimate experience suggests that self-worth may play an even bigger role than self-monitoring. In other words, it is not only that we get distracted. It is that part of us may quietly believe we do not fully deserve to be there. When we value ourselves, we tend to show up differently: more present, more open, more able to receive.
Our reference points matter too. Many of us learned what intimacy “should” look like from places that offered little healthy guidance, and we slip into roles instead of real contact. A body that feels like a performance cannot rest, and a body that cannot rest has a harder time feeling pleasure.
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Awareness, Not a Fight
You do not need to fight your beliefs about beauty. Fighting keeps you inside the same game. What helps is awareness, and an honest investigation of what you feel and experience.
We stay inside a narrow “beauty zone,” and we never find out what we are missing in other people or in ourselves. The invitation is to let people and bodies outside that zone reveal themselves to you. Doing this slowly rewrites the beliefs that were solidified in your mind. What you begin to experience instead is humanity, regardless of what someone looks like or which body they live in.
Then ask yourself an honest question about relationships. What qualities would truly bring joy and depth to your connection with another person? Most of us answer with words such as joyful, loving, intelligent, trustworthy, committed, loyal, kind and honest. Very few of these can be seen in a mirror. The qualities we actually search for in relating are far deeper than the surface layers we so often get stuck on.
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What Begins to Change
When you stop treating your body as a project, the energy that went into scrutiny becomes available for presence. People often find they feel more at ease in their skin, more able to receive touch, and more connected in their relationships. Pleasure grows from being at home in the body, not from perfecting it.
I will be honest: this is a gradual process, and it does not move in a straight line. Old beliefs can come back on a tired day. Self-acceptance is practised, one honest moment at a time. At the root of it is a simple question: instead of “Am I enough?”, can I ask “How can I love and care for the body I live in?”
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Working With This in Session
You can begin on your own, simply by noticing. Many people also find that having a steady, experienced guide makes it easier to meet old beliefs with compassion, stay with sensation, and move at a pace their nervous system can manage.
If you feel curious about exploring your relationship with your body in a session, you are welcome to get in touch through the website.
With Presence,
Rita Anayê