"Beauty and Body Image" with Hillary McBride
“Beauty and Body Image” with Hillary McBride
I had so many “aha” moments interviewing Hillary McBride, it’s hard to know where to begin summarizing our time together. Hillary is a Vancouver-based researcher, therapist, and doctoral candidate. She is also the author of Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves As We Are and is featured on “The Liturgists” podcast and the CBC podcast“Other People’s Problems.”
During our time together, Hillary talked about how her long-fought battle with an eating disorder transformed her vocational trajectory, catapulting her into a passionate exploration of how women can transform their relationships with their bodies. Along with her poetic and powerful observations on body image, beauty, and brokenness, Hillary names how personal suffering can somehow be mystically transformed to help prevent and heal other’s suffering.
If you have ever struggled with body image or are a mom wanting to pass along positive messages around body image to your daughter, this one is for you.
The Interview
Audio engineering by McGinty Media
THE INTERVIEW transcript
Melissa: One thing I like to do is give a little background to the women that I'm featuring.
Hillary: So I'm a therapist and researcher, doctoral student. I speak and write. A lot of the stuff that I do with my work right now is on the back end of a vow that I made to myself when I came out of eating disorder treatment, which is that I don't want other people to suffer the way that I did. When people are in suffering, I don't want them to feel so alone in that. I think that there are stories that we have in society and in the way that we respond to mental health issues and to pain that create shame around it, that create aloneness, and that prevent people from actually getting resources and help. A lot of that comes from miseducation and archaic narratives around weakness and gender scripting and whatnot. I like to ultimately help people feel less alone, but then to move them towards wholeness and thriving.
So I had an eating disorder for a very long time that would kind of be on the very extreme end of things, when you're looking at diagnostic criteria, and a mix of anorexia and bulimia and fluctuating between the two of them, probably from the time I was around 13. The last time I was in treatment was ... Or I ended outpatient treatment when I was, I would say, probably 25. At that point, when I was 25, I was doing more maintenance work, but was still connected to an outpatient treatment program.
I had been connected to inpatient work, outpatient work, and had seen many, many therapists. My parents were doing everything that they could to try and get me the resources that they could because I was really, really sick for a really long time, and had a therapist finally who I felt saw me, saw me, not my weight, not my symptoms, not the disorder, not everything I needed to do to change to kind of meet her ideals, but saw me, and brought up all of these things that allowed me to really show up as a self again, because, at that point when I saw her, the eating disorder had been both so consuming and so everything and also so secret and so shameful. It's this amazing thing of it's taking over everything, and yet there is so much secrecy behind it. So people on the outside don't even really get to see just how much it's taken over my life, except for the people who were close to me who were kind of desperate for things to be different.
She brought in things like critical theory and feminist theories and existentialism and humanism and spirituality and embodiment and work in all of these fields, social learning theory, all of this stuff that really woke me up to all of the things that had created this eating disorder. Why was it that I as an individual was denying myself something that I needed? How does that relate to all of the sociocultural factors around me? So she really gave me an introduction to a feminist and a social perspective on mental illness, because I'm not sure how much you or your readers will identify with this, but in psychology, it's very individual focused. That's the whole point. But we forget how the individual is situated in context and what are the contexts that shape that individual person's suffering. How is that person actually the canary in the coal mine? How is that person manifesting in their body, in their individual organism, something that's wrong with the culture at large? So she did a big piece of work with me around that, and we didn't talk about the eating disorder for a very long time. We talked about what it meant to be human and what it means to be alive and suffering and pain and all sorts of things.
When I was done with treatment, I went back to grad school. I had previously was doing my degree in performance violin. I was a violinist, and felt like the violin world and classical music was too close to the perfectionistic ideals that I held that really kept the eating disorder stuck in place, and so kind of tried to break out of that, and started to acquaint myself with new stories about being human. So went back to grad school, and I remember my supervisor saying to me, "What do you want to do for your thesis?" I had these sexy ideas around neural imaging and things about child development and brain development. I couldn't really figure something out. I remember her saying to me, "Well, what's the question you want to know? This is not about what makes an impact on the body of literature or on the field of academia, but something you want to know."
It came back to this fear that I had, that I would one day have a daughter who would hate her body and hurt herself the way that I did. So my research started around looking at preventative factors around eating disorders and the world of body image, and seeing what does it take for women to not hate their body. Because in the field of psychology and clinical work, we're so focused on pathology. We're so focused on understanding what has gone wrong, but we actually don't have spend a lot of time and research, clinical, academic, theoretical, in figuring out how do we help people do well. How do we help people thrive?
So I started doing research about what happens when it goes right, when young women love their bodies. Then my secondary question in my research was also, "And what do their mom's have to do with that?" Which was really a question around me. If I have kids one day, what do I do so that I can be a gatekeeper around their mental health, to be a steward of my influence on the next generation? And so really started this program of research around what happens when women love their bodies, what helps that go well. What do we learn about discourse around the female body, particularly in Westernized, industrialized cultures? How do we as individuals make a mark for each other as individuals, but also on society and the stories about women's bodies?
So I'm at the tail end of my PhD, continuing my work about women's relationships with their bodies across the lifespan, and have since done lots more publications and lots more research, and released a book in October 2017 called Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, which was really like a community and accessible version of my research so that people can understand how do we as women love our bodies. Even though every woman is not a mother, every woman has had a mother, whether she was involved or not, whether she had a healthy body image or not. So it's kind of about deconstructing this story that was handed down to us by the other women around us, taking responsibility for our own relationship to our bodies, and then being something different for the next generation.
Melissa: Thank you.
Hillary: There you go.
Melissa: I love that. I mean, that's so important. I'm just resonating with a lot of pieces of what you're sharing too, just the importance of that, the narratives and things like that. Thank you for sharing that.
Hillary: Yeah, you're welcome.
Melissa: It's always helpful to ... Similar, I guess, to what you said in terms of ... First of all, owning your story, I think is so powerful. Then turning it and figuring out then what can I do to help others, like you said, not suffer the way that I have.
Hillary: In a way, I think about it as being a kind of alchemy, if you will. How is it that we can take something that also took my life to become the thing that makes me feel alive? How is it that I can take my pain and suffering and it can be a gift to the world to prevent other people's suffering? My only understanding of that is that there's a divine hand in that, that there's a kind of magic that's bigger than us, that something that isn't supposed to be able to grow can grow, that a seed, that a blade of grass pushes up through a crack in concrete. How is it that that's even possible? I have this kind of mystic wonder, awe, about that, because it points to this story that there can be exceptions, that when there's been pain, there can be an exception to that. It can be the thing that allows us to grasp healing. I think it's beautiful when people have stories of suffering and it doesn't end up defining them. But in a way, they kind of flip it, and the suffering becomes this pathway into other people's healing. It speaks of miracles to me.
Melissa: I love what you just ... What you said is so true. I'm just also recognizing my own, I could just talk to you, chat with you for an hour. So I'm like-
Hillary: Couldn’t we? I know.
Melissa: ... okay, so I will be mindful of the questions I have, if you're okay with that transition.
Hillary: Yeah, let's do it. You take me wherever you need me. I'll follow.
Melissa: So the first question just is, how do you define beauty?
Hillary: I define beauty as anything that I am drawn to. I think of that as encompassing more than appearance. So beauty, I think, for a long time, meant adherence to an appearance ideal. It meant this is the ideal, and the closer you are to that ideal, the more beautiful. In the journey of my recovery, and alliance to a feminist critique of beauty ideals, I burnt it down. I burnt that idea down, that this is what beauty is and the closer you are to that the more beautiful you are.
For me now, what I want to try and do is see beauty everywhere and be curious and on a treasure hunt for it, but, really, anything that I am drawn to. So paying attention to when I feel a pull towards a certain kind of tree. When I hear someone say something and I feel a resonance in my body that says there's an overwhelming “yes” to that. When I hear a sound that makes me go, “oh, I could hear that over and over and over again.” To me, those body cues, those energetic pulls towards something or someone say to me that that is beauty. So it's the process of not just the thing, as in static, but it is the response within us that's generated that pulls us towards something that is part of the beauty itself.
When our eyes are wide awake and when we're paying attention, it's everywhere, including in us, and including in broken places, and including in something kind of unique. So I know that sometimes in our appearance we have these kind of quirks that make us feel like we're broken or defective because they're off center of what the ideal says. Sometimes when we're off center to something, there is a uniqueness and a striking ... It's striking to notice those things. Because of my new working definition of beauty, I have since identified those things as being beautiful, so a crooked tooth, or the way a person laughs that's kind of, “whoa.” If I find any kind of curiosity or wonder about something, to me, that tells me that there's beauty there. That means that I can learn to see ... as someone who is curious about the brain and social development, that I can see beauty in looking at a brain scan, that I can see beauty in the way that somebody reaches out to another person. It feels like our body marks goodness. So what I mean by that is I pay attention to my somatic cues that tell me there is something good here or something unique or something that I'm drawn to.
Melissa: Thank you. So given that, the next question might be kind of a tricky one. Where do you see beauty in the world, given that definition?
Hillary: I think I see beauty ... I would actually almost flip it, the question, and say I see beauty any time I'm paying attention. I think sometimes when I learn to see beauty and I learn to pay attention, almost the thing that sticks out more is where I don't. To go back to what I was saying, I feel like I see beauty any time I'm paying attention. It's all around me and in us and between us. But right now, right now, I'm noticing I'm really drawn to water and to the ocean, and so I've just been spending a lot of time outside and by the ocean. I've been noticing I see beauty in the way that light reflects off things.
I had some friends over last night, and my friend was really angry about some injustice that has happened to her, and there was something about the fire in her. It felt so powerful, but in that moment, I think if I was really paying attention, I was seeing how the light from my kitchen was shining off her face and her eyes. It made me see this side of her that I kind of hadn't really seen. Again, maybe it was because I was really paying attention, but noticing how light reflects off things, or, like I was mentioning, a crooked tooth, or an ocean. Those things I feel very drawn to in this season that I'm in right now.
But I imagine in the future it will be ... I just came out of a few years of feeling kind of obsessed with the color green. I was so drawn to green. Anything that was green, I was like, “I need to get my hands on it.” So we had green sheets. I'm wearing a green sweater. So any time I saw green, I was like, “oh, I love it!” So it feels subjective, and it feels related to what else is happening in my life. But the more I pay attention, the more I see it all around me.
Melissa: Thank you. The next question that I'm curious about ... You talked a little bit about your story, so I don't know if you'll want to talk more about that. But just the next question is tell us about the brokenness you're experiencing in life or something that you have experienced.
Hillary: So I think the thing that started the eating disorder for me was the feeling of not enough-ness, and the not enough-ness took over and led me to a series of behaviors and perspectives on myself and on my body that made me try to earn my enough-ness. When we're in a fishbowl of the story that says your body is how you are worth something and your adherence to appearance ideals make you valuable, it's really easy to take that question of “am I enough?” and try and answer it in a way that adheres to the cultural story, to try and use our body to create security on the inside for us, especially for women. So after treatment, after getting to a place where, behaviorally, my eating disorder was no longer ... I wasn't symptomatic anymore. When I would call myself recovered, I realized that the thing that was underneath was still there, which is “how do I work through this not enough-ness? How is it showing up in my life?”
What's really interesting about being a PhD student is that you are constantly told you're not enough and you need to do more and it needs to be better. Somebody else said it better. You could say it better. There's no end to the learning and the reflection and the editing that goes on when producing doctoral work. So I find myself, right now, in this season of my life, feeling some of the perfectionistic tendencies around “I am going to earn my enough-ness by being perfect at this task.” I feel that monster rearing its head.
Now what I will say is that I think that there is brokenness ... Just like there is beauty in everything, I think there is brokenness around us all the time and in us, and I don't think that that's a problem. I think our relationship to it is what makes it problematic or not. So when I feel the perfectionism emerging, instead of being like, “what's wrong with me? I thought I was through this. How come I'm still doing this?” I say to myself, “oh, look, there's an old pattern that's showing up. Oh, yeah, my old way of dealing with this ... This would have worked 15 years ago, and so my brain is still holding on to this as a viable option for how to respond to situations around me.” I don't beat myself up about those old things coming up.
So there will always be pain. I think that it's part of the story of being human. It's how we respond to that pain and if we continue to shame and blame and criticize ourselves for it that makes it even more problematic, or can we compassionate and loving. Can we see opportunity in it? Can we see an invitation to connect with another person or the broader story of being human? It's that that helps us get through the pain and through the brokenness. Oh, gosh, the brokenness is very much still a part of my story, because I'm fully human. I just have better ways of responding to it and dealing with it than I did in the past.
Melissa: So I don't know. You may have already spoken to this aspect. But where do you see beauty in the midst of that brokenness that continues to show up?
Hillary: I think that I see it in the capacity to choose something different than I did before. I think I see it in the way that people can love us and not be consumed by our own perspective of ourselves. So when I say to a friend, "I'm really hurting," she's like, "I know you are, and I'm with you, and you've got this. Remind yourself about this, and remind yourself about this, and this is also true about you.” That we don't have to be alone in pain. I think I see beauty in the capacity to heal, that I think that that's always an option. It doesn't always happen, and it doesn't always happen in the way that we want it to, but it's a possibility.
I see beauty in the way that sometimes there are small miracles, like when a person who is depressed and wants to kill themselves keeps taking their medication. What is it that's in them that allows them to do the thing that's kind of opposing the darkness? That, to me, is beauty and goodness. So exceptions might be maybe even more of a clinical answer, seeing exceptions to the pain story or the brokenness, seeing the not aloneness, the fact that we can heal.
What else? Recognizing that we're part of a story of being human that's so much bigger than us. This is really rooted in Kristin Neff's work around common humanity. But when we are in brokenness, we can often turn our gaze so towards the brokenness that we forget that we are not alone and that we are not even alone in the moment, but kind of cosmically, and in the journey of being human. Reminding ourselves I'm probably not the first person who's ever felt this and ever dealt with this, can give us courage to keep walking. I think that that's beautiful.
Melissa: Inspiring, thanks. So how about lies that you've experienced about beauty? You kind of spoke to that a little bit, but I don't know if there's more there potentially.
Hillary: Oh, yeah. That beauty was a thin, white, young female; that beauty meant that you were desired by a male; that beauty meant that you were happy; that beauty meant that you didn't have problems. So beauty was an appearance, and it meant all of these things about your quality of life and how other people looked at you. Beauty meant you can fit into your ideal pair of pants. Beauty was clean and perfect and ideal and didn't have room for humanness and grit and messiness and the complexity of life. So it really was this particular body that we see so often in images that are proliferated in Western society. It would mean everything I said about what your life would be like.
Melissa: Then the last question being, have you had any experiences in life that have transformed your ideas around beauty?
Hillary: Yeah. I think, really, becoming a feminist, truly, I would say, because it's the feminist discourse that has been so critical about the sexualization and the objectification of women's bodies. It's the feminist discourse that said those are lies. Those things that you believe, those are lies. It's being with other women who take up space unapologetically and see beauty in themselves and do not apologize for how they are different than the ideal that kind of bust open the very narrow perspective that I felt that I was handed.
Getting angry about those lies was very important for me as well. I think anger is a really beautiful, healthy response to injustice. It's interesting, I was talking about this, I mentioned I had some friends over last night, and I was talking about this with one of them, and how even though I don't have an eating disorder anymore, I still meet appearance ideals in a lot of ways, because I can fit into clothes that are in stores, and because a lot of the things that I want to wear will look good on my body, and because I don't have any major disfigurement. People may perceive me as being attractive or within a degree of attractiveness. So although I don't see myself in a distorted way anymore, I'm continuously being educated about how society and the beauty ideals are still harmful for other women and how we can do better.
The more I hear the voices of marginalized women and women who have different size and shaped bodies ... This friend in particular went into a store, and she is, what, probably a size 8 or 10, and they didn't have her size. Basically, she was saying, “your store is telling me that I don't exist here and that I don't belong here and that I'm not allowed to even buy clothes. I cannot clothe my body, a basic human right. I cannot clothe my body, and I cannot wear your beautiful clothes because my size is a normal human size.” It's really waking me up to how my mental illness of an eating disorder is not at the forefront of my mind, but how there is so much more that needs to be done for more diverse body shapes and sizes and types so that other women can see the lies and can resist the lies and be a part of something, can create a sense of belonging within themselves, no matter how they look.
Melissa: Thank you. It's always an amazing and affirming experience when you hear someone else speaking the truth that your heart has awoken to in new and deepening ways. So everything you said is so good.
Hillary: I'm so glad that there's resonance. It can be so validating when there are theories and studies that back up our knowing too. So, okay, great, we agree with us. But, actually, all of science is behind us too. There are really rich academic traditions, like journals of body image, academic journals that are published, I think, at least quarterly, that all they do is research body image from a feminist perspective and look at all the stuff.
Melissa: That's amazing.
Hillary: ... that we need to know about current research and measures of body image. Tanya Teall l is the developer of the Body Appreciation Scale, and it's actually really new that people are starting to research and look at, "So how do we love our bodies?" like I was saying before. She's a big name in terms of shifting the discourse around bodies from just “why do women hate their bodies and how do we study that and how do we heal it” to “how do we not let that happen in the first place?”
Melissa: So your conclusions about your question, I'm assuming, is in your Mother, Daughter, and Body Image book about how do we help women love their bodies?
Hillary: Yes, yeah. So there's a lot in there. Are you asking for a teaser? Is that what you're wanting?
Melissa: I'm just curious, because it's such an important question. So I'm just curious, what conclusions did you ... I mean, you don't have to tell me, but I'm just-
Hillary: Oh, yeah.
Melissa: Yeah.
Hillary: Critical theory. So it's something we call media literacy, which is being able to identify images that are problematic and see why they're problematic. So when you start to educate yourself about how images in media are skewed to a certain perspective, you can start to see what's missing. I've been doing a lot of deconstructing around privilege as a Caucasian person, and so now that I'm looking at images, I'm seeing, well, the bodies only look that way, but why are they all white women? That's really interesting. So you start to notice what's missing, and you start to be able to be critical about the underlying messages that are being communicated, like seeing images and noticing, “oh, you're trying to make me hate my body so I buy that product.” So really being literate to how subversive ... or not subversive, but being literate to how cultural messages about women and about women's bodies and about white supremacy are spoon-fed to us through the images that we see. So media literacy is a big part too.
Adherence to ... Let me say that differently. Having non appearance-based ways of feeling good enough in your life, knowing worth and value that isn't just about if your jeans fit or not or how big your breasts are or how you look. So what else makes up my identity? What else makes me feel valuable besides appearance? Having connection and attachment with an attachment figure or with other women who reinforce these things for you, who can help deconstruct culture, who can help remind you about who you are when you forget in those moments.
Then the last and what's proving to be probably the most significant as well is having an experience of goodness in the body, so not just evaluating the body from the outside, and not just holding the story of the body as image-based only, but experiential, so what we would call embodiment theories. So how do I feel free and strong and good from the inside out, paying attention to somatic and interoceptive cues. “What is my body telling me about what feels good? Can I listen to my body? Can I befriend my body? Is my body a resource for me for experiencing pleasure and goodness and connection and life and strength and power and energy?” So experiencing the body.
I like to think of this as shifting from seeing just the wrapper of a present to seeing what's actually on the inside, not just the package. We can like the wrapping, and it can be pretty, but the whole point of the present is the inside and what you get to experience because of it. So shifting our perspective of bodies from just appearance related thoughts only to experience related aspects.
Melissa: Yes. I love that. This is just out of curiosity, how do we popularize those ideas? Because, obviously, you've written a book, and you're doing your doctoral work about these things. But then how do we actually ... Raise awareness would probably be the ...You've probably thought about this.
Hillary: Things like education, so teaching parents and kids younger, and giving them new ways of thinking. Parent education in schools. I'm part of an organization called Free to Be, which goes into schools to educate kids. It's a several-day intervention that happens over time that's empirically validated. It's been tested and has really good results about it. So they go into schools, and they teach kids. I often do parent education stuff, so I'll have groups of parents come together, and we'll do a little mini lecture. Changing the images that we post on social media, and talking about why. Where do we put our money? Are we supporting brands that promote images of diverse bodies so that other people can see those images? What else? Are we having conversations with our friends? What are we talking about at family conversations when someone says, “I can't believe ... I was so bad last night. I had an extra piece of cake, so I'm not going to have my whatever today at the coffee shop.” So do we interrupt them and say, “hey, that's actually ... That makes me feel sad when I hear you talk about it like that.”
Then do people who have platforms in positions of power model body diversity in what they promote on social media? Do they speak in a way that's kind and loving? Then I often lead embodiment workshops for women to kind of create this relationship with their body on the inside. We'll do retreats. We'll do workshops so that women can get the experience of getting outside this image-based perspective of the body. They say that it changes everything about the way that they move and parent and live and think. We kind of deconstruct beauty ideals as well. When a few key people get the idea, it ripples out into their lives, and they start having different conversations. That's how culture changes.
We are so critical of culture, but we are culture. We are the ones who perpetuate the stories, by what we buy and say and don't say. So I think we need to take responsibility for our role in perpetuating culture. It's funny. I'm so outspoken and passionate about these issues, but I'm also married to someone who advocates for this stuff as well, and he does it in his very quiet and silent way. I remember when I was in the tail end of my eating disorder treatment, we were at a grocery store, and there was this magazine, tabloid really, and it was about so-and-so's baby bump. I remember him saying, “oh, gosh. He probably just exhaled, what is this?” And then turned the magazine around and said, "They should cover these things up like they cover up cigarettes in stores, so that no kids see them." I remember thinking, we need more men who advocate and more men who stand up in spaces and say, “I don't want a woman who is practically disappearing. I want a woman who has substance and value and things to say and insights and moves through the world in a way that's beautiful and powerful, and isn't just trying to play small to prop up an idea of masculinity.” So we need men to be involved too.
Melissa: Thank you... And I love that you’ve operationalized some of these things and have systems in place…
Hillary: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, for your interest. It's such a joy to work with you, and I'm so excited for the chance to partner with you on this. It sounds like your vision is really important, and I'm so excited for when your book comes out. It's going to be really right on the nose of what's happening in Western culture.
Melissa: Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Hillary: Oh, you're so welcome.
*Hillary later corrected the name of the author of the BAS as Dr. Tracy Tylka
To learn more about Hillary McBride, check out the following links:
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Also, check out Hillary’s book Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves As We Are on Amazon
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