When people come to me for body image work, they often expect the conversation to be about their body. What it looks like, what they'd like to change, what they eat, what they weigh. And of course, some of that comes up.
But the work that tends to move the needle isn't really about the body at all. It's about the story the body is carrying.
This is the heart of a narrative approach to body image, and it's the perspective I came away from my doctoral research most convinced by. Body image is not a fixed trait. It is a story we have been told, and have told ourselves, over many years. And stories can be edited.
Every body image is a story
Try, for a moment, to describe how you feel about your body, not in a sentence, but in a paragraph. If you listen closely, it usually contains:
- A plot ("I was fine until X happened, and then…")
- Characters (a parent, a sibling, a PE teacher, a partner, a stranger on the street)
- A moral ("So I learned that my body was…")
- A current chapter ("And now, whenever I…")
Whether you've ever put it into words or not, you have a story about your body. It sits underneath the daily thoughts, and it quietly organises them. It decides which experiences count as evidence, which get dismissed, and which get replayed.
Why the story matters more than the facts
Two people with the same body can carry very different body image stories, because they've had different experiences of being seen. And two people with very different bodies can carry surprisingly similar suffering, because the story underneath is the same shape.
This is why "just look at yourself objectively" advice rarely works. There is no such thing as looking at yourself outside a story. What you see when you look in the mirror is filtered, instantly, unconsciously, through everything you have ever been told about bodies like yours.
Change the story, and the reflection changes with it.
What narrative work actually looks like
Narrative therapy sounds abstract, but in practice it's very concrete. A few of the things we do:
Externalise the problem. Instead of "I am a person who hates her body", we might talk about "the critical voice" or "the mirror-checking habit", as things that visit you, not things you are. This tiny shift creates room to see the pattern from the outside.
Trace the origin. When did this voice first appear? Whose voice does it sound like? What was going on around you at the time? Very often, what feels like an eternal truth turns out to be a specific message from a specific moment.
Notice the exceptions. Every dominant story has cracks. Times you felt at home in your body. Times the critical voice went quiet. Times someone saw you differently. These small counter-moments are the material a new story is built from.
Question the audience. Whose approval is the story trying to earn? Are they still in your life? Do you still agree with what they cared about?
Write forward, deliberately. If the current chapter has been "I fight my body", what might the next chapter be? Not "I love my body", that's often too big a jump. Something smaller and truer: "I want to stop treating my body like the enemy."
Why it works
Narrative work respects two things at once: that your suffering is real, and that it is not the whole story. It doesn't ask you to argue with your feelings. It asks you to widen the lens around them, so that other truths can join them.
It also honours the fact that body image is deeply personal. There is no universal script for what a "good" relationship with your body looks like. There is only your story, and whether it is one you want to keep telling.
A quieter, more lasting kind of change
What I love about this approach is that it doesn't produce a dramatic "before and after." It produces a slow loosening, the critical voice becomes one voice among several, not the loudest one in the room. The mirror becomes less charged. The body starts to feel like a place you live, rather than a project you manage.
That is the kind of change that lasts.