How to Feel Beautiful and Desirable?
161. How to Feel Beautiful and Desirable?
You have difficulty feeling beautiful and desirable because of your weight, your appearance or your age or another aspect of yourself.
You even find yourself ugly or you have the feeling that you appeal to very few people.
You would like to feel more desirable and (to) like yourself more to have more confidence in the meeting process or in seduction.
This episode also follows on from episode 160 how to make them fall in love with you because desfois you cling to someone who is interested in you because you have little confidence in your ability to be desirable or you have little chance of finding someone you appeal to again.
This episode will give you the first keys towards this process which, like every element of the relationship to oneself, is maintained, requires time and repetition. If you want more episodes on the theme of the relationship to oneself you can listen to episode 28 on self-love and episode 114 on why go through the body to improve the relationship to oneself.
I consciously put it in the feminine because it is generally women who are most concerned. However this advice also applies to men if you feel concerned.
Two aspects to work on
I personally, myself Sandy Kaufmann, had a lot of work to do on this point when I was younger because I had a physique that was different from the seduction standards of my era (I was called Roberto Carlos because of my muscular legs) and also with unrealistic parental standards (if you have wounds linked to the father or the mother, I advise you to listen to episode 157).
I needed to work on this again with the perimenopause because I really felt that I suddenly “aged” and got 10 kg in the teeth (and not pretty fat if I may allow myself the details). I had to support myself again in the way I see and consider myself.
I was actually planning to make an episode on the impact of chronic physical or mental stress on the nervous system because this hormonal change, combined with other challenging events, “re-dysregulated” my nervous system and I had to take more care of it than usual. This could be an episode that concerns you if you have experienced a stressful phase of life, bereavement, depression, illness, burnout. Tell me if this is an episode that would interest you.
The work of feeling beautiful desirable and attractive has for me two sides a little like the 2 poles of a magnet:
- The first aspect is the pole of the magnet that attracts, which is what I am going to talk about in this episode. In short, it is the fact of believing in your ability to be a magnet, that is to say that you are sufficiently beautiful and desirable to attract.
- The second aspect which I will talk about in the next episode will concern the faith you have that magnets with an opposite pole will arrive, namely partners who appeal to you, because you can have no doubt that the overbearing ones and the unavailable people come to you (I talk about unavailability in particular in episode 45) but you can have a lot of doubts that the people who attract you will come towards you.
The obstacles to feeling beautiful
- The first unfortunately, still too common, is fatphobia. That is the fact of not tolerating people who do not correspond to the fashion standard in terms of weight — I say fashion standard because the average French size is a 42 (UK 14) and even people with a size 42-44 are called fat on networks. Overweight people are also seen as less dynamic, lazier, with less willpower, in poor health, whereas this is not necessarily always the case. Personally I really felt it when I put on weight, I saw that people’s gaze on me changed. I talk about it in more detail in episode 77 with Esther Taillifet.
- The second is linked to parts of the body that you have the impression are not attractive: your teeth, your hair, your eyes, your nose, your chest, your freckles, your height, your feet…
- It can also be your way of moving, if you are a bit clumsy (which is a sign of dysregulation of the nervous system by the way), your way of speaking, the sound of your voice.
- It can also be how you showcase yourself, how you feel in the clothes you wear, the haircut you wear…
- It can come from bodily discomforts such as sweating a lot, acne, bad breath, having a lot of bloating, biting your nails…
- And it can also come from unpleasant remarks from the past that are no longer relevant now but that continue to have an effect on your ability to feel beautiful.
The obstacles to feeling desirable
- You can consider that being desirable is a potential danger. If for example you have accumulated past experiences where you felt like an object, typically in the case of rape and abuse (episode 101) or in cases where your body was treated as an object, typically in medical interventions, or if you yourself used your body as an object in the sense that you inflicted a form of suffering on yourself, you were both your own object of desire and your source of suffering if I may put it that way (eating disorders, tattoo, tearing skin, biting nails).
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Key number 1 to getting out: proving the contrary to yourself
Depending on how anchored these patterns and beliefs are regarding your beauty or your ability to appeal, it can be difficult to immediately reconnect with your value.
A first key consists in observing that other realities, different from what you believe, exist AND ensuring that your exposure to these realities that prove your belief is false is greater than your exposure to the realities that confirm your belief.
To this end, you can use social networks in a positive way by following accounts that reflect the reality that contradicts your belief and automatically your personalised feed will show you these new realities.
For this to work you need to feel on an equal footing with the person who proves this other reality to you. For example, if weight is a problem for you and you follow the Ashley Graham account but you find her super beautiful in the face and that therefore compensates, you will need to find another person to follow. Personally I subscribed to accounts of midsize mothers of 45-50 years old with a good belly and it feels good.
Key number 2: showcasing yourself
I personally think that everyone is beautiful and that it is just a question of care and showcasing yourself like the flowers in a garden.
A second way of doing it is to showcase yourself to regularly feel this emotion of feeling beautiful (embodied).
Ask yourself what makes you feel beautiful: a quality garment adjusted to your size, a perfume, make-up, a way of styling your hair. For me, I stopped wearing the jeans that made me look bulgy and it is wearing a jean sézane adjusted to my size.
The more you do it, the more it will be a habitual and common experience for your body, your nervous system, the easier it will be to feel beautiful and desirable.
And if you want to take an extra step, ask yourself what you would do if you already felt beautiful and desirable:
- Wearing sexier clothes or clothes that dare more in colour, in style, in budget?
- Is it taking pole dance or heels classes?
- Treating yourself like a princess in the care you take of yourself, how you eat….
Key number 3: choosing your thoughts
Imagine if someone constantly told you that you are ugly throughout the day, how would you feel?
It is often what we say to ourselves without realising it.
In episode 137 how your thoughts sabotage your relationships I told you that the first thoughts you have are your brain making sense of what you are experiencing at the level of your nervous system and therefore it inevitably has a link with your past wounds, it comes automatically. This system is the same for the thoughts you might have towards yourself.
So the first step is to go through the body to return to your state of security then to choose a helpful thought that recognises your state and helps you to be more benevolent in the way you speak to yourself.
In my example, instead of saying to myself “I have a fat belly” I tell myself “I have put on fat because of my hormonal change and I am on the way to rebalancing all of this”. I know that this works in my case because I feel a calming (a sigh at the body level) and patience in the process.
If you have the feeling that you constantly have a lot of thoughts, can you add to this the meditation to cultivate more self-love every day for at least 40 days (episode 20).
Choosing your thoughts also has its limits. If the love patterns that make you think you are not beautiful or desirable enough are anchored, a work of deprogramming love patterns is necessary to reduce the intensity and frequency of these thoughts.
To give you my personal example I really thought that my physique, my weight was a problem for meeting someone and I do not think I would have got out of it just by choosing my thoughts. I had breakthroughs by seeing examples of the contrary for example during my trip to Brazil because there I was not the only one to have muscular legs and once when I saw a woman in a couple who was overweight and where I really saw her husband looking at her with the eyes of love. The biggest turning point for me was when I worked on the parental judgements I had received about my physique.
Now, even though I have negative thoughts from time to time about my belly, I cannot say that I have a profoundly malevolent discourse towards myself or that I put enormous pressure on myself to lose weight by going on a strict diet (which is moreover counter-productive if you have had chronic stress because when you have chronic stress you have more cortisol and therefore going on a diet would stress you even more, as would intermittent fasting, cold showers..). By putting in place the keys I have proposed in this episode, I manage to feel beautiful and desirable again. I hope that my example will help you understand from what point a deeper work is necessary.
Pour aller plus loin
Si tu as envie d’approfondir le sujet et d’identifier tes propres schémas amoureux (pas que celui en lien avec le fait de te sentir belle) tu as mon livre S’ouvrir à l’amour disponible dans toutes les librairies. Il y a notamment un outil pour t’apprendre à renouer avec ta valeur.
S'ouvrir à l'Amour
Le livre qui va te permettre d'identifier tes schémas amoureux et te permettre d'apprendre les clefs pour construire une relation saine
Going further
And if you would like to do the work on your love patterns through the body and transform how you see yourself, you have the programme Opening Up to Love. And if you feel that this pattern is very deeply anchored in you, you can always take the Day of the Past,, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a psycho-corporeal approach to deprogram the automatisms of the systeme nerveux — including the judgements on your body and your identity — and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir a l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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