Body Dysmorphia (BDD) Therapy in Kew

Body Dysmorphic Disorder involves a preoccupation with a perceived flaw in appearance, one that often appears minor or entirely invisible to others, but feels urgent, defining, and impossible to ignore to the person living with it. The mirror becomes less a reflection and more a site of ongoing, exhausting scrutiny.

At KYND Psychology, therapy for body dysmorphia looks past the specific feature someone is fixated on to understand what that fixation has come to hold. The perceived flaw is rarely, in the end, really about the flaw itself. It often becomes the place where deeper feelings, about acceptability, control, or being truly seen, get concentrated into something narrow enough to focus on and, in theory, fix.

Working from a psychoanalytic foundation, and drawing on evidence-based approaches where they serve the person in front of me, I offer a space to understand what this preoccupation has been carrying, alongside practical support for the checking, comparing, and avoidance that often accompany it. This isn't about being convinced you look fine. It's about understanding why this particular concern took hold so powerfully, always in service of the person, never the protocol.

​

Why the Flaw Feels So Certain

Freud's own case history of the "Wolf Man" included a preoccupation with an imagined flaw on his nose, a fixation Freud understood as displacement, anxiety and conflict too difficult to face directly, settling instead onto something concrete and visible. This is often why reassurance rarely helps for long: the certainty isn't really about the mirror, so no amount of evidence from the mirror can resolve it. Understanding what the preoccupation has been standing in for tends to loosen it more than argument or reassurance ever can.

​

What Sessions Look Like

Early sessions focus on understanding your particular experience of body dysmorphia: which concerns feel most urgent, what rituals have developed around them, and what life circumstances surrounded their onset. From there, therapy moves between practical support for daily functioning and a slower exploration of what this preoccupation has been holding.

Sessions are available for adults and young adults at our practice in Kew. Many clients travel from Hawthorn, Camberwell, Balwyn, and Richmond for a therapeutic approach that treats them as a whole person rather than a diagnosis. Clinical psychology offers structure and practical strategies, psychoanalytic thinking offers depth and meaning, and my training in both allows sessions to move between symptom-focused support and a slower exploration of where this fixation began.

Explore all therapy services