The Evolution of Body Image: How Beauty Standards Have Changed Over Time with Thomas Midgley

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The Evolution of Body Image

Speaker 1  0:00 

Becky, hello, and welcome back to the JenUp Podcast. If you’re struggling with an eating disorder and feeling lost, you’ve certainly come to the right place. Both myself and Becky Stone are former sufferers of eating disorders, and we understand the challenges that you’re facing. So, join us for inspiring educational content, whether you’re seeking support, guidance, or just someone who understands, we are here for you today. We have Thomas Midgley on the show, and it’s great to have him on here. He is the founding director of the Body Image treatment clinic on Harley Street, London. He is a BABCP registered CBT psychotherapist and highly specialised eating disorder dietitian. He has over 20 years experience in the NHS and private sector. Thomas has worked with adolescents and adults in eating disorders, personality disorders, and complex trauma. His special interest is body image and self-esteem, leading to regular contributions in the press, on podcasts, and at international conferences. He is also trained in CFT, schema therapy, DBT, and the nice recommendations for eating disorders. So, welcome today, Thomas on the show. It’s amazing to have you on here. Thank you.

Speaker 2  1:32 

Thanks for having me, Jenny and Becky. Fantastic.

Speaker 1  1:36 

Yeah, I’ve been wanting to have you on for a while now, so it’s great to get started on this. So, we had a really interesting conversation on a previous podcast together, so I thought it’d be really, really good for us to bring that up and talk about it. So really want to talk about your take on the evolution of body image. So if you could explain that a little bit to our listeners, that would be great.

Speaker 2  1:59 

Cool, I mean, the key helpful bit is to probably start with the evolution of the kind of human brain, and then relate that to how that has led to more recently increases in issues with body image. So, key thing to understand is our brain structure is a mammalian or a mammal brain structure, and mammals have had that similar brain structure for around two 50 million years, and humans evolved around 6 million years, and as Homo sapiens around two 300,000 years ago. Now, key component to understand in terms of mammals compared to animals that came before that is mammals have survived through safety in numbers, so if you watch any nature program and watch any mammals hunting, you’ll see them hunting in packs, and the core element that enables them to be effective is the implicit trust that each of the people hunting each of these animals in that pack hunting, trust each other implicitly. They’re going to do their job. They don’t have to question or within that, they know everyone is going to do their job, and that each will have their back if they get in trouble. If you see any mammals who are under attack, you’ll see a similar element where those mammals will then rely on each other to form a safety structure that protects them, so I watched a programmer not so long ago with the kids, where there were arctic walls attacking arctic bison, and the arctic bison form a circle with the horns out, and as long as everyone trusts each other and no one tries to run or come out and attack, then they couldn’t be harmed, and the walls try and antagonise one to come out, they do, they kill it, and if it runs, it kills it. The key point in all of this is that mammals, for two 50 million years, have survived based on the element of growing up in a small tribe or a pack, where your primary way of generating confidence is through trusting and knowing that the people around you have your back, no matter what, so it’s we develop empowerment and confidence through kind of kind of four main main routes. One is through empowerment to care and protect for someone that creates empowerment, like nature’s her mother protecting her children, so empowerment and confidence to protect another, we can get empowerment from feeling people have our back, so that’s our kind of robust, intrinsic sense of value and confidence that all mammals and humans require. And then the second way we can create empowerment and confidence is from comparing ourselves favourably compared to others, which is what we call social ranking, so trying to improve compared to others, self-improvement, embetterment, and the second way through that system, other than pushing ourselves, is to push others down, and that’s through judgment, attack, bullying. There’s four main ways, really, two of them come about from feeling connected. Through trusting powerful relationships, and two come from competing and comparing and attacking and oppressing fundamentally, so we have these four main ways. The interesting shift over the last few 100 years in our society, particularly in the West, is this movement away from having these close relationships. We no longer. If you think from an evolution perspective, we were grown up in a small tribe. Our brain size and its structure has evolved to function in only small groups. We can’t – our brains don’t function in larger group settings effectively, and so within that context, these small safe groups or family structures is what we need to feel secure. We now grow up in situations where we’re not raised by our extended family and everyone else in the tribe. We’re normally solely raised by one or two parents, and a school structure system. There is no tribe around us anymore. Parents are multitasking between what’s most common, at least now, is probably two working parents. We have schools where children struggle to be seen, heard, and valued.

Speaker 2  6:17 

So, within that context, we’re losing significantly that sense of implicit trust not raised by the village anymore, what raised in a way that means that sense of of relationships is becoming less common, which means our only other way to generate a sense of confidence comes from competing and comparing, or putting others down and attacking, and that’s something we’re seeing obviously more and more within our culture, and, and the more recently, as well, is there’s been a shift in what we aspire to have, so that confidence that other system that’s left if we don’t have those strong robust connections is based around social ranking. Now, social ranking is basically what fundamentally is about aspiration. What is aspirational? So, before the industrial revolution, most cultures were highly patriarchal, with men generating social ranking and status from what they could acquire, so what they attain, so it came from how much money they could attain in terms of how much influence they could attain within that, and sadly within that setup, in terms of women’s status was only was based around who she married into her father’s name, and then demanded what was around domestic elements as well, and to some extent appearance. Now there’s been changes, that’s not the general understanding of it, but there are elements that influence that as well. If you look back at the Renaissance period, what was aspirational across the board, across gender, was health, and what represented health was a strong big body that was healthy and resilient. So you had individuals in the artwork that now be considered, let’s say, bigger bodies, and that was the pin-up models, because it represented health, and the opposite of that, that people were trying to step away from, was anyone with any links to what was poor or unhealthy, which was anybody that would be slim in that sense. We had the same element during the 50s, when there was rationing, and what was aspirational was size 12, size 14, where if you could access food that showed, say, status within that sense, and then again, what was aspirational, particularly in women, shifted through 80s, where it became more fitness and muscle orientated, 90s became heroin chic, and then we’re shifting now into, into this kind of different areas, but similar trends are for, you know, kind of moving between those similar trends, and then the next bring to bring in that’s been massive, and all of this is obviously the mention of the internet and social media, so where in the past it’s been quite generic in relation to where people generated this social sense of social ranking from it would have been very individual, so on top of what I described, what you’d have as individuals growing in villages or towns or classes, and they’d be comparing themselves to a very small pool of individuals within that group, and what was aspirational be pretty, would be other than the things I mentioned, be quite geographical, so it’d be, you know, who would you look up to? Who would be the matriarchal woman in that town of society, and what would her attributes could be the main thing young women wanted to be like? What would it be like to be who in that area was kind of the most aspirational male, or might be quite geographical? Perfectly located, what the internet has done is it’s changed all of that. It’s meant that what is aspirational becomes pretty singular across the entire world, which means not only is we’re actually kind of aspiring to have a very, very, very limited thing that’s aspirational. What it means is that we’re then comparing to the most as people aspiration out of the billions of people that are in the planet today, so the different elements that could have created a sense of esteem and worth from aspiration has narrowed down, and the ability to actually reach anywhere near the top has been completely annihilated by our present culture and social media and image focused society.

Speaker 3  10:54 

There’s a lot of pressure there, isn’t there?

Speaker 1  10:57 

Just taking that all in, and yeah. I can see why young people feel pressured, can’t you? Yes,

Speaker 2  11:07 

it’s the particularly over the last two decades we’ve seen a massive.. I’ve seen a significant.. I’ve seen a significant shift in the last two decades with the impact of, yeah, social social media on young people, and in girls, certainly, but I guess the biggest shift I’ve seen is in young men, because that’s that’s where there is seeing a clear increase in appearance playing massive role, which wasn’t there in the past, that also makes sense as well in the context, if you think about the history of men and against social ranking and status, and comparing to what’s aspirational, and it’s about attainment, what can you attain, if you think about, oh, with men or women, I was thinking, if you want to check out what was aspirational, though, me just type, find the latest perfume adverts, and with women, it’s be careful, I say, here a normally somebody, slightly a female, slightly underweight, or maybe more than slightly underweight, doing something that demonstrates, at the moment, I guess, power, but sophistication. This tends to be a female advert with men, you tend to get something, a man in a suit, strutting around with an expensive watch, talking about how powerful he is, how good he feels. There’ll be a city landscape, or he’ll be holding a trophy, and he was scoring goal, you know. And you’ve got the idea of what kind of focus on what’s aspirational for men, and but the difficulty within that is those main elements. A lot of it’s focused on affluence, so it’s the job you have, the money, the car, the watch, the suit, the business, the status, and young men can’t access any of that. The only things left that they can access are basically the acquisition of an attractive sexual partner and appearance, but they link the two together, so they feel they can’t acquire the attractive part because of the appearance, which then drives in young men now, and look at the only things accessible to them. It’s going to be appearance related. They miss the point that, or we don’t understand, they haven’t been given what’s missing in terms of that important element, which is then around basically the connections and their ability to connect and those really important deep rooted relationships and actually in developing those we also develop particular social skills that are incredibly important, but also getting lost.

Speaker 1  13:56 

Well, that makes sense if everyone’s on their phones, and just go back to I had a really interesting question the other day to me, saying, Can you still be underweight and healthy, and I was like, hmm, interesting question, where’s that come from? Like, so what’s your opinion on that?

Speaker 2  14:24 

By the very term, the answer is, if you’re under what the term underweight would relate to under a weight that’s healthy, so the answers tends to be in the question. The answer is no. There are genetic differences for different individuals, but that’s what something like the BMI range is, is there to acquire to basically it’s meant to represent that those at the bottom end of those genetically with a much more petite frame structure and smaller muscle mass and smaller organs for height and the top of the ranges for those in terms of with larger structures increased muscle mass at the top of the range probably useful mentioning a. Little bit about BMI, because it has got a lot of bad rap in the media, but to be clear, within it, it is, it makes sense in terms of from the higher end, because it’s a very simple measurement within that, the higher end it’s measuring weight to height, so when you go above what’s healthy, you can’t separate whether that increases to do with increased muscle mass,

Speaker 1  15:22 

yeah,

Speaker 2  15:22 

or increased fat mass. So, me, I’m in the significantly overweight category, even though I don’t appear that way, but I played a lot of sport in my, in my youth, so that, so that’s an example of that. When someone is under the healthy weight category, it is a very accurate tool, because it’s basically saying that if you’re under that rate, whether you are a petite structural object, what you’re losing is you’re dropping down that is not fat mass, that most of that’s gone by that point, you’re losing organs and muscles that reduce, so as somebody drops below the healthy weight category is the very accurate marker of the severity of damage to somebody’s organs and master’s lethal system.

Speaker 1  16:07 

No, thank you for explaining that. I think that’s really important, even for schools and young people listening to this as well. I just thought it was a really interesting question, and I’m wondering if you know this people, young people, or anyone seeing people on social media looking a certain way and asking themselves, are they healthy? You know, one

Speaker 2  16:25 

other point is useful to bring in here as well. Around 20 odd years ago, or in the past, that the healthy BMI weight range used to be 20 to 24.9 It was only adjusted to take into account the Southeast Asian population, because we were from 20 to 24.9 was designed for white Western European individuals and deemed racist.

Speaker 4  16:47 

The

Speaker 2  16:47 

lower figure was to account for them, so it’s questionable. It’s when individuals, if you’re, if they’re below 20 in their white Western European descent, they’re not actually unhealthy for majority individuals under 20, let alone the lower figures that are now used on NHS websites, and so on and so forth, and most of the clinicians aren’t aware of why those adjustments were put in place. So, actually, a lot of individuals who believe they are healthy because of these weight ranges are actually potentially unhealthy. We’re actually sadly seeing some of our individuals in their 20s with osteoporosis in the clinics with BMIs of 19, and who sadly it’s going to have a severe impact on their quality of life and life expectancy.

Speaker 3  17:33 

Wow,

Speaker 1  17:37 

okay, that’s interesting. And just going back to the point of mentioning about boys, I think it’s really good to talk about that, because I don’t think then we talk about enough about boys’ body image, and kind of I have noticed an increase in boys going to the gym, like just, just everywhere, every gym, like going to just young boys, like just in the gym, in the weights area

Speaker 3  17:58 

together on their phones, so you can’t get on the machines, but that’s their tribing, they’re packing, but there’s loads of them.

Speaker 1  18:08 

Yeah, you know, and I have noticed that, and as you just said, obviously, that what you’ve just said, Thomas, and how it obviously explains everything and what’s going on, but my concern is if one person does it, they just copy, you know, and it’s just, I mean, what’s the solution to that? Where do you start

Speaker 2  18:31 

with, I guess it’s men or women, or I mean, it’s a, it’s a huge question, because it’s about society, the differences. How do you change what is the primary, what is aspirational and desirable in the world? It’s you’ve got billions and billions of pounds or dollars every year being pumped into big business advertising, who are looking to exploit what’s aspirational to sell product, that’s one of the biggest industries, is not the biggest industry there is. So that’s what, if you can align your product with what’s aspirational, then people, when they purchase that product, feel they step a little bit closer and feel better about themselves, but that’s generated through creating inadequacy, so the more inadequacy you can create with themselves, making somebody feel further from what’s aspirational, and then they can buy the product to temporarily feel closer, and then you want to generate more inadequacy, then you can feed into that that machine, and that’s what solution marketing, and that’s that kind of main driver behind that, and there’s a massive problem, somebody was telling me, which I did then look into recently. Have you heard of a book, Careless People, by Sarah Wynn Williams? No, she’s an ex-employee of Facebook Meta, and. She basically wrote a book, basically describing how I need to rather alleging that technology, the technology they were using, in terms of which relates to which is cool, which was trigger-based beauty ads, so what they were looking for is individuals on their phones, they were collecting data when individuals would take selfies and delete selfies, so or any evidence they were using their phones for an emotional cue. If they showed any emotional vulnerability in terms of something that made them feel distressed about their appearance, they could then use that to sell beauty ads within that target that individual sold beauty ads from around that, that’s what she alleged, that this technology was pitched to clients to be able to purchase those advertising spaces. Now, I believe there was a exact in it that the key with the technology is that whether it was being applied or simply tested? I think we’re still being debated because of Meta, I think, was denied that it was being used at all. So, there’s whether if there’s technologies out there being used, being sold, or at least is being tested, it still gives a sense of where we’re at in terms of advertising, marketing, and what individuals are trying to do to target and sell product. So, how do you change that? And then what you’ve got, that’s one element, which is, and then you’ve also got on the other side, what is aspirational. How do you change what is aspirational. If we went, you know, back Renaissance styley, you know, we went back there. What is aspirational then? It tends to be more about health, and there are other elements in histories that, in terms of social ranking, which basically around people’s ability to be effective orators, tell stories to communicate what people are effective, their morals, their moral value, their name was also a credibility, but it’s how do we, how do we change what then is aspirational? How do we kind of change the course of that? We’d have to have big business on board as well, and want to do that, and change that, and that presents a lot of the challenge. You can educate people. Yes, that’s interesting on your side of it. Educate people to become more savvy with what they’re seeing in terms of social media. Yeah, actually, How do you get people to critically analyse the content, know that the images they’re seeing are are edited and filtered, that it’s not reality, and understanding that the commercial psychological motivations behind these companies, and, and the meat, and what it’s there, what the role they’re playing within that, and are they able, at least educators will be able to become more insightful consumers of visual content. Yeah,

Speaker 3  23:09 

it makes so much money. So, are they going to change it? Because you feed off insecurity and there’s money to be made.

Speaker 2  23:18 

Well, this is it. That’s the bit that they’ll always have to, they’ll always be that to some degree.

Speaker 1  23:24 

Yeah,

Speaker 2  23:25 

that’s what the market is, what it based on. The question is, is can the target for aspirational, what’s aspiration be less damaging?

Speaker 1  23:38 

Yeah, that’s a good

Speaker 2  23:39 

question. Within that, because if we want to set we want to educate people to be more conscious and critical that they’re seeing online, that requires them to also have an idea of their values and how they want to be in the world compared to how they been told to be, and that’s one of the key things you do in helping individuals with body image issues and eating disorders, in terms of treatment, it’s helping them realise how who they’ve been told they should be and should look like to be desirable and aspirational, and compare it to how they would like to be and how they want there to be valued and their identity, and helping people find that balance. No one’s going to turn their back on their body image completely, and we won’t want that, but most people don’t want their body misses the primary thing that they’re known for, and their primary sense of identity, great looking, but other than that, yeah, not many people want that, you know, so actually helping individuals be able to build more of their confidence and worth from those other elements and appreciate their body and care for their body and their appearance, and it’s shifting towards that, understanding those values and using that then to support both navigating, and if there’s a large shift in consumers away, then I guess big business will have to follow and. But that’s that is difficult, I mean, it’s even you can even with TV programs, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Do you want young, slim, desirable people you know, or do you want normal people are going to watch, I forgot, I forgot the name of the TV program,

Speaker 1  25:25 

Love Island,

Speaker 2  25:26 

Love Island, yeah, I mean, that’s I was still in Love Island, you have normal people, or do you have the kind of people they have at the moment, and the sad truth is that’s what you know, unless people are going to turn their back on it, if nothing’s going to change, it isn’t going to change, or you can create, you can support businesses to create more of a moral stance, but that I do know people trying to work towards that and trying to set up

Speaker 1  25:56 

sounds good

Speaker 2  25:56 

work to try and target that, but I mean it’s, it’s gonna be, yeah, it’s gonna be a challenge,

Speaker 1  26:05 

but it’s definitely gonna be a challenge.

Speaker 3  26:07 

Yeah, it’s the one thing I really try, and like, in my friendship circle, but also with my, like, with my clients, it is really focusing on building up their core self-esteem, so they’ve got like rhino skin and resilience, that when they are coming up against things, they’ve got the tools to be able to handle it, but also calling out the beliefs, like I’m.. I don’t know how I’ve got any friends, to be honest with you, but it is.. but it is.. it’s calling out the belief system that we’re groomed with, and I want to use it grooming, because soon as you pick up your phone, you’re being groomed with stuff to make you buy their products, and with somebody who’s got ADHD, I’m like, oh, sparkly, let’s spend some money, let’s buy that. I don’t need,

Speaker 1  26:54 

yeah,

Speaker 3  26:55 

but we get great with it. I bought, what did I buy? I spent 30 pounds on deodorant, that fussy deodorant, I’m like, oh, I need that, and he’s coming, and I’m so excited, but somehow I’ve got groomed with these ads that are going to make this product, it’s going to make my armpits amazing, but that’s what we buy into,

Speaker 1  27:16 

I’ve seen so much around skincare, like there’s just so much that has shot up so much, like over the, that’s gone up massively. I just see it everywhere, even when I click off the ad and said I don’t want to see this, I just get another one. It’s like something just popped up, something different, like

Speaker 3  27:34 

I think we are being watched and marketed with, and I do think that lady that you were talking about there is something in it.

Speaker 1  27:43 

Yeah, no, definitely. And kind of Thomas, what you said about what I’m trying to do in schools is teach, and what I’m doing is teach the young children to social media is not going to go away, so it’s being able to like critically analyse the messages, look at what’s been edited, is that AI getting them to understand who funded the research, it was there evidence behind that claim, getting them to kind of like understand it, and kind of just teaching them the tools and how to navigate it better, because it’s not going to go away, so they need to understand how to navigate it in a better way, like going forward.

Speaker 2  28:16 

One thing that’s useful to answer, because Becky were talking about there, kind of, how do you develop emotional resilience? Emotional resilience isn’t born out of what most people think. Emotional resilience, born out.. I was talking before.. emotional resilience comes out of growing up in an environment with stable, strong, stable, meaningful relationships. In that sense, so there’s kind of key things a child needs in their early environment, in order to regulate their emotions effectively, in that context, now it’s difficult to retrofit that when someone hasn’t had those key needs met, and the difficulties, most people don’t know they haven’t had the key needs met. There are a couple of key things you can tell. First off, is if someone becomes an individual at a young age, which is something, as our culture kind of looks as a positive thing. Individualism in children is not a positive trait at all. It’s from a psychology perspective, it sends off huge warning signals. If someone has become, it become more individual at a young age is because they’ve either a given up on their primary caregivers, and in terms of that, or b they learn to trust, and then through abuse have given up and lost trust in that. There’s a third one as well, which is they may have learned to prioritise other needs over their own because they’re worried about the emotional stability of their primary caregivers, e.g. if mom and dad are struggling to manage one of their other siblings, or mom and dad are struggling to manage their own needs, a child is going to not want to burden their parents with their own struggles and talk to. About their own issues, because they don’t want to add to what they’re seeing, is you know, parents who are struggling, or siblings that need the care more. You’ve got three main ways, but at its core, if a child learns to be is learning, you know, it’s becoming individual, just then that is not a positive thing at all, because that then drives some of these issues we’re talking about. We’ve created a society which is promoting individualism, which is absolutely what you don’t want. You want what’s called interconnection. You want individuals who are trusting and reliant on their small, stable, and meaningful group within there, where they feel comfortable. They’ve learned it’s a positive experience to share their emotions and share their distress, and it’s through that that you create emotional resilience through learning to share and talk about difficult feelings and tolerate them in that process. The opposite is where individuals have learned to block emotions, so they don’t feel they bury and block, bury and block. They’ve learned not to tell people because it’s not safe or it doesn’t give them any benefit, so they suppress, suppress, suppress until they can’t suppress anymore, and then they kind of, it comes out, so you’ve got individuals that nothing, nothing, nothing, then rage, or nothing, nothing, nothing, panic, or nothing, nothing, nothing, over control, crying, where they can’t regulate their emotions effectively, from a psychology perspective, it’s probably a technical, but you then get fusing of emotions, which is if sadness gets fused with shame, it means you, they can’t connect with adversity, because they can’t process sadness without feeling shame and disempowered. So that then drives depression, or you get anger fused with shame as well, so they can’t assert themselves or express themselves, because that feels shameful, and that again is particularly more prominent in our culture in women, because as a patriarchal society, we teach our girls historically not to assert, not to push themselves forward, otherwise they’re called bossy, or they’re told to be patient, where we kind of encourage historic boys to be more assertive within that context, so you can have that fusing of emotions, but all of these things contribute to creating blocked emotions, and then the only way then to feel good is through social ranking and achieving or putting others down,

Speaker 3  32:22 

really. really interesting, isn’t it? It all comes back down to attachments,

Speaker 5  32:28 

does, and then your losses that you get,

Speaker 2  32:30 

and what you typically get in someone with an eating disorder is that element I described there. They tend to be into people that come individual at quite a young age, they’ve learned not to trust their primary caregiver, well, they’re predominant caregivers. They learnt to be quite independent, so their only way to generate self-esteem is is through competing and comparing and finding ways that were aspirational in society, which creates the weight loss element. And then the other, and then a percentage will also then become kind of empaths, where they’re also trying to generate self-esteem by caring for others, but certainly not allowing others to care for them, because they’ve learned to mistrust that, so you end up with those dynamics where they prioritise others’ needs over their own, and then they strive in terms of unrelenting striving in certain areas, including around eating, weight, and shape, and it’s that dynamic, and at its core, what’s missing underneath is an ability to regulate emotions in those stable, trusting, and meaningful relationships,

Speaker 3  33:26 

and that’s what they end up coming into therapy with us guys to then be able to us to mirror some of that, and then re-educate and relearn what feelings are about, which is that very, very subtle, slow dripping of change,

Speaker 2  33:43 

really, is those that need the care the most are going to be the least trusting, and they’re lead, they’re going to find therapy the hardest that need it the most, and those that will come and love it are then those who probably need the least, because they’ve got trusting relationships that it mirrors.

Speaker 4  34:00 

Well, that

Speaker 3  34:00 

makes sense. Why I repel people, like they come into therapy, and then they sort of get a little bit in it, and then they get really scared, and they disappear. And when I first started out working with eating disorders, what, what am I doing wrong? Like, I don’t get it, but I do get it, because it comes down to that exposure of feeling so exposed with that emotion,

Speaker 1  34:22 

a combination of therapies that you’d use with a client like that, different, yeah, both here, yeah,

Speaker 3  34:32 

I would say tools in the toolbox, I would really just, through the experience that I’ve got, just really listening to what they’re needing, and then adapting the training to what they’re needing. I don’t think when having, like, a whole manual on CBT is going to work for one client. I think you’ve got to adjust it, and really listen, and trust your gut instinct. Sometimes I get it wrong, but if I ride with it and push. Three. Normally, I come out the other side with really good recovery.

Speaker 1  35:05 

Okay, okay. No, that’s great. Actually, Thomas wanted to say, I mentioned in your bio you’re trained in CFT. What actually is that? Just so our listeners can know what that is.

Speaker 2  35:17 

Compassion focus therapy is a broad branch of psychology, which focuses on some of the stuff I’ve talked about here. I could talk in different ways. One of the elements is almost retrofitting those key things that a child needs in order to thrive, and some of that is being able to create empowerment or confidence from a caring for others, and b, to be able to create confidence from feeling the support of others, and it’s to be able to be able to create empowerment and confidence from those elements, and fitting, though, and actually working on those elements, so that we’re not solely then reliant on either competing and comparing or putting others down, so it a lot of work within that. It particularly focused on managing shame, shame-based presentations with a strong, with a particular focus on working people’s internalised critics. So, if individuals have a very powerful inner critic, this is a treatment model that specialises in helping individuals work with their critics. Their critic becomes far less shaming and bullying and far more supportive and helpful, because that’s the kind of key thing within it. Are in the way we talk to ourselves is based on our lot within our lived experiences of up from our primary caregivers, whether that’s teachers, parents, other role models through the media, or more close to home, or peers, and that’s the thing. What social media is also also looking to create, it’s increasing the amount of same age peers becoming role models and potentially reducing role modelling from basically closer family networks, so yeah, I mean that safety does a lot of work then helping people manage shame, and as we kind of talked about, if shame was core to a lot of individuals’ mental health struggles, is this fusing of shame and sadness, or shame and anger, so if you think about what they was talking about there, within that, as if, if you can get people to begin to open up and process their present challenges with food, body image, and historical ones, and learn to trust and develop a trusting relationship that then becomes rewarding. It then sets a, then unhooks sadness and shame, so individuals feel less ashamed about their vulnerabilities, and can then begin to then process that separately, and then they can process their present historical adversity, and they can get out with that initial trap. And then it’s the same with anger, individuals with as fused, you can do lots of fun work when it’s fused with anger, getting people to learn to be assertive, to get angry, begin to vent and express themselves, learn to assert in different ways, which can be really fun, getting people to learn to do that, and for the first time, see them come out of their shell.

Speaker 1  38:19 

Thank you for explaining that. I have to look into that. I’m doing my last year now of my level four counselling course, so yeah, I’m going to look into that, and kind of what you said, it’s really interesting. So, thank you for that, and it’s just good for everyone to understand that as well, if they didn’t know what it meant, what it was. So, thank you,

Speaker 3  38:38 

know what it was.

Speaker 1  38:41 

So, yeah, no, definitely. Thank you very much. Yeah, it was so good to have you on the show, and I hope everyone benefit has benefited from today. If anyone wants to work with you, Thomas, like on an individual basis, like, where, where can they find you, like social media or website?

Speaker 2  39:01 

Yeah, we’re on, we’re on TikTok, we’re on Instagram, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on the internet, and we’ve recently launched with shifting our eating disorder to work to our parent company, which is the, which is Rover clinic.co.uk and we’re on TikTok, roboclinic.co.uk and then our other sister companies, the Body Image Treatment Clinic, which is, and our two specialisms are eating disorders and trauma and body image issues, and the Body Image Treatment Clinic is going to predominantly work on body dysmorphia and BDD, and the rote and Robo Clinic is going to focus more on our eating disorders, but in a sense it’s so we can be found if you kind of look for the body image treatment clinic or robot clinic. We are out there and the team of psychologists are there to help.

Speaker 1  39:56 

Amazing. Thank you very much. I’m gonna hand over to Becky to end off the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 3  40:03 

Thank you so much for listening to the JenUp Podcast. Please subscribe and share this podcast, so others can benefit. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram at @askjenup, or on Jenny’s website at www.jenup.com. If you visit the website, you’ll find lots of different resources available there. Please like, subscribe, and share.

How to get help?

Jenny Tomei is a Nutritional Therapist and Eating Disorder coach. See all her credentials on her About Jen page and then should you need help then make contact with her today. Your road to recovery can start now!