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A Gay Therapist’s Guide to Healing Body Shame: Beyond the Mirror
A therapist’s raw look at how trauma, not vanity, drives the gay community’s body image crisis — and the path to healing
I’ve watched gay men destroy themselves for the “perfect body” for over twenty years. Here’s what we’re still getting wrong.
When Marco broke down in my office last week, his gym-sculpted body heaving with sobs, I recognized a painfully familiar pattern. Not just as a therapist who’s specialized in gay men’s mental health for two decades, but as someone who spent years fighting the same battle.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked, eyes red and swollen. “I’ve got the body I thought would make me happy. So why do I still feel like that skinny kid everyone called a faggot?”
His words cut deep because they expose the fundamental misunderstanding about gay men’s relationship with their bodies. We treat it like a vanity issue, a simple matter of wanting to look good.
As a therapist specializing in gay men’s mental health, I’ve witnessed what research confirms: gay men experience significantly higher rates of body image disturbance compared to heterosexual men, including increased drives for thinness and muscularity and markedly lower body…
