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“I’m not skinny enough to find love!" (and other lies your brain tells you.)

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • January 21, 2018

“It’s too late to go back to school and start a different career.”

“I don’t have the money to travel.”

“All the good, loyal men are taken.”

“I have to be at my goal weight before I get on any apps.”

“I’ve poured so much into this relationship already, I can’t back out now, can I?”

“They’re family, so I have to spend my free time with them, right?”

Do any of these beliefs sound familiar? Have any of them popped up in the last few weeks as you thought about what your goals and plans for 2018 include?

If you haven’t had these thoughts exactly, you likely have your own version of them: Sneaky, intrusive thoughts that pop up and seem to scold you out of pursuing what it is you want or shame and blame you into “more realistic” goals and dreams.

In other words, lies your brain tells you.

Almost ALL of us have thoughts like this — ways we shut ourselves down, or talk ourselves out of going after what it is we want in life.

It’s normal and natural to have beliefs like this.

We likely learned these beliefs at some point in our lives and, perhaps, they may have even served to keep us safe at some point (or we thought we were keeping ourselves safe), but now these beliefs are getting in our way and possibly contributing to our emotional distress.

These beliefs have become maladaptive thoughts. And they need to be addressed.

So today I want to explore the concept of maladaptive thoughts with you, provide some prompts to help you recognize your own maladaptive thoughts, and provide further exercises you can use to challenge these maladaptive thoughts and come up with more functional, healthier patterns of thinking.

My hope is that this will support you not only in going after your goals in 2018. But in every way in all your days this year.

What’s a maladaptive thought?

Maladaptive thoughts are firmly established patterns of thinking that are often intrusive, negatively biased, rigid, distorted, and inaccurate.

They don’t have to be just one single thought. (e.g.: “He won’t go for a woman who looks like me!”) They can be entire schemas – patterns or core beliefs of thought (e.g.: “I’m unloveable.”).

Maladaptive thoughts form in much the same way any of our beliefs about the world form. We form in relationship to the relationships around us. So in other words, we absorb the messaging and beliefs we receive implicitly and explicitly from our early relationships. From our parents and caregivers, our siblings, our school peers, even our church and local communities.

Some of the beliefs we absorb may be functional and helpful. (“Don’t get into a van with a strange man!”) Others may be less helpful. Such as when you grow up with a narcissist for a parent who gives you the message (through their actions and perhaps words) that you are fundamentally unlovable.

Maladaptive, by its definition, means that these particular beliefs fail to help us adjust adequately or appropriately to the environment and situations that we are in.

So while it may have been a sane, appropriate belief if you grew up with a narcissist who was incapable of loving you to believe the thought, “I’m unloveable to this person.”, it becomes a maladaptive thought if you maintain this thought as you grow up and surround yourself with more functional individuals who are capable of healthy love.

In other words, your belief is no longer adaptive to the situation you may find yourself in now.

So what’s the cost of maladaptive thoughts?

On the more “mild” end of the spectrum, maladaptive thoughts can stop us from going after what it is we hunger and long for. They can become the excuses we use for not going after the job, the romantic partner, the travel, the lifestyle design we truly want.

And on the more “serious” end of the spectrum, these cognitive distortions can impact greatly our emotions and daily well-being, possibly contributing to anxiety, depression, and a sense of hopelessness and powerless.

So it’s important that we get in touch with what our own maladaptive thoughts may be and then challenge these thoughts to untwist our thinking and come up with more functional, adaptive beliefs.

Inquiries To Identify Your Own Maladaptive Thoughts:

Below I provide a list of inquiries to help you get in touch with your own maladaptive thoughts (the lies your brain tells you). (Hint: think about any resistances or blocks that have come up for you in the past few weeks as your thoughts about any goals you want to pursue in 2018.)

• What kind of lies does your brain tell you? What are the automatic thoughts you have that tell you why you can’t do something/why things won’t work? What does your brain seemingly shout at you when you start to feel vulnerable or move towards something you want?
• Do your maladaptive thoughts tend to have a particular flavor? These thoughts can often fall into buckets centered around categories like defectiveness (“It won’t work out because nothing ever does for me!”), unloveableness (“Other women can find men on those apps but I can’t because of my baggage.”), abandonment (“Why even bother trying to date? He’s just going to cheat on me anyways.”), and powerlessness (“What’s the point of applying? It’s a boys club and I don’t have a chance at the promotion.”)
• Examine the source. Where does this belief (or beliefs come from) come from? Does it remind you of anyone you know or knew who would preach something similar? Whose voice does this sound like?
• Explore the cost. How has believing this lie impacted your life so far? What have they stopped you from doing? What’s the cost of continuing to believe these stories?

Exercises to challenge your maladaptive thoughts:

Now that you’ve identified some (or possibly many) maladaptive thoughts and explored how they’ve impacted your life so far and what the cost of continuing to believe them may be, I want you to practice challenging these thoughts and seeing if you can come up with some other more functional, healthy beliefs. Here are a few exercises to help you do this:

• Use another person’s perspective: Who is someone in your life who doesn’t seem to buy into this lie like you do? What would your mentor or best friend or therapist say? What’s a story or belief THEY probably think instead? What would it be like for you to tell yourself THIS story instead of your maladaptive belief? What impact would that have on your life?
• Use data to disprove yourself: Can you come up with three examples of people or situations that disprove your belief? For example, if the belief is that you’re not skinny enough to find love, can you think of three examples of women or men who seem to have found love despite whatever size they are?
• Use logic to poke holes in it: Ask yourself, is this thought realistic? Is it, perhaps, black and white all or nothing thinking? Is this thought based on facts? Am I thinking an extreme or over exaggerated thought? Can I think of any reason why this thought may not be 100% true?
• Ask yourself what you would tell a loved one. Ask yourself if you would tell your best friend or your child this thought. No? So what would you tell them instead? And what would it be like to tell yourself this thought? What new story would that be then?

Wrapping this up.

Almost all of our brains tell us “lies” – or, rather, maladaptive thoughts about who we are and what we are capable of in this world.

This is normal and natural and a consequence of growing up in society writ large let alone whatever household we were lucky or unlucky to have grown up in.

You’re not wrong for having these beliefs. We all have them in our own way.

But I want to invite you to get to know these “lies” more – these maladaptive thoughts – and to choose how well they are working for you and whether or not it would be more helpful for you to believe something else instead.

When we can create some choice and flexibility in our thinking, that’s where our freedom lies.

When we uncover and own our resistances, our stories and introjects (lies we swallow whole), when we challenge them and then choose something different – this is where change can really start to happen. Doing this can be a huge support in moving towards your goals.

And now I’d like to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave a message in the comments below so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

The Research: What We Know About Body Image, Shame, and Lovability

• Cash, T. F. (2004). Body image: Past, present, and future. Body Image: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice.
• Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. International Universities Press.
• American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Wei, M., Mallinckrodt, B., Larson, L. M., & Zakalik, R. A. (2005). Adult attachment, depressive symptoms, and validation from self versus others. Journal of Counseling Psychology.
• Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
• Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.

How Body-Based Maladaptive Thoughts Show Up in Driven Women

In my work with driven women, body image distress rarely presents as overt eating disordered behavior. It’s more subtle than that. It shows up as the executive who delays launching her LinkedIn profile because she doesn’t like how she looks in photos. The physician who declines invitations to speak at conferences because she isn’t at “the right weight” to be visible. The entrepreneur who defers her dating profile for another six months, another six months, another six months — waiting for a version of herself she can finally offer to the world.

What I see consistently in driven women is that the body has become a stand-in for deeper questions of worthiness. “If I could just fix this one thing,” the logic goes, “then I’d be acceptable. Then I’d deserve love. Then I’d be allowed to want things.” The body becomes the last-remaining project — the one area where the driven woman still locates the reason she isn’t enough. This is not vanity. This is relational trauma expressing itself in the only language the culture has offered her for talking about her internal sense of inadequacy.

Tessa is a 37-year-old venture-backed founder who has raised three rounds of funding, employs twenty people, and has a calendar that’s managed in fifteen-minute blocks. She’s been single for four years and has downloaded and deleted three different dating apps without activating them. “I keep saying I’ll get on there after I lose the weight,” she told me. “But honestly, I don’t think that’s really what it’s about.” She was right. What Tessa was describing was a long-standing belief — absorbed from a critical mother and reinforced by diet culture — that her body’s imperfections disqualified her from being chosen. The dating app wasn’t really the obstacle. Her sense of fundamental lovability was. And no body weight was ever going to fix that.

Challenging the Lie: What Actually Changes the Belief

If maladaptive thoughts form in relationship — if they are absorbed from early relational environments — then they must be updated in relationship too. This is not a case where intellectual reframing alone does the work. You can know, cognitively, that your body is not the barrier to love and still feel, in your body and your nervous system, that it absolutely is. The knowing and the feeling operate on different tracks.

Aaron T. Beck, MD, psychiatrist and the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, developed the foundational framework for understanding how maladaptive thoughts operate — how they become automatic, how they distort perception, and how they maintain themselves even in the face of contradicting evidence. But Beck also acknowledged what the relational therapies have developed further: that schema-level beliefs — the deep core beliefs about the self, like “I am unlovable” — don’t shift through challenging the thought alone. They shift through new relational experiences that contradict the original message at the felt, embodied level.

What this means practically: the work isn’t primarily about developing better counter-arguments to “I’m not skinny enough to find love.” It’s about building enough relational safety — often in a good therapy relationship first, and then in honest friendships and eventually in romantic relationships — that the nervous system can start to update its foundational belief about your lovability. That is slower work. It is also the only work that actually changes the belief, rather than just covering it over with more effortful positive thinking.

The exercise prompts and journaling inquiries that appear later in this post are useful. They can help you surface and examine the maladaptive thought rather than just living inside it. But the deepest change — the shift from “I know intellectually I’m lovable” to “I actually feel it” — happens through the sustained experience of being seen, cared for, and valued exactly as you are. Relational therapy is often where that experience becomes available for the first time.

Both/And: You Can Want Deep Connection and Still Need Independence

Driven women in relationships often feel caught between two fears: the fear of being swallowed by intimacy and the fear of being alone. They want partnership but struggle to surrender the self-sufficiency that has kept them safe. In clinical work, this tension usually points backward — to an early relational environment where closeness and control, love and loss of self, were dangerously intertwined.

Sarah is a management consultant who described her marriage as “wonderful on paper.” She loves her partner, trusts him, and still finds herself pulling away whenever things feel too close. “I pick fights before vacations,” she admitted. “I don’t know why.” In therapy, we traced the pattern to its origin: a childhood where emotional closeness was always followed by unpredictability. Her nervous system learned that intimacy precedes danger, and twenty years of safe relationship haven’t fully overwritten that early code.

Both/And means Sarah can love her partner deeply and still feel the pull to withdraw. She can want connection and need space without those being contradictory. She can be working on her attachment patterns and still have moments where the old wiring activates. The goal isn’t to eliminate the tension between closeness and independence — it’s to expand her capacity to hold both without one hijacking the other.

The Systemic Lens: How Culture Scripts the Relationships Driven Women Build

Every intimate relationship contains two people and an entire culture. The expectations you carry about who should initiate, who should sacrifice, who manages the household, who carries the emotional load — these aren’t personal preferences. They’re the residue of decades of gendered socialization, compounded by race, class, and cultural specificity. When driven women struggle in their relationships, the struggle is rarely just interpersonal. It’s structural.

Consider the mental load research pioneered by sociologist Allison Daminger. Even in partnerships that appear egalitarian, women disproportionately carry the cognitive labor of household management — anticipating needs, monitoring, planning, delegating. For driven women, this invisible workload often goes unacknowledged because they’re “so good at it.” Their competence becomes a trap: the more capably they manage, the more management accrues to them, until they’re running a household like a second job while their partner benefits from a life that appears to “run itself.”

In my clinical work, naming these systemic dynamics in couples therapy is essential. When a driven woman feels resentful, exhausted, or taken for granted in her relationship, the answer isn’t always better communication. Sometimes the answer is an honest accounting of who does what, and a reckoning with the cultural systems that made the current imbalance feel inevitable. Your relationship didn’t create these conditions. But it’s operating inside them, and pretending otherwise keeps both partners stuck.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

The diet and beauty industries are not passive participants in the maladaptive thought patterns this post describes. They are active creators of them. Industry research is clear: industries that profit from women’s body dissatisfaction have strong financial incentives to cultivate and maintain that dissatisfaction. This is not a conspiracy theory — it’s a business model. The woman who is at peace with her body doesn’t buy as many products, doesn’t subscribe to as many programs, doesn’t consult as many professionals promising transformation.

For driven women, who tend to apply their achievement orientation to everything including self-improvement, this creates a particularly insidious dynamic. The message that your body is a project to be optimized — and that failing to achieve the optimal body reflects a failure of discipline, strategy, or willpower — lands on fertile ground in the mind of someone who has organized her entire life around achievement. She brings her full executive function to the project of fixing herself. And the industries continue to profit from the fact that the project, by design, cannot be completed.

Naming this isn’t meant to remove all personal agency from the equation. But it does provide important context for why the thought “I’m not skinny enough to find love” is so persistent, so culturally reinforced, and so difficult to argue down with logic alone. You are not irrational. You are navigating an environment that profits from your believing this about yourself. The work of reclaiming your sense of worthiness is work against that tide — and it requires both personal and cultural awareness to do effectively.

How to Heal the Lies Your Brain Tells You About Your Body and Lovability

In my work with clients who’ve internalized the belief that their body disqualifies them from love, I want to start with something important: these aren’t random thoughts, and they’re not simply low self-esteem. They’re deeply held beliefs about conditional worth — beliefs that were likely seeded early, reinforced by culture, and possibly by specific relational experiences that told you love had to be earned by looking a particular way. These beliefs feel like truth, and they’re not. But simply being told they’re not true doesn’t make them stop feeling that way. Healing this requires something more than reassurance.

The thoughts that tell you you’re not enough — not thin enough, not pretty enough, not the right shape or size to deserve connection — tend to be held with extraordinary force because they’re protective. If you believe your body is the problem, you have an explanation for relational disappointment that doesn’t require you to be vulnerable to actual connection. It’s painful, but it’s a kind of control. Understanding what those thoughts are protecting you from is often where the real work begins.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a modality I return to often with clients carrying this particular kind of pain. There’s almost always a part running the “I’m not enough” narrative — a part that developed for reasons that made sense at a particular time, in a particular context. IFS allows you to find that part, get curious about its origins, and understand what it’s been trying to protect. When you can meet it with compassion rather than argument, the grip it has on your self-perception tends to loosen in ways that pure cognitive work can’t achieve.

Somatic Experiencing is also something I integrate in this work, because beliefs about the body are held in the body. When a client tells me they don’t feel at home in their body, or that they tend to dissociate when looking in a mirror, that’s not just a psychological statement — it’s a somatic one. SE helps clients develop a gentler relationship with their physical self, gradually building the capacity to inhabit their body with more safety and less judgment. That physical homecoming is a prerequisite for believing, really believing, that you’re lovable as you are.

Trauma-informed therapy more broadly is worth seeking if there are specific experiences in your history — comments from a parent, a relationship that conditioned your acceptance on your appearance, experiences of rejection or humiliation — that seeded these beliefs. Those experiences don’t have to remain the organizing story of your self-worth. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can help process the specific memories that are most charged, reducing the emotional force they carry into your current self-perception.

I also want to gently push back on any framework that promises to love your body through affirmations or radical acceptance alone. For women carrying significant relational or developmental trauma, body image work that doesn’t address the underlying relational wound tends to be superficial. The path to genuinely feeling lovable isn’t through your bathroom mirror — it’s through relational experiences, including therapeutic ones, that actually demonstrate the lie in the belief that you have to be different to deserve love.

You deserve to be loved in the body you live in, right now, not in some future version of it. If you’re ready to start challenging the stories your brain has been telling you — not with affirmations, but with real work — I’d love to support you in that. You can learn more about therapy with me or take our short quiz to get a clearer sense of where your work might begin. The brain’s lies are worth investigating. What you find underneath them is usually something much kinder than the story you’ve been carrying.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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