Fake Love

According to Wikipedia, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, or BDD, is “a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one’s own body part or appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix it.”
BDD can be caused by a variety of factors, but in the case on this painting I wanted to focus on when it is caused by trauma and abuse.
This painting represents the chaos somebody feels when trapped in the conviction that something in their body is wrong, the feeling of watching oneself in the mirror and realizing that you do not recognize the person staring back, you don’t know who it is, and perhaps you don’t even know where you are.
The hands hint at sexual abuse or physical abuse, and they embody the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own body, the feeling that one’s skin does not belong to them anymore but to the hands who soiled it, who took advantage of it until they broke.
The terrible feeling that your body isn’t yours anymore, and you don’t know how to get it back.