Who Am I, and What Do I Know About Any of the Pain You’re Going Through?

I’m Sandy Kumskov, I’m a holistic counsellor specialising in body image. I became a body image specialist because from the time I was about 8 years old I had what I now recognise as a body image problem. I learned in my 30s that as a child I’d had Graves Disease, which is an overactive thyroid gland. I was a VERY thin child and my family nickname throughout childhood was Skinny. My best friend’s family called me Bones. Now my family were not cruel, they were just doing what families do. But for me as a child not knowing any better, I just thought I was ugly and since I was the younger sister to two older brothers and was a real tomboy, it didn’t really bother me.

At 9 I started to wear glasses to correct my increasing short-sightedness and of course acquired Four-eyes as another name. I know, original

When I was 11 I got a rude shock one morning when the obvious signs of puberty hit, early, when my first period started. Over the next couple of years my body’s appearance started to change as well and I went from being really skinny to being quite curvy – still thin, but curvy. In the course of those curves emerging, the skin on my hips and thighs developed a LOT of stretchmarks. They didn’t hurt so I figured I wasn’t dying but on swimming day at school I’d sneak a look at my classmates and none of them seemed to have the marks, so I hid them, I thought, quite successfully. Until the day my mum saw them and she flipped out. She immediately took me to the doctor who prescribed some pregnancy cream called Happy Event which I was supposed to use morning and night (yeh right! I was a tomboy remember! Cream?? That’s for sissies!), but there was no “cure”  he said so all the cream might do was prevent them from getting “worse”. From then on I felt not only ugly, but also like a freak.

We’d grown up with a swimming pool in our yard and I loved to swim, but as puberty continued to evolve my body, the marks got worse and I stopped swimming altogether. I’d watch my brothers and the other neighbourhood kids instead, often from my bedroom window. I realise now that I put up quite big barriers to stop anyone from getting too close to the real me because then they’d know the truth: that I was ugly and therefore “unworthy” somehow.

I was a good student so I became a bookworm, and no one really bothered me much because I was doing what was expected of me – be a good girl, get good marks at school, do what I’m told and I managed somehow to avoid swimming classes during the summer terms. My standard clothing line was jeans, I never wore shorts and I’ve still never worn a mini-skirt.

Mum and my aunts were doing “The Drinking Man’s Diet” and compared notes every weekend! Then came the Israeli Army Diet and the Grapefruit Diet. Dieting was what women thought about, talked about, and did.

So, by about age 14 or 15 I was a UK size 8 with a well-developed chest and hips, a very small waist and apparently was quite pretty, though I certainly never felt pretty or even attractive in any way. I knew about sex but I never really thought about it in relation to myself. My friends were, like me, a bit bookish and tomboyish, not the ‘girly girls’. I remember sitting in the sun during a break at school one day when I was about 14, with a friend named Carol. We were looking through a women’s magazine and critiquing the body of a much-admired local model. What we were really doing of course was comparing ourselves to her, and I, anyway, was coming up short: the model surely didn’t have stretchmarks!

And one day a family acquaintance made some comments to me that made me realise men were looking at me differently. I don’t remember the comments but I do remember my absolute shock and my thoughts – is this the way world really is? Will I never again be regarded as a person with a brain because I also have breasts? I noticed that no one was calling me skinny anymore, and quite a few older males were calling me sexy. I was very uncomfortable with my breasts, my curvy bum and round thighs and small waist and very uncomfortable with the comments; one because I didn’t know what to do with the attention and two because inside I felt so ugly – if they only knew that I had all those horrible marks on my hips and thighs, they’d be calling me something different, I thought. My knees and elbows were still boney, I still felt like ugly-duckling-Skinny and so I started wearing t-shirts that were too big for me, and jeans were still my favourite clothing. The comments didn’t stop though….

Then our family left South Africa and moved to the UK – new schools new friends new weather – and at about 16 my body-consciousness started to become laser-focussed. Mum and her girlfriends would talk diets and count calories. I became friendly with my mum’s scales – I noticed that if I skipped a meal (like dinner) I’d lose a kilo, but my weight pretty much stayed in that 48-50kg range so I never really bothered. I was a comfortable size 10 and on a “good” day a size 9. I did a lot of running and walking and played netball and did gym at school because that was my lifestyle, and mum controlled our food pretty well, because she controlled her own food. I was amongst the thinnest of my friends and still not aware that my thyroid was probably still overactive. I still felt like SKINNY but on some level was quite enjoying the fact that my friends were obsessing about the size of their thighs in their new cordurouys and openly jealous about the smallness of mine.

When I was 19 I met my Australian husband and moved to Australia. I was a size 9 and weighed 48kg. Funnily enough he never even once commented on the stretch marks, I guess his attention was elsewhere. I went on the Pill and gained 10 kilos and a few more stretch marks. Now I was really getting concerned: 10 kilos!! I was an ELEPHANT!! I tried the Pritikin Diet and the F Plan Diet and every other new diet that hit the headlines. I never lost the Pill weight, so was now hovering around 65kgs and wearing a size 12. Two years after I’d moved to Australia my mum and dad visited, and I was now 2” taller than my mum and could nearly look Dad in the eye. They’d not shrunk so obviously I’d grown taller. Yes, we keep growing until we reach our full adult body size at about 22.

I remember one hot summer day I gathered my courage in both hands and went swimming with a girlfriend and her two small children. And you know what children are like: “Sandy, what are those white lines on your legs?” I actually didn’t know what to say, and my girlfriend said, “Don’t ask personal questions Tommy!” I was very successfully creating more reinforcement every time I dared to bare my skin, and my sarong became my best friend! I went to the pool and sat in the shade watching. I was so relieved when all the campaigns about skin cancer started because it gave me an excuse to wear shorts and a t-shirt to the beach!! “Oh I burn so easily….” And to my surprise, people accepted that!! I started to realise how infrequently people actually think about others, they’re so focussed on their own insecurities!

During my pregnancies I developed a few marks on my tummy and a few on my butt, it added to the tracery and with my awareness beginning to change didn’t worsen my body image. But I was still focussing on my stomach being flat enough (it never was) and my breasts and bum being too big (they always were).

My two lovely daughters did, I think, ask about the marks because they asked about everything, and of course there was no judgement from them because I was their mum and the marks were just part of me and so what? I had become aware of how I’d absorbed my mum’s judgements about her body and about mine, and really wanted my girls to be more comfortable in their skin than I was in mine.

Not that I was modelling that very well! I had a shelf full of diet books and also tried Gloria Marshall, Weight Watchers, the latest powders, potions, even over-the-counter diet drugs. And I spent many hours at the local gym. I felt physically very fit but still the “best” I could do was a size 12 and that was tight! I was living what I truly believed was the best way for our family, working part-time and being a nearly-full-time mum. I’d hated that my mum couldn’t go to important things at school because she was working and was determined to be available for my kids. The truth was I felt lonely. I was younger than most other mums at my children’s school and felt very displaced in the world – I’d emigrated twice in ten years and really had no friends. My husband’s family were very dispersed and not at all close. I worked in my husband’s business, and became involved in a women’s voluntary organisation which was a life-saver in some ways, and gave me an outlet for my very active mind; and in other ways was severely limiting.

When my eldest daughter was about 13 she was developing in the expected way and sure enough, along came some stretch marks. I was determined she’d not feel the way about them that I did, because I was by now the expert on stretchmarks. I knew what caused them and how they made a woman feel, and what the ‘treatments’ were. But my daughter noticed the marks, decided she didn’t care, and that was that! She has always known she’s lovely and no matter how her body has changed, she’s been very comfortable with it.

Meanwhile I was still battling the fat demon! I looked at photos of my younger self, when I’d believed I was so fat and ugly! I was so struck by how I appeared so differently than how I’d believed I looked. And still I believed that the next diet would do the trick, that there was something wrong with me for not being able to maintain my thinness.

As I’m writing this I’m actually getting really bored with the story. So I think I’ll summarise it here by saying eventually I had enough of hating myself, of being depressed and angry, and with the help of EFT I acknowledged it all, transformed a great deal of it, and got on with life. But I must have been about 40 years old by that time, retraining as a professional counsellor while working at being a web designer and parenting a very wild teenage daughter and a quieter-but-missing-nothing younger daughter. Lots of challenges in those years and lots of clarity that the pain and anxiety and self-hatred of most of the women I knew, about their bodies, was life-limiting for everyone – families, communities, and themselves. And from day one at counselling college I knew that helping women shed that pain and those limits was where I wanted to work.

So, that’s a bit of my story, it’s nothing unusual, I’m sure your story has elements of the same, and probably many differences. If you’d like to share some below, please do. If you’d like to get on with shedding the limits, please sign up for my free 10 day EFT Loving Your Body Program, and let’s change the world together!