Dr. Melisa Arias-Valenzuela, CPsych, 116 Lisgar, Suite 101, Ottawa, ON (2026)

She is also the founder and director of Uprise Psychology & Wellness.

12/18/2025

Holiday gatherings can activate body image in ways that feel sudden and intense, especially when comments are framed as “concern,” “jokes,” or “just being honest.”

From a psychological perspective, these comments reinforce body surveillance and shame, even when they’re subtle or well-intentioned. Over time, that constant evaluation teaches the nervous system to stay on high alert around food, appearance, and belonging.
Boundaries don’t have to be confrontational to be effective. Simple, repeated responses help reduce emotional load and signal that your body is not a public topic.

And if setting boundaries doesn’t work? Creating distance, emotionally or physically, is also a form of self-protection.
You’re allowed to enjoy the holidays without your body being up for discussion.
Save this. Share it. Come back to it when needed

You landed on my post for a reason. For more support on your body image resilience journey, follow 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

12/11/2025

I’ve been a body-image therapist for almost 10 years, and here’s what I’ve learned:
Most people don’t actually struggle with their bodies; they struggle with the thoughts, emotions, memories, and pressures attached to their bodies. Body image is a psychological experience, shaped by your nervous system, your history, and the culture around you.

So when clients ask how to improve their body image, here are the pieces I come back to most:

✨ 1. Regulate first, then rethink.
A dysregulated nervous system makes body thoughts harsher and more distorted. Grounding, rest, nourishment, and co-regulation create the conditions for change.

✨ 2. Curate your inputs.
Your brain internalizes what it repeatedly sees. Unfollow comparison triggers; add diverse, real bodies. This gives your mind new evidence.

✨ 3. Treat body thoughts as thoughts, not facts.
“I’m ugly” is a feeling, not a measurement. Body thoughts often reflect stress or perfectionism, not reality.

✨ 4. Build respect before love.
You don’t need to love everything to act respectfully: nourishing yourself, dressing comfortably, resting, moving gently.

✨ 5. Reduce body checking.
Mirrors, weighing, pinching, comparing, these keep the brain focused on appearance. Even small reductions bring relief.

✨ 6. Expand your identity.
When appearance becomes your main identity, body image becomes fragile. Strengthen the parts of you that have nothing to do with looks.

✨ 7. Practice body neutrality.
You don’t have to feel amazing every day. “I don’t love how I feel today, and I can still show up” is a powerful place to live from.

These aren’t quick fixes; they’re small, doable shifts that create real psychological change over time.
If you want a part two, tell me in the comments. 💛

12/09/2025

Healing body image rarely feels like a warm, magical glow of self-love.
In fact, most of the time, it feels uncomfortable, messy, and slow.
That’s exactly why it can be so hard to notice progress. You might still have bad body image days, critical thoughts, or moments where you feel like you’ve gone backwards, and yet, those very moments can also be signs of growth.

Psychologically, this makes sense: body image is less about the body itself and more about the nervous system, relational patterns, and internalized messages. So the real work often feels internal, invisible, or counterintuitive.
The key is this: healing isn’t linear, and it rarely looks like constant self-love. It looks like noticing your patterns, making tiny shifts, and slowly reclaiming your life from a system (e.g., family, culture, diet culture) that has taught you to monitor and control your body instead of live in it.
So if today feels hard, if your reflection still triggers judgment, if your mind still criticizes, you’re not failing.
You’re doing the work. You’re noticing, choosing, pausing, and learning.
And that… is exactly what body image healing looks like.

You landed on my post for a reason. For more support on your body image resilience journey, follow 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

12/02/2025

Healing body image rarely starts with liking your reflection.
It usually starts with realizing how much of your life has been shaped by fear; fear of being judged, rejected, or not “enough” in a world that constantly ranks bodies like they’re up for evaluation.

People with a healing body image don’t magically wake up confident.
They simply begin doing things differently.

They stop treating their body like a lifelong renovation project. They stop outsourcing their worth to compliments, comparisons, or photos. They stop letting the mirror, or other people’s reactions, function as a mood regulator. These shifts are subtle, but psychologically, they’re powerful: they move you out of appearance-based self-worth and into a more stable, internal sense of identity.

Healing doesn’t mean loving your body every day.
It means you’re no longer organized around your body.

You start noticing your values.
Your relationships.
Your pleasure.
Your boundaries.
Your actual life.

For many people, body image struggles have been a form of emotional survival, trying to control the body because the environment felt uncontrollable. So when you practice neutrality, rest, gentleness, or even simply looking away from a triggering mirror, you’re not being “lazy” or “giving up.” You’re interrupting an old coping strategy and replacing it with something that actually supports your nervous system.

And over time, these micro-shifts accumulate:
more presence, less self-surveillance.
more connection, less self-criticism.
more meaning, less obsession.

Healing body image isn’t glamorous.
It’s deliberate, grounded, and often uncomfortable.
But it’s also deeply liberating.

Save this if you’re trying to break out of the loop.
You deserve a life that feels bigger than your body.
You landed on my post for a reason.

For more support on your body image resilience journey, follow 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

11/27/2025

As a body image psychologist, I’ve learned that the truth people most need to hear is often the truth that stings a little.
Not because it’s mean.
Not because it’s judgmental.
But because it hits the places where diet culture, trauma, and old relational wounds taught you to stay quiet.

Most people believe their body image issues come from their body.
But I’ve sat with thousands of stories and I can tell you with full clinical confidence:
body image is almost never a “body” problem.
It’s a history problem. A nervous system problem. A relational problem.

Healing isn’t about “learning to love how you look.”
It’s about untangling your worth from the people and systems that convinced you it lived in the mirror.

It’s about realizing:
– that you were taught to chase standards no one was meant to meet
– that shrinking your body won’t shrink your shame
– that self-criticism is not self-improvement
– that your “lack of discipline” is often just a dysregulated nervous system
– that the voice you think is yours was often shaped by someone else’s discomfort, fear, or bias

And yes, sometimes the most healing moments happen when we name the uncomfortable truth directly.

Because once you see the pattern, you can stop blaming your body for the pain other people handed you.

This is the work:
Not making your body smaller, but making your life bigger.
Not fixing your appearance, but repairing the relationship you have with yourself.
Not chasing confidence, but creating safety.

If these slides stung a little, take it as a sign:
Something in you knows you’re ready to grow past the rules you were taught.
Something in you is waking up.
And honestly? That’s where real body image healing begins.

You landed on my post for a reason. For more support on your body image resilience journey, follow 🙋🏻‍♀️
Also follow my practice for everyday mental wellness 🏡

Disclaimer: My social media accounts are for educational purposes only and should not be considered psychotherapy or medical care.

Address

116 Lisgar, Suite 101
Ottawa, ON
K2P0C6

Telephone

+16136957133

Website

http://uprisepsychology.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Dr. Melisa Arias-Valenzuela, CPsych posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to Dr. Melisa Arias-Valenzuela, CPsych:

Dr. Melisa Arias-Valenzuela, CPsych