Body Image and your spouse on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that

people face. One of the questions that we have received here lately at ACBC concerns how to

minister to your spouse when your spouse has body image concerns. And when we talk about body image,

we're talking about difficulties with the

way they perceive themselves. They look at themselves and find themselves to be ugly or too fat or

too thin or whatever it is. And that can create a real set of tensions, not only in the mind and

the heart of the person who's struggling with the concerns,

but also in the relationship between the person who struggles with concerns and their spouse.

And the question is, how do we deal with that in marriage? And so we're going to talk about that this week on the podcast and how to think about and minister to your spouse that may be struggling in this area.

And what I want to do is mention just four things that you could keep in mind as you try to deal with this situation.

And here's the first one.

We need to be honest about a culture of comparison.

So we live in a culture where most people compare themselves to other people.

A person doesn't so much have a body image problem, but has a comparison problem.

A person who was alone on a deserted island and never saw another

human being would not have a body image problem. But as soon as you place yourself in a culture with

advertising, with movies, with pornography, as soon as you place yourself in that world, you start this problem

of comparison. And it's not about what I look like so much as about what I look like over and against

what he looks like or what she looks like. And so we need to be honest that we do live in this

culture of comparison. And we need to be honest about we do live in this culture of comparison.

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