Sexuality as a space of personal transformation, which I wrote about last time, is possible only to the extent that you are in genuine contact with your own body. And precisely this contact is profoundly influenced by something we all carry, in varying degrees: body image, meaning the story we tell about our body and the place it occupies in our inner life.

It is not a superficial subject. It is one that affects, in concrete and measurable ways, not only sexual life but also the quality of relationships in general, the level of self-confidence, and the capacity to be present and open towards others.

Body image is not what the mirror sees. It is what you believe the mirror sees, filtered through years of messages received from family, peers, culture, and past relationships. These messages accumulate and form an internal narrative about the body that operates autonomously, often without our being able to read it directly.

Research in body psychology shows that negative body image is associated with a range of relational consequences that go far beyond dissatisfaction with appearance. People with negative body image tend to withdraw from situations of intimacy, to avoid physical contact, and to be preoccupied with monitoring their appearance rather than being present in the intimate experience. And this withdrawal is not a conscious decision. It is an automatic response of a system that has learned the body is a source of shame or judgement.

How does body image influence self-confidence in relationships? Through a simple but profound mechanism: if you do not believe your body is worthy of attention and affection, you will interpret the attention and affection you receive as errors or exceptions. Not as something real and deserved, but as something temporary, which will cease once the other person truly sees.

This conviction produces a specific behaviour: preventive distance. You withdraw before being rejected. You do not allow yourself to fully receive affection, because receiving it completely would mean believing it, and believing it would make subsequent rejection more painful. And so, paradoxically, negative body image produces precisely the loneliness it fears.

There is an important difference between dissatisfaction with the body and disgust towards the body that we underestimate. Dissatisfaction is almost universal and comes in varying degrees. Disgust towards the body is something more severe, a feeling of profound estrangement from one's own physical form, which produces a significant impact on functioning in intimacy.

People who experience this disgust cannot be present in intimacy, because a portion of their attention is permanently occupied with the image of their own body seen from the outside, with monitoring how they are perceived. It is a specific type of absence from the intimate moment that has nothing to do with attraction towards the partner or with sexual desire. It has to do with the relationship with oneself.

Sexual life is one of the domains where negative body image manifests most visibly and most painfully. Avoiding certain positions or contexts from fear of being seen, the difficulty of receiving pleasure without thinking about how you look in that moment, the impossibility of being fully present because you are caught in internal surveillance, all of these are ways in which the difficult relationship with one's own body sabotages intimacy.

And equally important: the partner feels this absence, even if they cannot name it. Partial presence, attention divided between the experience and bodily surveillance, is felt. And sometimes it is misinterpreted as emotional distance or lack of interest in them.

What can you do? There is no quick solution and anyone who promises one is lying. But there are real directions.

The first is becoming aware of the internal narrative. What do you tell yourself about your body and where do those words come from? Sometimes recognising that the critical voice is not yours, but belongs to someone who spoke to you that way at some point, produces an initial distancing from it.

The second is gradually replacing evaluation with curiosity. Not "how do I look?" but "what do I feel?" Not "what does the other person see?" but "what is alive in my body right now?" This shift in perspective, from mirror to experience, is the foundation of any improvement in body image.

The third is to seek relationships, including the one with your partner, in which your body is treated with attention and respect. Repeated intimate experiences in which you are received rather than judged have a genuinely reparative effect on body image.

How would you describe your relationship with your own body in moments of intimacy? Do you feel present in it or do you observe it from the outside? And what do you think would change if you could be less of a spectator and more of an inhabitant of your own body?