The other day, I was listening to a patient explain to me why he was ugly and no one could possibly find him attractive.
This was news to me, because so far as I could tell he was a very handsome guy – film star handsome. It was a puzzling case.
Let’s talk about beauty – plain old physical appearance.
The first steadfast rule is summed up by the old cliche – beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If you’ve never thought about what that really means, let’s do it here.
The fact is there is no standard for beauty. That’s a myth. The gossip mags and entertainment shows on television hold up one star after another as the ideal, but it’s not true. Only you decide to whom you are attracted, and your taste doesn’t have to match anyone else’s.
Different eras have held widely varying ideas about what is beautiful. Even now, Americans are only beginning to open their eyes to the beauty of different ethnicities whose images were almost entirely absent from the popular media for centuries.
Just as you have a right to decide whom you think is beautiful – other people have that right, too. And it is quite possible someone might decide his ideal of beauty is…you.
My patient had been told by various people that he was handsome, and some had even attempted to pursue him, but he’d always dismissed their interest. He couldn’t accept that other people didn’t see what he saw when he looked in the mirror: he was too short, had bad skin, bad teeth, a bump on his nose. Even as he enumerated these terrible flaws, I strained to see what he was talking about. I looked – and saw a handsome guy.
The problem wasn’t with how this guy looked. It was with the messages he was given as a child.
His parents had him when they were very young, and their marriage soon broke up. The father, caught up in a nasty divorce battle, fought for custody of my patient and won it, only to dump the boy on resentful relatives. My patient grew up receiving the message that his presence was a nuisance – that people wished he wasn’t there. He learned that he was nothing special – certainly no one whom anyone would notice or be attracted to.
My patient went on to succeed in his career, against the odds. Despite his parents’ disinterest, he worked hard in school and rose to an impressive position in the business world. But he still felt ugly – nothing special. His physical appearance became a container for all the feelings his parents put in him about himself.
In our session, I reminded him that his parents were old now, and far away – he hardly saw them anymore. Nowadays he was the one in charge of parenting the little boy inside him. And he was doing a lousy job of it.
I asked him when he first became ugly.
He shrugged.
I asked him whether he was ugly back when he was a little boy. Was he ugly at 6? At 10? At 12? When did the ugliness first arrive?
He shrugged, and said he’d always felt that way.
I asked him if there was such a thing as an ugly little boy.
He said, no, probably not.
So were you ugly when you were 7?
He said he didn’t know – probably.
I said of course not. There is no such thing as an ugly 7 year old. In fact there is no such thing as an ugly child. No child is ugly because every child is unique and beautiful.
So why are you treating this child with such cruelty – telling him such terrible things about who he is?
The messages my patient was addressing to his child were the same ones his parents sent him. A psychotherapist calls these messages “negative introjects” – voices that were put inside you as a child, messages that keep playing years later, like:
You are a nuisance. You are nothing special. You are always in the way. We wish you weren’t here.
I asked him to create some healthier messages for his child self.
He looked at me blankly. Like what?
Well, let’s pretend your mother wasn’t absent from your life when you were little. Let’s pretend she took you up in her lap when you were a boy and said something like:
You are my little one, my precious little fellow. You are handsome and good and you make me proud. You are my boy, my special boy. You are beautiful. You are my treasure.
Tears started to run down my patient’s face.
She never said anything like that.
I know. But you can say it. You don’t have to feel ugly. There’s nothing ugly in you and nothing ugly about you. You deserve love because you are beautiful. Inside and out.
Please don’t tell your child he is ugly. He isn’t. He’s you, and he deserves your love, so he can learn to accept love from the world outside. It’s critical to his happiness. Please be a better parent to that little child.
The People's Therapist 
I came over from Above the Law. I am very glad you have found what appears to be your true “calling,” if you will. Your comments are very insightful, and I will definitely be coming back to you website. Thanks.
Thanks for your kind words. I will be posting regularly. Please feel free to leave feedback, or suggest topics you’d like me to pursue or follow-up on. This is meant to be a dialogue, a place to discuss stuff that’s universal. We all have a heart as well as a head and we can all benefit from stepping back and asking ourselves who we are, where we are and where we’re going.
Great story! Very moving!
Before I read this article, I thought for certain it would address an issue with which I and so very many in the gay male community deal on a daily basis, but while reading it I realized it actually addresses the precise opposite issue.
When I was a child, my mother said exactly the things to me you suggested your patient should say to his own inner child. She continually and frequently told me both how handsome and intelligent I was, so I was unprepared for the blatant hostility many gay men would later show me only because they were not sexually attracted to me. My intelligence and wit were meaningless and worthless to them because similar qualities could be found in an attractive man if they would only ignore me long enough to find one.
Unlike your patient, I felt reasonably attractive and I had a cheerful overall outlook in part as a result. However after decades of nothing but rejection, if not outright flight, from every gay man to whom I was attracted, I began to doubt the lessons my inner child had received and instead started to feel like the monster like which I was being treated. I even felt emotionally abused in that these men had felt perfectly entitled to reach into my brain and destroy my confidence and self-image, perfectly entitled to lobotomize the happy teenager into a twenty- and thirty-something-year-old who was terrified to socialize because he started to believe he must indeed be that monster if all these men felt the same way without ever having discussed it with each other.
In my late thirties, I lost a little weight and started to circulate in chubby and “bear” crowds, and this has been my lifesaver. I was first quite reluctant to identify as a bear; identification with animals seemed very foreign to me, and I also didn’t want to be pigeonholed. However, I have come to embrace the identity mostly because I feel I’d have no dating or physical affection in my life without it. The camaraderie within the (sub-)community also lifts my spirits. Unfortunately, the men to whom I am most attracted still seem to want nothing to do with me, but at least I can give and receive hugs without seeing a look of horror on someone’s face.
I agree that “there is no standard for beauty. That’s a myth.” But your article seems to preach to the choir in my case. To this day, I look in the mirror and think I am sufficiently attractive that I’m continually baffled I have such great difficulty finding even a small circle of men who experience mutual attraction with me. I have found difficulty deprogramming myself so as to find older, fatter, and less conventionally attractive men attractive. (“Only you decide to whom you are attracted, and your taste doesn’t have to match anyone else’s.”) The gay men to whom I am attracted seem unwilling to similarly deprogram themselves, and the chubby chasers and bear admirers are very few and far between.
Sorry, P.T. Instead of dumping all this here, I should probably wait until you address the issue in a future article, but I was just so sure this article would have been the one.
We all bring what we have to the marketplace, and rejection is commonplace. I think most of us probably reject 80% of everyone else without really thinking about it. So if you keep meeting new people, take care of yourself and feel good about who you are…I’m sure the right fella will come along. In the meantime – continue enjoy being you! I know plenty of non-bears who bear-chase. There’s someone out there for everyone – that’s just how it seems to work.
I would disagree with the idea that there are no ugly 7 year olds. In fact I have photographs of myself with eyes sticking out like a deer, a terrible squint, missing and chipped teeth, I am as ugly as they get.
And so it continued. While I appreciate the essence of the article it’s foolish to assume that there aren’t ugly (objectively ugly) people of every age group.
It sounds to me like you were perfectly adorable as a 7 year old.