gushing geysers of forbidden joy vs. "body positivity"

Lately I've been thinking about how grateful I am for all the body positive stuff in pop culture right now celebrating an array of shapes and sizes...

... and I've also been thinking about what it takes, internally, to go beyond just a veneer of positivity and into a fundamentally altered relationship with one's physical form?

Venus looking in a mirror- by Peter Paul Rubens and my own cheeky captioning

I've been pondering this, of course, because I find that my internal negativity on the subject of "ways I fall short of conventional beauty ideals" can be damn persistent, and no amount of telling myself "Oh, I'm just Rubenesque" or "Big is beautiful, just look at Lizzo!" - has ever really done the trick to silence that voice.

Then, recently, a notion occurred to me: what if negative body image chatter was just a reaction formation, covering up an almost-unbearable amount of repressed pleasure in my physicality?
The notion of "a reaction formation" comes from Freudian psychoanalysis - Freud has gone out of vogue for many good reasons, including the fact that his theories of child development had more to do with his own hang-ups than anyone else's -- but still, the old Viennese doctor indisputably knew a thing or two about the ways that humans hide secrets from themselves.

According to Freud, a reaction formation is a defense mechanism -- in order to suppress feelings and impulses that contradict social conditioning, the ego reacts to situations that evoke the "unacceptable" feelings with an exaggerated opposite sensation.
So a classic example of a reaction formation would be a conservative Christian high school kid with bisexual tendencies getting nauseated when he sees some gay guys kissing.

Through the nausea, his social conditioning and his "acceptable" idea of himself as unswervingly straight gets to be preserved, because he's able to say honestly, "Gay stuff makes me sick."

The high school kid in this scenario actually feels the nausea. It's real. And...

... It's a defense mechanism that his ego generates to cover-up underlying "dangerous" feelings of homoerotic attraction, enjoyment, and desire.
The psyche has an imperative to unconsciously, automatically cover up socially unacceptable pleasure with an exaggerated sensation of repulsion in order to preserve the survival of the organism.

In other words, through the way he was raised, this conservative Christian kid has gotten the message very clearly that openly enjoying the sight of other men kissing would result in exile from his community (and through thousands of years of evolutionary experience, we associate exile from our communities with death)...

... so his psyche protects him from that potential exile and death with the reaction formation of nausea / repulsion at the sight of "gay stuff."

Of course, while reaction formations are great for preserving one's social acceptability, they can alienate us from our more honest emotions and enjoyments, our genuine fulfillment in life.
Which brings me back to my initial pondering... what if the "negative self-talk" and dismay that so many of us have at least sometimes about our bodies ...

... is in reality, a total lie?

Like, what if the felt dismay / negativity is a reaction formation unconsciously designed by our psyches to prevent us from feeling socially-unacceptable levels of wild, wanton delight in our illicit pudge, wrinkles, unique proportions, etc.?
Part of why I find this idea so helpful is that it reframes all my memories of disliking my body.

To my internal dialogue that goes:

me: "I love my body!"
also me: "No you don't, what about 10 minutes ago when you couldn't stand how you looked in that dress?"

... I now have the snappy come-back, "That was just my reaction formation protecting me from the gushing, geyser-like levels of pleasure I truly feel in my body."

And indeed, when I lay down in Existential Kink meditation and focus on getting in touch with that deep, taboo pleasure in the shape of my body exactly as it is right now... I can find it ;)

I have a feeling that with time, this will shift my experience of my body at a fundamental level, as that's what's happened when I've applied the same reasoning to other arenas of life.

Anyhow, I invite you to give it a try - get down with those gushing geysers of forbidden joy hiding underneath your negativity. I promise you can protect yourself from exile and death using your street smarts, you don't need to rely on an unconscious conditioned mechanism to do it for you.

love and villainy,
Carolyn Elliott

P.S. Did you know I'm on Instagram at @carolynelliott__ ? Hop over and follow me there so you can get more provocative musings. ;)