Helping Women Conquer Negative Body Images

by Katie Farrell

North Reading Transcript, North Reading MA
November 14, 2002

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©2002 North Reading Transcript. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

North Reading's Isabelle Tierney has a message she wants to share with other women: it's not okay to hate your body.

Tierney suffered from bulimia for 20 years before finding a way to begin the healing process eight years ago.

"The reason that I hurt my body so much was that I just saw it as an object ... a thing that had to be manipulated in order for me to be loved," she remembers.  "I was completely making my body a thing."

The 39-year-old says that she realized during therapy for eating disorder that her body was actually an amazing living system capable of feeling the effects of what she was doing to it.  She credits that realization as her turning point.  "When you start connecting to your body as an ally ... you actually want to start to care for it."

As she continues to recover, Tierney now works to help other women and men learn to love their bodies by stopping self-destructive habits and letting go of negative thoughts and feelings through her "Body Beloved" workshops.

Tierney will be holding a T.H.E. workshop this Sunday, November 17, from 1pm to 5pm at the Aldersgate United Methodist Church on Park Street.

As she strives to teach participants "The inside-out way to love your body" during the session, Tierney focuses on first making the participants aware of the negative voices they hear when they look at themselves in the mirror that guide their body images and food choices, and then helps them change the voices into positive expressions.

She also works with the audience on experimental exercises designed to make them go inside their bodies to see what they claim to hate is really the digestive system, muscles, bones, and oxygen -the vital components of their body that keep them alive and healthy.

"What is so revolutionary about the workshop is going inside the body and seeing what is in there," she said. "We miss out on so much when we are just looking at the outside.

Tierney says that the feedback she received following her first workshop in September for 14 females was extremely positive.  However, as she looks towards the future of the sessions, her intent is to eventually hold weekly workshops which will keep the motivation from the workshops alive.

For now, in an effort to help her clients remain motivated, Tierney encourages the workshop participants to state five things they are grateful for about their bodies each night as they shift their perception from what their bodies are not to what they are. 

"The weight, the scale, the mirror ... they are false (images) about what our bodies are." She said.

"We all try to look like what our society tells us we should look like," Tierney remarked.  "What matters is how does your body feel, is it working for you?"

Tierney also seeks to expand her T.H.E. workshops by bringing them to the middle school and high school audiences.  For Tierney, these are the people who desperately need to hear her message as they are taught that "what they look like on the outside is what matters," she noted.

Tierney has a masters degree in international relations and communications from Boston University as well as a masters degree in child development from Tufts. She also graduated from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in Florida, a four-year school that combines the teaching of psychology and spirituality. She lives with her husband and three children at 7 Canterbury Lane.

©2002 North Reading Transcript. All rights reserved. Used with permission.