Hi, my name is Felipe and I used to suffer from BDD and Depression. I don’t know how it started but I think it was at some point when I was between 13 and 15 years old. In my case I felt I had a problem with my speech. I couldn’t explain it to doctors; I knew I didn’t have a stutter or anything and there were times when I spoke normally – mainly when I was with my family. So my problem must be psychological.
“My parents thought it was just their teenage kid going through an undefined crisis”
I struggled on my own for about 6 years, and during this time I got low grades, had almost no social life, lacked the will to do anything, and didn’t attend school very often. In fact the only positive thing I can say about this period is that, while I stayed home, almost all my free time I spent reading, which is a good habit I still have. My parents thought it was just their teenage kid going through an undefined crisis or something, but didn’t think it was very important. Not even when their son remained in the car when they went out, remained in the hotel when they went travelling abroad, and had no social life.
One thing that helped me was Buddhism, and meditation. When I started doing meditation it hit me like a rock that life was very short, and I had to live it no matter what. So, still under the effects of BDD I started making the effort to go out, use the bus and underground, even though I still thought everyone was looking at me for being so utterly hideous and different from other people. Eventually I sought psychiatric help, and went on to have regular therapy. It’s helped me a lot. I’m taking an antidepressant, and it helps too. Knowing that there is an illness with the very symptoms you have is the first step to recovery, I think.
Thank you.
My name is Nicole and I am 20 years old. I was diagnosed with BDD a little over a year ago and have spent my time since then trying to learn about this disorder. When I was first told I had it I felt relieved that there was a name for what was wrong with me, but I also felt sad because there was definitely something wrong with me. I remember when I was only nine years old I thought about cutting off my nose because it was too big. I was already tired of the snide remarks from friends and even strangers about how big it was.
“On school picture days I would come home bawling because I knew that my nose would be posted everywhere”
When I was in junior high, my self-esteem issues went far beyond the average teenager angst. I couldn’t bear to look in a mirror or have my picture taken. On school picture days I would come home bawling, because I knew that my nose would be posted everywhere. I wore a windbreaker with long sleeves so I could use the sleeve to cover up my face. It made me feel better. In high school I discovered my knack for humour. I made fun of myself before anyone else could get to me first. Deep inside the demon was ready to come bursting out. I suffered from anorexia for years, as well as addiction to painkillers.
After I was diagnosed with BDD, along with panic disorder, I was put on an anti-depressant that has saved me. No, it doesn’t take away the thoughts about my nose or body; no, it doesn’t give me hallucinations that I am a supermodel. It helps me to think clearly, and not dwell on my ‘physical problems’. I know that no matter how many times people might tell someone with BDD that you are beautiful, you still won’t believe it. And what if you were absolutely the most gorgeous woman on the inside? Doesn’t that matter too? That’s what I try to tell myself each and every day. It’s sort of my mantra now. I’ve noticed that, once I stopped openly complaining about the way I looked, I began to receive more positive vibes from people. I am still not ready to be photographed, but hopefully with time and my therapy I will make that giant step!
How do you feel when you look in the mirror? Happy? Not fussed? Whenever I saw my face in the mirror, I felt so sick I wanted to smash the glass. I thought I looked like a monster. It all started my first term of secondary school. A bunch of girls and boys in my class began bullying me about my acne, calling me ‘Spotty’. I tried to ignore them, but the insults made me feel really self-conscious. They started taking the mick out of my forehead, saying it was ‘massive’, and that I had a voice like a man just ’cause it was deeper than some of the other girls in the class.
“By the time I was 13 the way I looked was all I thought about”
As the months passed I got more and more upset. When you’re told over and over again that you’re ugly, you start to believe it. I began studying my face in the mirror, worrying about the way I looked. I decided I hated my nose: it was too big. My eyes squinted when I laughed, and my hair was too thin. And I was fat. I’d try holding my stomach in and pulling the skin taut, wondering if I’d be prettier if I was skinny. By the time I was 13 the way I looked was all I thought about.
I tried to talk to my school friends about how I felt. ‘Don’t be silly, Cari,’ they’d say. ‘We all feel like that.’ But I knew they didn’t. It wasn’t like I was having an ‘off day’; I felt like this constantly. If I was going out with mates I’d spend the entire day getting ready, changing my outfit and make-up about 20 times. Each time I’d hate the way I looked, take off my make-up and start again, only to hate what I saw and end up in floods of tears. In the end I’d refuse to go out at all. Gradually my friends stopped including me in their plans, which made me feel even more isolated.
When I was 14 I started self harming. I wanted to punish myself for being so ugly and worthless. Nothing made me feel better about myself. If someone paid me a compliment I wouldn’t believe it. If a boy glanced at me I’d imagine he was looking at me in disgust. As I got older I started finding other ways to hide. I had a fringe cut to hide my forehead and began getting tattoos and piercings. I felt that if I had something beautiful on my body, I wouldn’t be quite so revolting. Plus, if people were looking at my body art they wouldn’t be looking at me.
“You silly girl,’ she told me as she hugged me, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.”
I knew my family were worried about how withdrawn I’d become, yet when they tried to talk to me I’d just snap at them. But as time passed I found it harder to keep my feelings to myself. Finally, one New Year’s Eve (as usual I was at home instead of out partying), I found myself blurting out everything I felt to Mum. How ugly I was. How I’d cut myself. Mum was shocked. ‘You silly girl,’ she told me as she hugged me, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.’ She didn’t understand that her words couldn’t make me feel better. I wasn’t just feeling insecure; I hated myself.
Mum was convinced I had depression, so she took me to the doctor who put me on anti-depressants. They made me feel a bit better, but I still couldn’t shake the repulsion I felt about my own appearance. Months passed. Then one day, when I was 17, I sat down in front of the TV and started watching a documentary called Too Ugly for Love. It was about people who couldn’t have relationships because they felt they were so ugly. None of the people in the show were ugly, but their behaviour was like mine: they’d look at themselves for ages and hate what they saw. They all had something called Body Dysmorphic Disorder, or BDD: a condition that meant they couldn’t see themselves the way other people saw them; their self-image was so distorted they thought they were hideously ugly, when they were perfectly normal.
It was like a light bulb going on in my head. I knew this was what I had, too. Weirdly, just knowing what was wrong with me helped me to feel better. I found a counsellor, which meant I had someone to talk to, and having an actual diagnosis made it easier for my family to understand what I was going through. I still struggled to accept my body, but gradually I recognised that I didn’t see it the way other people did, and that it was possible for me to live a normal life. I even said yes when an old friend, Mike, asked me out. I’m working on the way I feel. I hope that one day I’ll feel truly confident in myself.
My first memories of BDD symptoms are from when I was younger than 7 years’ old and at primary school. I had a fantasy that I would run again and again in my head that involved me playing in the playground at school and then suddenly dying. The other kids and the dinner-ladies would notice without being upset or bothered, as I was too ugly to care about. However, when they moved my body, the mask of ugliness that I had been secretly wearing all that time would slip off to reveal a pretty little girl underneath. At this point, the children and dinner ladies would become very upset and mourn my death, realising that all the time they had shunned me for being ugly, they had been wrong, and all the time I had been pretty underneath.
Other specific memories from that young age are rare, but the feeling that I was repulsive compared to the other children was always there. Playing kiss-chase with the other girls was never an option as it would put the poor boys in an embarrassing quandary where they were forced to either kiss some monster or humiliate me by not chasing me at all. I can remember being very young – I still had curly hair which I lost when I was 6 so I must’ve been 5 or less – and somebody in a shop commented to my mum that I had beautiful hair. I was eaten up with embarrassment and anger at the woman for saying something so obviously untrue and stupid. I couldn’t understand why she would be so cruel.
“I just knew that I was ‘very ugly’ and had horrid hair”
At that point my BDD was vague and undefined; I just knew that I was ‘very ugly’ and had horrid hair. Then, when I was about 11 years old, I started to get spots, and the BDD had something to really get hold of. By the time I was 14 I was spending an average of 4-5 hours getting ready to leave the house, with all my energy going into plastering on foundation and concealer and re-constructing my face as much as I could, using blusher and other makeup. I was getting though a concealer stick each week. If I heard anyone coming towards my bedroom during this process I would have to lock the door and pretend I was getting undressed to make them go away. I just couldn’t allow anyone, including family, to see me without full makeup, so it was always a stressful rush to get it all on before anyone caught me with a naked face!
People would make comments within earshot about wearing too much foundation, but I would much rather that than reveal the true horror of my face! High School was difficult, as my friends and I grew into young adults. They were all pretty, and would peer into mirrors to check their skin and have a moan about the odd black head. I would hang back; I couldn’t go anywhere near the mirror as I knew they would’ve been secretly watching me to see how I coped with looking at myself and my ugliness. In my head, my hideousness was recognised by all my friends but they were kind enough to never mention it, and to play along with the farce that I was normal. I could never figure out why they hung around with me, but I was fairly sure it was because they would look prettier to the boys if they stood next to me!
“Every waking moment and everything I did was shadowed by an intense self-consciousness and awareness of my looks.”
Of course, it was a different story with mirrors when I got home. I had one in my bedroom that I spent most of my time in front of, putting on makeup, staring unbelievingly at my gargoyle features, crying, asking why me, hitting and scratching and clawing at my face for hours on end. The only day of the year I looked forward to was Halloween, when I could wear a mask and blend in with the other people, and experience for one night what it was like to be normal. Every waking moment and everything I did was shadowed by an intense self-consciousness and awareness of my looks. I was so repulsive that I wanted to hide away forever, and not put others in the embarrassing position of having to look at me. I felt sorry for anyone that came into contact with me. When I was out I had an overwhelming urge to walk up to passers-by and apologise for my face, and let them know that I was fully aware of what I looked like but there was nothing I could do. I wanted to beg them to forgive me for being so ugly. Every fibre of my body just yearned to disappear.
The only thing I can liken it to is being forced to walk down a street and go about your business completely naked, feeling vulnerable and exposed and knowing that it is unacceptable and wrong for you to be naked, that everyone is staring at you but is too shocked or polite to say anything. So there is this overriding belief in every social interaction that the person you are speaking to knows you are naked and they know that you know they know, and they are horribly embarrassed about it and so are you, but neither one of you is going to mention it. The worst thing was that it could never be talked about. In my head, everyone knew how hideous I was, but it was never mentioned and I could certainly never bring it up as I was so excruciatingly embarrassed by the whole situation. Unfortunately in the ‘real’ world, this meant nobody would’ve known the reasons I was behaving oddly. I avoided leaving my bedroom, as it was the only place where I didn’t feel like I was about to explode with the stress of it all.
During my later teenage years the darkness of night and the dim lights of nightclubs provided a certain amount of disguise, where I thought my skin and layers of makeup were less obvious. So I was able to participate in a basic social life with my friends, especially as getting drunk dampened the feelings of self-hate a little bit. I would know, down to the last minute, what time it got dark during the summer, and only then would I leave my bedroom. It meant missing out on all the summer day activities and early-evening fun, but there was absolutely no choice. I would start getting ready at about 5pm, but still not be ready by the time the pubs were closing at 11. My friends grew increasingly annoyed with my lack of reliability. It wasn’t just a case of not ‘being ready’ to go out – it was more a case of not having done a good-enough job to conceal the terrible secret that was my face. There was no way I could leave the house and let people find out the true extent of my grotesqueness. That would mean disaster.
Obviously I didn’t have boyfriends. Now and again I would drunkenly snog someone in a club, but I knew they were only doing it because they were drunk and that they would wake up the next day ashamed, with their mates taking the piss out of them. Now and again someone would say they fancied me, and my world would spin with anger at their cruelty. I wanted to push them up against a wall and scream in their face that I knew what I was, I wasn’t stupid, and that I knew they were taking the piss out of me, and how could they be so spiteful? All of this was accompanied by the huge amount of other neuroses that you would expect someone under great psychological and emotional strain to display. The OCD symptoms, general anxieties, phobias, depression, self-harm and thoughts of suicide all kept my BDD great company.
But there is hope, and good news. I am now 30 years old, and have considered myself ‘recovered’ for about 5 years. I only realised there was something to ‘recover from’ at the age of 22, when I stumbled across Katharine Phillips’ book The Broken Mirror, in the course of my psychology degree. If I had been as ill as I was during the rougher years, I think I could have read that book from cover to cover and never realised that it was describing something I might have, so convinced was I that I looked like a 100% genuine freak.
“I still fail to comprehend that someone might fancy me or fall in love with me”
BDD caused me to drop out of my A-Levels (in the end I couldn’t face leaving the house). It cost me a ‘normal’ childhood and adolescence, and left me with a persistent underlying suspicion of anyone who compliments me or wants to hang out with me. I still fail to comprehend that someone might fancy me or fall in love with me, but I hope this will change as time goes by, and at least I can be rational about these things now, and recognise that it’s probably the BDD whispering doubts in my ear, rather than the way things really are. Life is liveable and I can function. I can look at myself in a mirror with other people present. and I can walk down the street without wanting to apologise. I feel very positive about the fact that I can now recognise I had a disorder. In my mind that is the definitive sign that you are on the road to recovery, because then you can start to see and accept the outside world’s perspective. Things get a lot easier from that point onwards!
I was at primary school when I first started thinking that I was too skinny and awkward-looking. Somebody teased me in the playground, someone else insisted that I needed feeding or tidying up… But I was already an insecure little girl. Life at home was unstable. I needed reassurance and security. I wanted so much to feel loved and accepted. I had a quirky mother, to whom I never felt as close as I wanted. I lacked a father figure but had an older brother who was adored and preferred over me. I spent my childhood years feeling depressed, and started to believe that the key to happiness lay in my looking a certain way.
I would fan out my hair on the pillow at night, hoping my mother would pop her head around the corner and think what a beautiful daughter she had. In fact I felt anything but. I was angry inside. I wet the bed, and had terrible nightmares. I suffered from panic attacks. I felt like a disappointment. I felt weird. As I got older school became a struggle. I was stuck in a rut of negative thinking about myself, and consequently my development suffered. Despite positive attention, friends, aptitude for some subjects, I became entrenched in my conclusion that I was not good enough. I was allowing myself to be ruled by an ideal of unattainable perfection.
“The mirror was my best friend and my worst enemy”
I looked to the mirror to help me cope with my difficult feelings. If I could only make myself appear a certain way then I would be okay. So my thinking went. I wore thermals underneath my clothes to bulk me out; I hid behind layers of make-up. I wore my hair a particular way to disguise all that I saw wrong with me. The mirror was my best friend and my worst enemy. I gazed in it secretly, because the monster was always gazing back; keeping me locked in a cycle of preening and face pulling. I couldn’t look in it in front of anybody. I would become quietly hysterical at the sight of a photograph of me.
I believed I was a monster. I had to conceal my true identity from the world, at any cost. So, at the age of fifteen, when life should have been exciting and full of a sense of beginnings, of character-building experiences, I dropped out of school and, for an entire year, became a recluse. I lost touch with the world and life grew cold and lonely. All my time was spent gazing into the mirror, wondering what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t look and be normal like everyone else.
At sixteen I finally met someone, moved to London, and started working. People would offer up compliments and even tell me that I should be modelling. But, although I thrived on positive attention when I was with others, later, alone at home, my hellish reality would dawn on me again. I felt like a fraud. I’d spend hours naked, just looking at myself, poking and prodding bits, preening, exercising, worrying that every additive in the food I ate was conspiring to make my skin uglier. I’d check my reflection from every angle, under every kind of light, always ending up back with my self-loathing and tears. My life was not so much about living as surviving. I didn’t feel worthy of happiness. So many times I ran away, only to find that, funnily enough, I couldn’t get away from myself. With each new home, new area, new job, I’d vow that things would be different. I’d be different. But nothing changed.
“As I started to read I had a sense of revelation, because I saw myself in this horrendous illness. Suddenly I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t crazy.”
I remember the day I first heard about Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Flicking through a magazine I came across an article with the heading, ‘I Feel Too Ugly to Live.’ It spoke directly to me. As I started to read I had a sense of revelation, because I saw myself in this horrendous illness. Suddenly I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t crazy. I know some people struggle to believe they have this disorder but for me there was no mistaking it. I went to get a professional opinion at the Priory in North London and walked away determined that I’d kick arse with this disorder.
I tried various medications, eventually some counselling; I even visited a spiritual healer and tried prayer. I read up on the illness, I talked with others who were suffering, I created a website, ‘BDD Help’, to raise awareness and reach out to other sufferers. Yes, some days I struggle and cry and get frustrated because I don’t feel good enough or presentable. It’s to be expected; you pick yourself up and brush yourself down. I have found ways to keep my BDD demons under control, and to get enjoyment out of things I never could before. What I most want to say to you is this: there is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a slow process reprogramming your brain to think differently so you eventually feel differently, but it’s worth it! And it can even be fun getting to discover who you really are from the inside too, to see yourself changing for the better by developing new ways of thinking and being. Life is an adventure and that is the only way to look at it.
So where am I now? Well you know what, with my hand on my heart I could look back on my life so far and either feel regret and sadness, or take out of it valuable insights to carry me forward. I choose the latter. As I get older I realize that it’s the world I live in that is messed up, not me. I see through the media and the beauty industry, all the ignorant and shallow grand illusions that we’re sold. I appreciate that beauty lies in imperfections and uniqueness. Yes, really! But I also see how sensitive and vulnerable we are as children, and how important it is to nourish and nurture every spirit.
I would like to end by saying a big Thank You to all of you that have contacted me since BDDHELP was created. For me it has been wonderful getting to know other sufferers, and to get back support and encouragement from you.
Onwards and upwards with love,
Emma x
