EP. 1 - WHO THIS PODCAST IS FOR
(THE BODY DYSMORPHIA RECOVERY PODCAST)
July 8th, 2022
Welcome back to the Body Dysmorphia Recovery Podcast!
This blog post includes a transcript of an episode of the Body Dysmorphia Recovery Podcast. To listen to the full episode, click the link here.
[00:00:00] Doug: If you feel that body image issues have too much of an impact in your life, if you try and fail regularly to be kind to that image of yourself in the mirror, if just looking at a photo of yourself makes you feel physically terrible, or if all you want to do is be able to love yourself, lean in my friend and get excited.
This is your invitation to a life where you can love your body. Where body image issues don’t control you, where you can feel at peace with how you look and where you can live without that negative self talk draining you every day. This isn’t fiction. It’s a reality that thousands of people have already reached.
If you like this show, you’ll love the powerful resource that’s helping people get to that point. It’s my elite hypnosis audio, The Miracle Mirror. This hypnosis is designed to help you heal that relationship with your reflection, to let go of critical and damaging self-talk, and to learn to love your body [00:01:00] again. So much so that this change might just feel miraculous.
This audio is the perfect next step to being free from that body image struggle once and for all. Once you get your audio of the miracle mirror, you don’t have to dodge your reflection anymore or cringe and apologize every time the front camera turns on. This audio will help you start to heal how you feel about your reflection, and it will help you get those issues out of your life for good.
You can get your miracle mirror audio by going to anywherehypnosis.com. That’s anywherehypnosis.com. Right on the homepage, you’ll see right away where you can get your miracle mirror audio right now. And I’m serious about that. Right now. Pause this podcast and go get your audio today.
Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back. Go to anywherehypnosis.com and get that today because it’s completely free. And this will change how you feel about your reflection for good. Test this audio for yourself, because you’ll never know how [00:02:00] just effective this will be until you see the changes in your own life.
Again, that’s anywherehypnosis.com. One more time, anywherehypnosis.com. Now on with the show.
(INTRO)
[00:02:11] Doug: This is the body dysmorphia recovery podcast, where we explore powerful resources to help you heal body dysmorphia and the harmful eating patterns and help you live your normal life after BDD. Even better, we’re doing it without waiting weeks or even months to get treatment. My name is Doug Sands and I’m your body dysmorphia hypnotist.
On this show, you’re getting cutting edge methods to wipe out BDD once and for all. You’re also getting interviews with leading treatment experts for BDD, body image issues, and disordered eating. We’re giving you tools to work through all areas of body dysmorphia and to get it out of your life once and for all.
Get ready my friend, because this show may change your life for good. Let’s get started.[00:03:00]
(MAIN)
[00:03:03] Doug: Welcome to the body dysmorphia recovery podcast. My name is Doug Sands, I’m the hypnotist and the host of this show. And I’m so excited to be here with you for this very first episode. In this first episode, we’re talking all about a question I get all the time. Specifically, can body dysmorphia be cured?
This is one with a lot of nuance, and we’re going to answer that question in detail and explain all of that nuance, right here. Now, body dysmorphia often comes with accompanying issues like disordered eating or mental health issues, like anxiety or depression. And if you’re facing one of those issues, this episode will be excellent for you as well.
Know that most of what we talk about here with body dysmorphia can be applied directly to those other issues as well. So as we get started, let’s start with the million dollar question. Can you cure body dysmorphia? And the answer you’re gonna get depends on who you ask. Many will say no, that once you have it, you have [00:04:00] it for life.
And I disagree with a few exceptions. I’d say that the people I’ve worked with to get it out of the life would disagree as well. And let’s explore that as well as the nuance of what I mean by that. And as a disclaimer, I want to remind you that this is not medical advice, nor is it a diagnosis. I am not a doctor or professional within the standard medical field.
I’m a consulting hypnotist and I use cutting edge methods with a body of research that is continually growing to make these changes. And if you want to know more about the 125 years of research behind hypnosis, we’re diving deep into that in upcoming episodes. Remember to subscribe because you’ll get these delivered right to you without missing any of those episodes.
So back to it, know that right off the bat, I do not diagnose BDD, disordered eating, or mental health issues. I also technically do not treat them. When someone comes to me, having been diagnosed with these labels by a doctor or an ED specialist, [00:05:00] I don’t work with that issue. Instead, I help them work through underlying issues without having to relive them.
And I help them build a healthy, loving relationship with their body and eating habits. And when that label of body dysmorphia or disordered eating just goes away as well, that’s completely fine by me. We’re working with habits, the patterns, the underlying issues, not that label or that diagnosis. So when working with clients, I don’t use those labels or diagnoses like these because they’re not within my practice. But working with the habits, the emotions and the patterns that keep those issues around as well as healing those deeper issues quickly and effectively, that is within my practice and it’s the major part of what I do.
Now, if hearing the words deeper issues makes you a little hesitant, just relax. Know that this isn’t therapy. Whether you feel fantastic, ambivalent, or even negatively towards therapy, know that therapy and hypnosis are not the same thing.
In hypnosis, you don’t need to [00:06:00] relive those experiences to work through them. Instead, we work often with symbols and habits, as well as how your brain perceives what’s happened to make those changes. This is just one of the things that makes hypnosis so successful. When you work with me, we’re not talking about feelings. And I’m not going to force you to open up and be vulnerable if that’s not what you want.
In fact, I don’t even need to know the exact details of what you went through to help you get that issue out of your life. We don’t need to explore the content of that memory, because we’re working with how your brain stores that memory or habit and getting those difficult emotions, those difficult patterns out of your life for good.
And that brings up a really great point. When we’re talking about BDD and disordered eating, we need to shift how we think about it from calling it a disorder to calling it a set of habits. As you listen to all these episodes, I encourage you to adopt this change of mindset. This issue is not something that you have for life or something that is [00:07:00] set in stone and never changes, but rather it’s a set of habits that your unconscious has built up that perhaps no longer serve you.
In the past, these habits may have served you in some way, and we’ll talk about more on that in just a bit. But adopting this simple viewpoint shift can have major impacts in your life because it’s much easier to change an action or a habit than it is to change an identity. When we’re dealing with a disorder, as we often identify it, we often identify with that disorder even if unwillingly.
We think I am an anorexic, or I am someone with BDD, or I am someone who faces these issues and will face them for the rest of my life. I mean, talk about a disempowering belief. When we believe these things so deeply, it causes our brain to shut down and not even explore how we can actually work through these things in our life.
The power of identity is such that our unconscious lives up to the identities and the beliefs that we give [00:08:00] ourselves. Think for a moment about what other identities you have in your life, perhaps their identities like sister or daughter, or brother or son. Maybe their identities like father or mother or uncle.
Maybe their identities of our occupation like teacher or doctor or mayor or scientist. Identities in our life are so important because our unconscious mind aims our actions to make those identities real. Our unconscious mind thinks, what would a doctor do in this situation? Or what would a good mother do in this situation? Or what would a loving sister do in this situation?
And this can have really powerful effects for us when used well, because that helps us to stay in line with our true values. The problem is this works for negative identities as well, negative labels even. If we believe that we’re ugly or stupid or unworthy, if we identify as an anorexic or as someone who has body dysmorphia and who always will have it, our [00:09:00] mind is going to live up to it.
And it’s also going to change our actions to suit. It’s also going to change how we look at the world. And without you even noticing it, it will start to look for and find reasons that might back up that belief as true. So instead of identifying with the label as in something you are, change that label in your mind to something that you do.
It seems like a very small shift, but this is so powerful. Even if this is something you currently do unconsciously or unwillingly, this can have such an impact in your life. And is honestly the first step to realizing that you can actually change this. To change it from an identity, something that’s set in stone to something you do.
And to understand this, we need to explore Dilts logical levels to get a firm foundation on this. And this is essentially a framework of ideas that can explain this a little bit deeper. This was developed by Robert Dilts and it’s used extensively in tools like NLP or neurolinguistic programming. [00:10:00] So this model is a pyramid with six levels and here’s how it works.
Each of these levels are things that impact how we think, how we behave and how we move through our life. The lower levels on this pyramid are things that are more distant from who we are that perhaps still have an effect on our actions. The higher levels are things that are much closer to our core of our being, closer to who we are as a person.
Now, everything on those lower levels is easier to change than on the higher levels. But the flip side of that is that when you change something at the very high level, everything below, it changes to match. So these levels in order from bottom to top, are number 1, environment, the place you find yourself in. Number two, above that is behavior.
Number three, are your skills or your abilities, essentially what you’re physically or mentally able to do. Above that, we’ve got values and beliefs. Above that near the top, we’ve got identity. And all the way capping the pyramid is purpose. [00:11:00] Some also call this spirituality or higher meaning. Now with this, know that identity is way up there and that’s why changing it outright can sometimes be difficult.
But when we shift it, even semantically into that behavior as something we do, not something we are, that can help break that deadlock in your mind that you may have been struggling with. Changing those actions can and will change that identity later on. And we’ll talk more about that in just a little bit.
When we do change our identity though, everything below it changes as well. I’d love for you to think of a new parent or a new PhD graduate or someone else whose identity has radically changed, and that impacts all of their actions. A really vivid example is a born again, Christian. Perhaps they were a motorcycle gang member and maybe they had a crash, or maybe their wife left, or maybe there was some other dramatic event that shook up their life.
Then perhaps they find religion of some kind and everything changes practically overnight.[00:12:00] Their behaviors change, their environments change, their beliefs change, and that’s because they change at such a high level. They change at that identity or even higher than that of purpose. One day, perhaps even sooner than you’d expect, will get you to that new identity of someone who used to face that issue and who doesn’t anymore.
All that and more is coming up next. Now that we’ve laid the foundation, we need to talk about how these disorders are not an inherent flaw in your mind. Meaning that, your brain isn’t broken in any way. This thing we call a disorder is simply a set of habits that no longer serves you. And to explain that we’ve got to take a deeper look at what habits are.
Habits are simply behaviors that we’ve repeated enough times for our brain to build strong neural connections around this. And this may seem very simple, but this is literally the core of what we’re doing with so many different change works. And whether you use hypnosis or therapy or another method entirely, this is going to be at the core of what we’re changing.
[00:13:00] So our brain is a habit building machine. That’s because essentially our brain is lazy. It loves shortcuts. And that’s because for much of our history, for many of our ancestors, it was important not to have to think all the time because our brain is one of the most calorie intensive organs within our body.
Some studies estimate that almost 33% of the energy we take in every single day has used up just by our brain. That’s literally a third of every single calories we eat. And for primal humans, if you had to go out and hunt all your calories or gather them, you didn’t want to have to expend a bunch of those thinking about things that you did all the time.
So that’s why any action that we repeat becomes a habit in our brain. And our brain has become so good at creating these habits that often it does this without us even knowing. Any action that you repeat will become a habit with enough repetitions and that’s any action. Maybe it’s brushing your teeth.
Brushing your teeth as [00:14:00] a kid might have seemed really tricky. There are a lot of unnatural, fine tuned muscle movements that have to happen to get it to work right. But fairly quickly, it became a muscle memory. And then it became a habit that you just did each and every day. The same can be true with driving a car or learning to cook or playing a piano or a million other activities.
Habits are incredibly powerful in our lives. And I love this quote by Benjamin Franklin that says, the chains of habits are too weak to be felt until they’re too strong to be broken. This is essentially what’s happening. Our mind is creating these habits, and then when we try to consciously change them, it’s really difficult to do so because our mind has literally changed the structure of what’s happening at that neuron level.
Now, since Dr. Franklin’s time, we’ve developed powerful tools that can and do help to break those habits down and build up new ones. It’s so important to mentally make that semantic change from calling BDD or harmful eating a disorder to calling it a habit, and here’s why.
[00:15:00] Disorders are scary. They carry all the weights of authority as well. Maybe you might think, someone in a white doctor’s coat told me that I had this. So it must be true because I respect their opinion, their expertise. Disorders sound like they’re a fundamental problem with your brain. Like you’re missing a lobe or something somewhere.
Often we don’t try to work through something we call a disorder because it’s way too intimidating and where do we even start with that? When we change it to a habit on the other hand, that’s far less scary. Habits can be changed and we know this because we’re doing this all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. Ultimately, whether you call it a disorder, a problem, or just some weird thing that your mind is doing, this issue is just a habit or series of habits that your unconscious mind has gotten really good at running.
And that is so important to understand that your mind is not broken. In fact, your mind is running perfectly. It’s simply running an imperfect program perfectly. And that can be really powerful, especially if you’ve fought your mind, or if you’ve hated that part of [00:16:00] yourself for so long. Know that your unconscious mind is always working to help you and to keep you safe. At least it’s doing what it believes will keep you safe.
And this is the part where we get into those deeper issues. So asking why do we have these habits in the first place? Often, it’s because of trauma. And right off the bat, that word gets a bad rep. And just for a moment, let’s explore what that means without all the cultural baggage.
Just take that and set it aside for a moment. When I’m working with a person, I often explain about big T and little T traumas. Every single person experiences trauma at some level in our lives at some point. Meaning that it might be a really big trauma, what we typically think of as a trauma. It might be the death of a family or a horrific car accident, or a really painful breakup.
These things can cause really drastic results very quickly. And they can traumatize us in many ways. But there are also things called little T traumas, these little traumas that often go [00:17:00] unnoticed. These things that build up over time to eventually have the same impact as one big T trauma event. Little T traumas can be things like someone constantly commenting about your body.
Maybe it’s a parent who tells you to lose weight all the time. Maybe it’s a peer who thinks that you need to change something about your body. Maybe it’s other things that you might have just tried to brush off, but have actually hurt you or made you feel unsafe. Ultimately, anything that hurts or causes pain or makes you feel unsafe can be a trauma.
And when our brain faces a trauma, it often reaches for anything that will help it to not feel that way even if the tool it grabs is not a great tool overall. And when it finds something that works, even if that’s an imperfect tool, it sticks with it because our minds really dislike risk. It doesn’t wanna try something new because what you’ve already got has a proven track record of success.
In the opinion of your unconscious, that thing did its job because your brain is essentially [00:18:00] just trying to keep you alive, and everything else beyond that is second tier in priority. Our brain is a survival machine and our minds believe that it’s better to overreact and perhaps laugh at ourselves later than to underreact and never have that chance to chuckle at ourselves.
And this is why it may reach for things that seem really drastic, really extreme, like body image issues, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders. So, when your unconscious looks at this set of habits that you’ve had an issue with, it’s confused because these habits have a perfect track record of keeping you alive because you’re here, you’re listening to this.
You’ve been alive since the moment you got that issue, but we can do better than this. We can still help your unconscious to achieve all the goals that this set of habits helped to achieve. And to do it in a way that serves all of you, not just part of you. Because the ultimate goal of all treatments that work with these habits is to change how your mind reaches its goals.
When I work with the client and we’re working to get that habit out of their [00:19:00] life, there are two main routes that we can go about it. We can either heal those underlying issues, or we can give the unconscious mind better options to achieve those goals. Options that serve that purpose and do it ecologically so that all the parts of you are happy.
First of all, let’s talk about that underlying issue and about how to heal through it. When we have body image issues or harmful eating in our lives, often it’s because of something that hurt us in the past. And that’s where trauma comes in. Trauma is trauma. If it hurt you, if it made you feel unsafe, or if it made you feel you need to protect yourself, it likely was trauma. And everyone has trauma in our lives and that’s ok.
Trauma is never a sign that we’re broken or flawed. No one invites trauma upon themselves. Any trauma that happened to you is not your fault. And let me repeat that. Any trauma that happened to you is not your fault. It may be the fault of someone who ought to have protected you or the fault of a caregiver who hurt you intentionally.
It may be the fault of teachers for not stepping in and of [00:20:00] peer groups for egging on a bully. It may be the fault of one individual, of several, or of many, and this isn’t to play the blame game because that ultimately doesn’t serve us. A big part of letting go and healing those traumas is being willing to forgive the people who may have hurt you.
Now, I’m not saying that you have to forget the trauma. There’s an old saying that you can forgive the tiger for hurting you, but that doesn’t mean that you have to get back into the cage. Now that we’ve talked about trauma, let’s talk about how our brain finds the solutions that it grabs onto these solutions like body image issues.
Even if it may seem counterintuitive, your unconscious mind picked up those issues whatever they may be, as a way to help you, perhaps they were there to help you fit in, or to avoid being seen by others, or to keep you from trying and putting yourself out there where you’d be exposed to new risks.
Often, when we have that initial trauma, our brain may reach out and grab whatever solution it can find. Even if that solution isn’t the best overall. Perhaps it needed a [00:21:00] tool to distract you or to protect you or to push away negative thoughts. Sometimes, this tool might be reaching for food or for your phone or for other distractions.
Sometimes, it comes about by reaching for other common addictive behaviors. Things like drugs, sex, gambling, and alcohol. The point is that your unconscious grabbed anything really to help it in that moment. It didn’t weigh the options to find the best solution for you in the long term. I found something that worked and it stuck with it, and that’s why it may have been so hard to change that issue consciously in the past because our minds hate change. They like to keep that status quo no matter what, because that old solution had a track record of success, even if it wasn’t perfect. And remember, success for your unconscious mind, typically just means that you didn’t die. At its base level, your unconscious is simply working to keep you alive.
And this podcast is to help you fine tune what that success means so that your unconscious can help you to get there. And that definition of [00:22:00] success may be one of the biggest reasons you may have struggled to change this in the past. For one, you’re fighting against your unconscious. And that may be one of the most difficult things that we can do.
Researchers estimate between 95 and 98% of what we do every single day is entirely unconscious. You are trying to get your unconscious to release something that it believes is keeping you alive. And when your unconscious believes something, it believes it wholeheartedly. Your unconscious is kind of like a giant that trying to work against it through typical means is not going to work.
For another, you may have been attacking the symptom, not the root cause. And here’s a really good metaphor to explain that. If you have a fruit tree in your yard and you want to stop it from dropping rotten fruits on your lawn. Yeah. You can go ahead and knock all the fruits off, but that’ll only work for a little while.
Eventually they’re going to grow back. And if you’d like, you can cut that tree down, but you’re still left with a stump and those deep root systems. To finally be rid of that problem, you [00:23:00] have to take the tree up by the roots. Now, that’s a pretty vivid example, but this doesn’t have to be difficult or painful for you in any way.
The old way of thinking was that this had to be really difficult and that’s why I’ve chosen hypnosis to work through these issues. With the old way of doing things, the unconscious mind would fight you every single step of the way, because it literally believed it was fighting to save your life.
With hypnosis, we first show the mind that it’s completely safe. That’s how we get your unconscious working with us rather than against us. And that’s one of the number one reasons why hypnosis happens so fast. Hypnosis is not magical because if we didn’t fight our unconscious, all of those changes that we make with whatever tools would happen really quickly.
When our unconscious mind works with us, like when we change our identities, the rest of that change can happen in the blink of an eye. So, what happens when we resolve those deeper issues and remove those roots? That gives us a lot of freedom. We [00:24:00] can then build back on top of that to smooth over the ground.
Perhaps we want to plant a better tree or perhaps we want to build something else there entirely. When you dig up the roots, you don’t have those fruits in your life anymore. Your brain simply does not need them. And that’s what makes this so rewarding. After that hypnosis session, or if you’re using a different modality, your brain suddenly realizes that it doesn’t need that old habit.
Sometimes it may take a day or two of using that habit with no clear reason why you’re doing it for that habit to crumble away. Perhaps you suddenly realize one day that it’s been weeks since you felt that badly about your reflection. Or since you struggled with a binge or with restriction. So when those habits are gone and no longer a problem in everyday life, will you be completely free of that issue forever?
Yes and no, and stay calm because there’s more to this. Sometimes, even with hypnosis, a few people might face relapse at some point in their lives. Now this is rare, perhaps one or two people in a hundred [00:25:00] might experience this. Maybe that relapse happens four months or four years or 40 years down the road. So why does relapse happen if it ever does?
Usually, it’s because something in that person’s life shook them up. Maybe it was the death of a family member. Maybe it was a breakup, maybe it was losing a job. Maybe it was moving to a new place. This can also be good things that change in your life that also shake up your life and force you to sift through the pieces, essentially.
Maybe it’s getting married or having a child or finding a romantic partner or accepting a great job. This happens because the brain loves stability and routine. And when that stability is shaken up, it reaches for anything that will help us regain that status quo. This is especially true if there are strong emotions, good or bad that are flooding its system at this time.
When we are flooded with those emotions, we often don’t make the logical decisions that would help us in the long run. Now, relapse often happens because their unconscious hasn’t [00:26:00] forgotten how that old issue helped them in the past. When I work with a client, there’s unfortunately not much we can do to erase all knowledge of that habit.
That’s because your brain loves having options. Remember, your brain is a survival machine and having options equals having adaptability. After that habit is no longer immediately needed, your brain likely puts that habit way back on the storage shelf. And it just lets it collect dust but it doesn’t throw that habit out.
And when life gets shaken up, our brain looks at the options that it has. It sees one solution which may have helped it amazingly well for perhaps the last 14 months. Or it sees that difficult solution way back on the shelf, which even though it isn’t perfect, that kept you alive for 14 years. That’s a simplified way of explaining what happens if a person relapses.
The good news is though, if in the rare case it does happen, we can always work through it with whatever tool that you first used. Because your brain now has a roadmap to [00:27:00] help you get there. And when you have that map, the change happens very quickly. Often, we don’t even need to have another session. Because once that disturbance has settled and everything’s kind of back to normal again, your unconscious mind often reverts back to the better habit naturally.
And over time, your brain also builds up that new habit so much so that it never has to turn back to that old habit. The longer your unconscious uses that better habit, the less likely it becomes it will ever use that old habit again. Eventually the better habit becomes the default. Day by day, month by month and year by year, you’re building that habit stronger and stronger.
One day, it will have the longer track record, and that will be the default option that it always turns to. Now, when I’m working with a new client, there are always a few questions that come up and I want to address those here. Question number one is what if I’ve had this for a really long time? And in the past, that did matter because we had to work against the issue consciously.
We were [00:28:00] fighting, not just what your unconscious believed, but also what was wired into your brain. Because each time we do a habit, our brain changes at a biological level. Those neurons grow. They make new connections. And each time you do that habit, those neurons grow closer together, making it easier for them to fire. The longer that you had that issue, the stronger that connection became.
And that’s why it was so difficult to change in the past. But with hypnosis and with other tools that you’ll hear about in this podcast, that doesn’t matter. In fact, the reason you’ve had that issue for so long becomes the very thing that helps you make that change so rapidly. You’ve tested this so-called solution for weeks, for months, for perhaps even years.
And you’re sick of it. With that powerful motivation, the change we make with these tools is relatively easy. In hypnosis, we’re literally rewiring the brain at the biological level. And if that sounds pretty out there, know that we do this all the time. Anytime we fire a memory or a habit, we’re changing [00:29:00] the structure of our brains.
Simply with hypnosis, we’re doing this intentionally. By showing the unconscious that it’s safe to release that habit, we get it working with us, not against us. And remember, between 95 to 98% of our actions in life are entirely unconscious. Your unconscious mind is a giant. And when we work with your unconscious, that change can seem downright incredible.
So, question number two. What if I learned this from a relative who I’m still around? And this is a really great point to talk about triggers. In the work that I do, we call them anchors. Think of an anchor as an on-ramp to a habit. This is something that tells your brain, Hey, it’s time to do this repeated behavior that we’ve done all the time. It almost always creates these anchors unconsciously.
Now, many of these are very common and perhaps even helpful. Perhaps it’s picking up a toothbrush or sitting down in a car or picking up a good book and settling in with it. Our mind is creating anchors every single [00:30:00] day. And that’s good news because it shows how our mind is so very flexible. And we can change what those anchors mean for us.
Here’s an example of that. I worked with a client not long ago, who developed body image issues after being left by a long term boyfriend. And every time that she thought of him or remembered a memory with him in her house, it overwhelmed her with those feelings. The issue became her mind’s method of getting rid of those painful feelings and not feeling them and not confronting them.
And she got to the point where she was considering moving out for six months, just to wipe that slate clean. And in this case, with just one session, we were able to change what those anchors meant to her. First, we recognize that one dude, no matter how much she loved him, is not the sole arbiter of whether she is or isn’t worthy of love.
That guy is human. He makes mistakes and he clearly did. Then we flipped that script and I helped this client mentally thank this boyfriend for letting her go. And that may seem odd, but this shift completely changed the [00:31:00] script for her. Now, she was free to pursue her own interests that she’d been putting on hold for so long.
She would find someone who valued her with all her quirks and beauties and unique flaws. And she wouldn’t be held back by that person any longer. Now partly, this was about resolution. When difficult things happen, our brain seeks answers. Our brain asks, why did that happen? And how can we prevent that pain in the future?
Partly, it was also about reframing what she’d gone through. Yes, it was a breakup, but it was also an opportunity for freedom. Our perception of the problems in our life often decides how we view what happens around us. So ultimately, can you cure body dysmorphia? Yes and no. It simply comes down to the habits that make up those issues and those we can definitely work with.
So, I’ll leave this up to you to decide. Because ultimately, what you believe is far more important than the methods we use. If you believe that there’s no hope for you, that you’re always gonna have this issue and that there’s nothing you [00:32:00] can do, you’re probably right. If you believe that so strongly, then none of the techniques that I’ve used and that the experts you’re going to hear from use on a daily basis, none of those will work for you because that belief will always be fighting you tooth and nail.
But if you actually did have that belief, I’d have just one question for you. Why are you still listening? The fact that you’re still here, tells me that at least some part of you believes that this is possible. It may be a tiny part of you that’s holding on hope. Or it may be a really big part of you that’s ready to make this change. And that’s all we need because the more you listen to this podcast, the more that hope, that knowledge, and eventually, that certainty will grow. So now I’d love to know, what questions do you have about body dysmorphia or disordered eating or something else that’s related to these issues?
I encourage you to send me your questions because you might just see them answered in future episodes. And most importantly, I highly encourage you to subscribe. Click that subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this, because you won’t want to miss [00:33:00] out on what’s coming next. This is going to be an incredible journey.
And you also won’t want to miss out on the bonus episodes and bonus resources that we’re releasing right here. You likely won’t receive these episodes and everything they contain for you unless you subscribe. So click that subscribe button because you deserve to start that healing process today. And while you’re there, why not leave a review?
Even a one word five star review greatly helps. And this isn’t just for vanity. This is to help more people to find this podcast, because the more reviews we have, the more the platforms push this podcast to people who really do need this information. Now, it’s time for the empowering metaphor. If this is your first time ever hearing an empowering metaphor, know that these are powerful stories that can help us to change, often unconsciously.
While our conscious mind is enjoying the story, our unconscious is taking the underlying lessons it needs and mapping it across to specific issues in your life. All you have to do is just sit back, relax, and enjoy.[00:34:00] So this empowering metaphor is called the polio vaccine. Polio was and is a disease with a long, long history.
The recorded history of polio and its outbreaks goes back as far as the 1860s. And no one could really tell who was going to get it. It seemed to strike at random. Some people, it seemed to hurt a little bit. For others, it would completely change their life. Many kids would be paralyzed for life from polio. Perhaps the most famous victim of polio was FDR, who often used a wheelchair to get around, even as the president.
Now, people thought that this was just something that we’d have to live with forever. That polio would always be around, that we’d always have kids struggling with this, struggling with those paralyzed limbs. Then, in the late 1940s and fifties, people started making advancements on a polio cure.
Some probably thought they were crazy. But they did it and they kept going with it. And starting in 1955, they rolled out the very [00:35:00] first polio vaccine. They’d taken something that was thought to be impossible and found a cure. And now, polio is such a thing of the past that hardly even enters our mind any longer.
Thank you so much for listening into this podcast episode. If you’re tuning in when we first launch, just know we’ve got nearly 40 episodes and interviews already recorded, and it’s simply about working through those in post production, to get them all out to you. I encourage you to listen to the ones that are already out and really enjoy those.
And if you’re listening in the future, just enjoy all of the episodes that are already out there. Lastly, remember to click that subscribe button because you won’t want to miss out on what’s coming next.
My name is Doug Sands, and I help people with body dysmorphia to wipe out BDD, to heal harmful eating and to get those issues out of their life often in as little as two sessions.
Thank you so much for listening in to this episode. And I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
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Like what you heard in this episode? Remember to Subscribe! Click the + button on your favorite podcasting app, because you won’t want to miss out on the bonus episodes that you’ll only get when you subscribe.
Want to watch what happens behind the scenes? Check out the Body Dysmorphia Recovery Podcast on YouTube! Whether for solo shows or guest interviews, you can see everything that’s happening behind the scenes to bring this podcast to you.
Ready to learn more about ending BDD with Hypnosis? Check out Doug’s website! Here, you can learn more about how Doug helps people end BDD, heal harmful eating, and live that normal life again.
You can also check out the Free Hypnosis Audios that Doug has created especially for podcast listeners. Click here to get your Binge Blocker Hypnosis, to help you overcome uncontrollable eating whenever it strikes! And if you’re ready to overcome that struggle with mirrors, photos, and videos, it’s time for The Miracle Mirror. You can find out more about both here.
Finally, if you’d like even more of the Weight Loss with Hypnosis podcast, check out the show on Instagram and TikTok!
To your journey towards life without BDD or body image issues,
Doug
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgp0ylxhJsL2QXsU8IdmQVQ