posted 15th February 2025
Why would your mind lie to you?
Everything we've ever known has been transmitted to us through our senses, we felt, saw, heard, tasted and smelt it. There's also a kind of knowing or intuitive sense that develops as we grow up. We came to learn that our senses don't lie: the nettle always stings us, the butter always tastes rich, the fire burns our fingers and the shouty person makes us feel afraid. As we grew up, we had an ever-increasing bank of knowing that helped us to navigate the world around us.
In BDD the mind is always doing its best to keep you safe, but didn't anyone ever tell you that your mind can lie? We know that different people see or experience things differently- if you experience intrusive concerns about your body you will likely have had experience of other people disagreeing with you about what your eyes (your mind) is telling you. This is distressing in itself: surely what I can see is real?
Your eyes are an extension of your brain, protruding from your face, their job is to take in data, transmit it to the meaning making part of your brain where sense is made of it. If you have ever been inside a camera obscura, you'll have experienced the fascinating sight of the outside world being translated into an upside-down image. Your eyes are the same, they receive the data upside down and somehow (don't ask me) your brain interprets. However, in BDD for very good reasons, there is a distortion in the meaning; your brain shifts the emphasis, making a distortion in both what you see and how you understand it.
The human mind has been involved in keeping your ancestors alive for untold millions of years. If your ancestors hadn't been vigilant, you wouldn't be here today. Their concerns were likely about attacks by animals or other tribes and protecting their very survival. Did you know that males are thought to have vison that helps them to focus on the big picture- far off focus, this would have necessary to the tribe as the sight of the males in hunter gatherer tribes was highly tuned to spotting and focusing on prey and being able to accurately throw a spear. The female brain is more attuned to gathering, I often amaze my son with my ability to find a mushroom in a field of grass where he misses it completely.
In the past, humans who lived long enough to have children had well honed, watchful brains. Their survival was often precarious; your brain is primed, just as your ancestor's brains were, to search for danger and act on it. They lived in times of uncertainty, and they gathered in safe groups where there were times of threat and conflict and sometimes peace, but still, one or other of the tribe likely remained on watch.
Your brain is still on alert, its hard-wired alarm systems are instantly available to you- just think of a moment when you were suddenly startled or threatened- your alarm system would have jumped into action, fast as lightening, can you feel the flash of adrenaline as you go to fight or flight?
Our lives today are more complex than those of our ancestors, many of us will have had experiences that caused us distress or anxiety that would never have been experienced by our ancestors. And we have ongoing threats to contend with including the flood of distressing or provocative images on social media. We are often separated from our safe tribe; some of us don't have a safe tribe at all. We are forced into the sometimes-violent environment of school, home, work, the town centre at night, the onslaught of trauma in films and the terrible judgements we may make about ourselves in comparison to airbrushed people who dominate social media. I sometimes wonder at the sight of a celebrity who I know is maybe ten years older than me, but who looks ten years younger.
There's an overwhelming demand to succeed and perform, to conform too. Our body and mind become flooded with alarm and our mind's job is to figure out what that alarm is about so that we can act to keep safe. We are all so accustomed to the everyday trauma of life that the mind does what it should; it keeps us safe by assigning a meaning and reason to the alarm we feel.
All too easily the thought 'My nose is ugly' becomes linked to the alarm in our body and a loop is created and here's where the mind-lies begin to grow. I can't tell you the exact process of how your mind's perception becomes shifted, but I can tell you that this is exactly what happens.
When you have met enough people whose alarm systems have 'gone rogue', you begin to see a pattern: how much the mind distorts things. The consequences of this alarm/ belief cycle are potentially devastating: no one explains, no one tells us, this thing you feel is alarm, this is why it is happening, and this is how your mind is coping with it; by making the best meaning it can- which (unbelievably) is often inaccurate. But it serves to keep us safe. I see this time after time and I can in every case, trace the history of how the person's often repeated traumatic experiences led to alarm in their body, which was unexplained and uncared for and then led to their mind putting in protective safety measures.
When we experience repetitive and compulsive thought-based alarm, body image concerns for example, we become trapped in ever tighter corner as the mind struggles to keep us safe from the perceived threat of rejection or attack. We become caught in a process that's like hearing a fire siren, we startle and jump to attention and then becoming frozen, transfixed by what we see as our terrible image. It's like we stand hypnotised by the flames as our scary thoughts link to our body-mind alarm states.
Too many people are caught in the torment of the distortions of perception about how they look. Their brains are working so hard to protect them from threat. It becomes a very personal, private, disgust and shame-filled loop which also has some fascination to it. Certainly, it keeps you safe (because you can't lead your life to the full while you are so preoccupied by the fear and alarm states) and it keeps you terribly trapped.
Somewhere in your experience (and I expect that you know some of these moments) somewhere, things were too much to tolerate and then your mind took over and created a diversion, a concern that far outweighs the reality of the true impact of what your mind focuses on as an image concern.
All this is made more complex by the objective/ subjective dilemma we all face as we perceive 'being me' in this organic, ever-changing physical vehicle we inhabit. The internal harsh critic we all have, sits in judgement. I know her, she has her own set of criticism that she trots out every day. I challenge her and live my life in the sure knowledge she's doing her best when she prompts me to worry about stuff that simply doesn't matter.
Let's all live our lives as if what our eyes and our critical voice tell us is of little importance. Let's you and I gently sidestep this, let's care for our historic trauma and get on with being in a world that needs sensitive people like us.
I'm increasingly sure that the way out is through the processing of old hurts and trauma, not only with words, but with a close attention to and care of the alarm that's held in our body.