The truth is, you know you’re talented and you appreciate your artistic gifts. When you are in your emotional creative spaces – where you get in touch with your talents, skills, and your inspiration all coming together in one – you transform into an artistic expression. In that space, your creativity flows in you naturally and spills out in ways that excites you and keeps you engaged in your creative pursuit.
But it all feels inauthentic when you’re not feeling right in your own body. Your body holds and expresses your emotions. It speaks to what’s inside, even if you try to avoid or deny its messages. It’s the core of what you are.
How are you getting in touch with your artistic expression through the messiness of challenging feelings about your body? How is your creative flow impacted by shame you feel about your body?
At times, your feelings about your body become the obstacles to your creativity. You feel filled with the imperfections of a figure full of flaws. Perhaps this is the fallout from the way you were abused, bullied, assaulted, or rejected in the past. Maybe you simply never felt you measured up to societal standards.
All you know now is that your body feels, many times, awkward and not good enough to honor it, to feel its energy, to create from within. Maybe odd and heavy. Or weak and thin. Or beautiful but not connected to your heart. Whatever the case and however you came to this perception, your own body feels the shame and unrelenting self-rejection.
So. What now? What do you do when you love sharing your art or performance with your audience but feel held back by a body that feels wounded or unworthy?
EMDR Can Help You Tame Your Body Shame
At some point, the impulse to hide your body can interfere with your creative mind. You may disconnect with how you feel in your body, leaving yourself unconnected to you as a whole, trapped in an intellectualized place to make your art. Thus, the solution is to rewire your powerful mind-body connection so you can show up more fully in your creative pursuits. Art that speaks to others has to come from a whole inner and complete self – with all the richness of your humanity and the beauty of your complex feelings – to tell the story that touches your audience. EMDR can heal body shame and allow you to become whole again. To stay connected to the core of who you are when you create or perform. 
EMDR is a body-centered approach to soothe old feelings and help you transition to a feeling of healthy and empowering self-acceptance
What fears and sensations accompany thoughts about your body? EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works to help you identify and process the painful internal places and memories that shape your body unhealthy and fragmented perception – that something is intrinsically wrong with your physical self.
Thus, EMDR permits you to get in touch with your perceived imperfections and reintegrate them with all of who you are so you can stay connected with all that you are to make your art.
You can become a lovely blend of healthy, grounded, and genuine body confidence. This shift can allow you to make healthy decisions to be in tune with your body: to nurture your body, to make active decisions about what you want to change (i.e.natural changes that come with a healthier life-style) about your body, and also to accept what you can’t or don’t want to change.
To be able to actively and creatively create your own self-images that you can embrace and live with a sense of connection and healthy pride – rooted in a new understanding of your uniqueness, free of past judgments or abuses.
You can reconnect to your feelings in your body. To be aware and in touch of your body safely and compassionately. So you can access and harness it and express your creativity – to make art or perform with your full self.
EMDR addresses the memories related to relationships and interactions that left you feeling ashamed of your body, healing them and clearing away flawed and unreal self-perceptions. By engaging REM (Rapid Eye Movement), EMDR transforms old emotional conflicts around your body into healthy connections to all that you are.
EMDR can help you shift from the pressures of creating or performing from body perfection to working with your own unique talents and skills 
EMDR allows you to systematically reprocess the connections you may have made between unhealthy body image and the realities of career pressure and rejection. In this way you can start working with the reality of a tough career and while you stay grounded in healthy self-image and to continue to develop your artistic abilities. To realistically invest yourself in crafting your talents and skills. To use your body, the hub or the core of who you are, to perform or to create.
EMDR can help you reconnect with your body, your inner source of feelings, wisdom, and energy. It actually transforms the connections in your brain that would allow your body perception to further goals.
It’s beyond feeling good about your body, it’s about the inner-connection to all that you are to create and perform with all that you are. It’s less about reframing thoughts and more about actually transforming the connections in your brain that would allow your body perception to impede your goals.
As your perception shifts, you can see career criticism as just that, rather than an indictment of who you are or what you look like. Resilience and clarity are the resulting gifts.
So, What’s Next?
How do you reconcile the creative gifts you have to share with the challenging feelings about your body? It’s time to stop being in your way. Reach out for help, embrace the present, and learn how to stop reliving body shame again and again.
If you have any questions about EMDR or would like to know if it’s a good psychotherapy approach for you, please contact me for your free 15-20min phone consultation.
I am Mihaela Ivan Holtz, Doctor in Clinical Psychology. I help creatives and performers with their life struggles, depression, anxiety, performance anxiety, creativity, relationships and love, PTSD, and addictions – to become their own best version. You can read more about Therapy for Creatives here.
