Louise Hay: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

What Louise Hay taught, how mirror work is done, what You Can Heal Your Life claims about thought and illness, and the serious criticism of her AIDS-era work.

Who was Louise Hay, and what is she known for?

Louise Hay was an American self-help author and publisher, born in 1926 and died in 2017 at the age of 90, known above all for the 1984 book You Can Heal Your Life and for founding the publishing house Hay House. Hay grew up poor in Southern California and described a childhood marked by domestic violence and sexual abuse, leaving home as a teenager and giving up a baby for adoption at sixteen. She spent years in New York, worked as a fashion model, and married a businessman whose surname she kept after the marriage ended. In 1970 she began attending the First Church of Religious Science in New York, a New Thought congregation, trained in its practitioner program, and started counseling clients. Her first publication was a slim 1976 booklet, Heal Your Body, pairing physical complaints with the mental patterns she believed produced them and supplying an affirmation for each. That booklet grew into You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984, the same year she started Hay House so she could publish it herself. National television appearances in 1988 turned an obscure title into a long-running bestseller.

The middle of Louise Hay's career was defined by the AIDS crisis. In the mid-1980s she began holding a support group in Los Angeles for men with AIDS, which participants nicknamed the Hayride. It grew from a handful of people to hundreds meeting weekly in a West Hollywood auditorium, with singing, group affirmation, and physical comfort at a time when many hospitals and families treated patients as untouchable. That work made her nationally visible and, later, the target of sustained criticism. Hay House meanwhile grew into one of the largest self-help publishers in the world, carrying Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and Gabrielle Bernstein among many others. Hay kept writing into her eighties, often with collaborators: All Is Well with physician Mona Lisa Schulz and Life Loves You with psychologist Robert Holden. Her last major solo book, Mirror Work, set out the practice she is now most identified with.

Did Louise Hay have medical or psychological training?

No. Louise Hay held no medical degree, no psychology license, and no clinical qualification. Her formal credential was as a practitioner in the Church of Religious Science, a New Thought denomination whose practitioners offer spiritual counseling and affirmative prayer. She described herself as a teacher rather than a therapist, though much of her audience did not draw that distinction.

What is Hay House and did Louise Hay found it?

Hay House is a publishing company founded by Louise Hay in 1984, initially to publish You Can Heal Your Life after conventional publishers showed little interest. It expanded into one of the dominant publishers of self-help and mind-body titles, and it also runs audio programs and live events. Hay retained her connection to it for the rest of her life.

What did Louise Hay actually teach?

Louise Hay taught that the thoughts a person habitually holds about themselves shape their experience, and she extended that claim to physical health. The central proposition running through Louise Hay teachings is that most human trouble traces back to a single belief, some version of not being good enough, learned early and usually from adults who held it themselves. Her remedy was not insight but repetition: deliberately replacing the internal sentence with a chosen one, out loud, many times a day, until the new sentence becomes the default. She named the mental patterns she considered most destructive, chiefly resentment, self-criticism, guilt, and fear, and treated forgiveness as the operation that dissolves the first of them. Hay put unusual emphasis on willingness as a separate step. She argued that a person who cannot yet believe a positive statement can still be willing to change, and that stating the willingness is enough to start. She also insisted that the point of leverage is always the present thought rather than the past event, which is why her work spends far less time excavating history than therapy does.

The mechanism Louise Hay described is closer to conditioning than to insight. She held that a mind repeating criticism thousands of times a day has trained itself, and that untraining requires the same volume of counter-repetition rather than a single realization. This is why her instructions sound mechanical: say it in the car, say it at the sink, say it whether or not you mean it yet. She rejected the objection that affirming something untrue is dishonest, arguing that the negative sentence a person already repeats is equally unproven and simply better rehearsed. Louise Hay teachings also carry a metaphysical claim inherited from New Thought, that a benevolent life force responds to what a person accepts as true about themselves. That claim is not testable, and Hay never presented evidence for it. The psychological layer can be separated out, and it overlaps with well-studied ideas about self-talk without requiring the metaphysics.

What did Louise Hay mean by loving yourself?

Louise Hay used self-love to mean approval rather than feeling, and she was explicit that it did not mean vanity. In her framing it is the decision to stop criticizing yourself, followed by treating yourself with the courtesy you would extend to a guest. She argued that criticism never produces lasting change and approval does, which is a psychological claim rather than a moral one.

Did Louise Hay claim that thoughts cause disease?

Yes, and this is the sharpest edge of Louise Hay teachings rather than a distortion by critics. She wrote that people create illness in the body through mental patterns, and Heal Your Body assigns a probable mental cause to hundreds of named conditions. She did also tell audiences to see doctors, but the causal claim is stated plainly in her books and is not supported by medical evidence.

What is mirror work and why did Louise Hay build a practice around it?

Mirror work is the practice of looking into your own eyes in a mirror and speaking affirmations aloud to your reflection, and Louise Hay built her method around it because she found it exposed what silent affirmation hid. In her counseling she noticed that clients could repeat approving statements comfortably in conversation or on paper, then be unable to say the same words to their own face without breaking eye contact, laughing, tearing up, or going flat. She read that reaction as the real state of a person's relationship with themselves, and treated the mirror as both diagnostic and treatment. The essential form is short and unglamorous. You stand close enough to see your own eyes, you say your own name, and you say something approving in the present tense. You keep looking. If resistance comes up, Hay's instruction was to notice the specific thought that arrived, since that thought is the belief being worked on, and then continue. She recommended frequency over duration, suggesting short exchanges every time you pass a reflective surface rather than one long daily session.

Mirror work is not original to Louise Hay in the sense of being invented from nothing. Mirrors had been used in psychodrama and in group therapy traditions before her, and Hay was working inside a New Thought lineage that had used spoken affirmation for decades. Her contribution was to make the mirror the default container for affirmation and to strip the practice down until anyone could do it without a facilitator, a group, or a fee. She also gave it a developmental shape, most fully in her book Mirror Work, which lays out 21 days each organized around a theme such as monitoring self-talk, releasing anger, or forgiving, and each combining a mirror exercise with journaling and a guided meditation. The unusual feature compared with most affirmation advice is the insistence on speaking out loud to a face. Hay argued that internal recitation lets the critical part of the mind stay hidden, while a mirror forces it into the open.

Do you have to say mirror work affirmations out loud?

Yes, in Louise Hay's version. She was specific that mirror work is spoken, because hearing your own voice make a claim while watching your own reaction is the mechanism rather than a stylistic preference. Silent repetition removes the part that produces the flinch. If you live with others, a closed bathroom door and a whisper preserve the effect well enough.

What book did Louise Hay write about mirror work?

Louise Hay set out the practice most completely in Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life, published in the mid-2010s near the end of her life. It gives one theme per day with a mirror exercise, affirmations, a journaling prompt, and a meditation. The practice also appears throughout her earlier work, including You Can Heal Your Life.

How do you actually do Louise Hay's mirror work? A seven-day version

Here is a seven-day version of Louise Hay's mirror work you can run this week without buying anything. Use a mirror where you can see your eyes clearly and will not be interrupted, and give it two minutes in the morning and two at night. Day one: look into your own eyes, take a breath, say your name, and say nothing else. Hold the contact and notice what your face does. Day two: add one sentence, spoken to your reflection, that you accept yourself exactly as you are today. Day three: say your name followed by a statement that you love and approve of yourself, and note the exact counter-thought that shows up. Write that counter-thought down. Day four: answer the counter-thought directly, out loud, as you would answer a friend who said it about you. Day five: switch to willingness, telling your reflection that you are willing to release the pattern that produced the counter-thought. Day six: name one thing you did well and thank yourself for it by name. Day seven: repeat day three and compare it with your day three notes.

A few operational points decide whether this works or feels absurd. Speak in the present tense and the first person, since Louise Hay held that the mind treats future-tense statements as confirmation that the thing is not currently true. Use your own name out loud, which most people find hardest. Do not smooth over resistance. Hay's method treats the objection that surfaces as the actual material, so a session where you say the affirmation and immediately think it is nonsense is a productive session, provided you write the objection down. Expect the first three days to be uncomfortable. If you cry, Hay's instruction was to keep looking rather than turn away, though this is exactly where anyone with significant trauma history should stop and consult a therapist. Keep a running page of counter-thoughts; after a week that page is more useful than the affirmations, because it lists your operating beliefs in your own words.

What do you say if affirmations feel like lying?

Use willingness statements instead. Louise Hay's workaround for disbelief was to affirm openness to change rather than the change itself, telling your reflection that you are willing to consider a different view of yourself. This sidesteps the contradiction that makes a flat positive claim collapse, and it is the step most people skip before concluding that louise hay affirmations do not work.

How do you know mirror work is doing anything?

Track behavior rather than mood. The measurable signs are how long you can hold your own gaze, whether your voice stays steady, and whether the counter-thought you wrote on day three still arrives with the same force by day seven. Louise Hay pointed to a softening in how people spoke to themselves after mistakes as the earliest reliable change.

What is You Can Heal Your Life about?

You Can Heal Your Life, published by Louise Hay in 1984, argues that self-criticism and unresolved resentment drive most unhappiness and much illness, and that both can be changed through forgiveness, self-approval, and repeated affirmation. The book opens with a set of statements about how life works, moves into an examination of where beliefs came from in childhood, and then walks through exercises: identifying the messages you absorbed, spotting the phrases you use about yourself, working with mirrors, and practicing forgiveness toward parents and toward yourself. It reads less like a treatise than a workshop transcript, which is roughly what it is, since Hay had been running the material live for years before writing it down. The back third contains the feature that made the book famous and later notorious, an alphabetical list of physical conditions with a probable mental cause and a corrective affirmation for each, expanded from her 1976 booklet Heal Your Body. The list runs to hundreds of entries, from headaches to cancer. Hay presented it as a starting point for reflection rather than a diagnosis, but the format invites the opposite reading.

You Can Heal Your Life reached its enormous audience partly by timing. It was cheap, it was written in plain language at a level anyone could read, and it arrived as the AIDS crisis created demand for anything that offered agency against a disease medicine could not treat. National television appearances in 1988 pushed it onto bestseller lists, and it returned to them years later after further exposure. Hay House claims sales in the tens of millions across dozens of languages, a figure from the publisher rather than an independent audit. A film adaptation of the same name, produced by Hay House, was released in 2007. If you read one of the louise hay books, this is the one, though later titles such as The Power Is Within You present the practice with less of the disease material attached.

What is the difference between Heal Your Body and You Can Heal Your Life?

Heal Your Body, published by Louise Hay in 1976, is a short reference booklet: a list of ailments, the mental pattern she assigned to each, and an affirmation to counter it. You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984, is the full book containing the philosophy and the exercises, with an expanded version of that same list appended at the back.

Is the ailment list in You Can Heal Your Life reliable?

No. The list assigning mental causes to physical conditions has no basis in medical research, was compiled from Louise Hay's intuition and counseling experience rather than study, and is rejected by mainstream medicine. Treating it as diagnostic is the most harmful use of the book, and it should never inform a decision about seeking or refusing treatment.

How do you write a Louise Hay affirmation that actually works?

Louise Hay affirmations follow four rules: present tense, first person, positively phrased, and short enough to say a hundred times without thinking. Present tense matters because a statement about the future implicitly confirms the thing is not true now, so she wrote that abundance flows to her rather than that it will. First person matters because the practice targets self-concept, not the world. Positive phrasing matters because Hay held that the mind processes the image in a sentence more strongly than the negation attached to it, so an affirmation about being free of debt keeps debt in view while one about income arriving does not. Brevity matters because the method is volumetric; a paragraph cannot be repeated at a traffic light. Her own standard affirmation was the plainest possible statement that she loved and approved of herself, and she recommended running it underneath everything else rather than treating it as one option among many. For releasing a specific pattern she used a willingness formula, stating that she was willing to let go of whatever created a given condition, which is deliberately weaker and therefore easier to say sincerely.

The most common failure with louise hay affirmations is picking a statement so far from current belief that saying it produces immediate internal argument. Hay's fix was to move down a rung. If a statement that you are confident is unsayable, a statement that you are willing to become confident usually is, and if that fails, a statement that you are open to the possibility usually is. Work up the ladder as each rung stops producing resistance. A second failure is treating affirmation as a substitute for action, which Hay did not teach. She described affirmation as the step that makes action possible by removing the internal veto. A third failure is silent repetition. The method depends on hearing yourself, which is why she anchored it to the mirror rather than to a journal.

How many times a day did Louise Hay recommend repeating an affirmation?

Louise Hay recommended very high frequency, often describing hundreds of repetitions a day for a core affirmation, worked into ordinary moments rather than set aside as a session. Her reasoning was that the negative self-talk being replaced already runs at that volume, so a few repetitions a day cannot compete. The ratio matters more than the number.

Should affirmations be written down as well as spoken?

Louise Hay used both, with writing serving a different function from speaking. Spoken repetition in front of a mirror is the primary practice; writing is where she had people record the objections that surfaced and track what changed. The written list of counter-thoughts is the diagnostic half of the method and the part most readers skip.

Why is Louise Hay controversial?

Louise Hay is controversial because she taught that mental patterns cause physical disease, and because that teaching reached gay men dying of AIDS in the 1980s. Her booklet Heal Your Body lists probable mental causes for hundreds of conditions, and the AIDS entries reference feelings of defenselessness, hopelessness, and sexual guilt. In the mid-1980s she began the Los Angeles support group known as the Hayride, which drew hundreds of men weekly, many abandoned by families and receiving little comfort elsewhere. Critics argue that whatever solace the gatherings provided came packaged with a message carrying an unavoidable implication: if self-love heals, then those who did not recover had failed to love themselves enough. Writers revisiting this after Hay's death in 2017, including a widely read Slate essay, described her ideas as pseudoscience that harmed a generation of gay men. Some longtime survivors have called her a profiteer who sold blame back to the dying. Others who attended defend the Hayride as the only place in Los Angeles where they were touched and treated as fully human.

Two further criticisms are worth stating plainly. Louise Hay's account of curing her own cervical cancer without surgery, which appears throughout her work and functions as the credential behind her method, has never been supported by published medical documentation and rests entirely on her own testimony. The commercial structure is also part of the objection: Hay House built a substantial business on the premise, and the promise of self-healing sells books and conference tickets to precisely the people least able to evaluate it. Set against this, several things are also true. Hay ran the Hayride when hospital staff sometimes left meal trays outside doors, and she did not charge admission. Her defenders point out that she told audiences to keep seeing their doctors and never instructed anyone to refuse treatment. The honest summary is that the same body of work produced real community for isolated people and a framework that made their illness their fault, and both effects came from the same idea. The 2021 short documentary Another Hayride, assembled from archival footage, is the most direct record of that period.

What was the Hayride?

The Hayride was the nickname for the weekly support group Louise Hay ran in Los Angeles from the mid-1980s for people with AIDS, overwhelmingly gay men. It began in a small setting and grew to hundreds of attendees in a West Hollywood auditorium, with singing, group affirmation, mirrors, and physical contact. It is the source of both the strongest praise and the strongest criticism of her work.

Did Louise Hay tell people to refuse medical treatment?

Louise Hay generally told audiences to keep working with their doctors and did not issue a blanket instruction to refuse treatment. The criticism is subtler: by teaching that thought causes disease and by publicizing her own refusal of surgery for cervical cancer, she modeled a choice some followers copied. Responsibility for that pattern is genuinely disputed rather than settled.

How did Louise Hay respond to critics?

Louise Hay rarely engaged critics directly and generally restated her position rather than defending it in argument. In interviews she tended to soften the causal claim, emphasizing that she offered a possibility to consider rather than a verdict, while the published lists of mental causes remained in print unchanged. That gap between the public framing and the printed text is itself part of the criticism.

Where did Louise Hay's ideas come from and who did she influence?

Louise Hay's ideas came almost entirely from New Thought, a nineteenth-century American movement holding that mind shapes health and circumstance, transmitted to her through the Church of Religious Science. She began attending its New York congregation in 1970 and trained as a practitioner, which placed her inside the lineage of Ernest Holmes, the movement's systematizer, and behind him Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and the affirmation writers Florence Scovel Shinn and Emmet Fox. Almost every structural element of Louise Hay teachings is already present in that tradition: the present-tense spoken affirmation, the emphasis on forgiveness, the claim of a responsive intelligence in life, and the assignment of mental causes to bodily conditions. She also studied Transcendental Meditation in the 1970s, which shaped her habit of pairing affirmation with a settled repetitive practice rather than with effort. What Hay added was accessibility. She removed the theological vocabulary, wrote at a reading level anyone could manage, and put a physical mirror at the center so the method needed no teacher and no congregation.

Her influence runs through two channels. The first is direct: the mirror-and-affirmation format now sits under a great deal of popular self-help and social media self-love content, usually with no idea where it came from. The second is structural. Hay House, founded to publish herself, became the distribution system for a generation of teachers including Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Brian Weiss, and later Gabrielle Bernstein, and its conference circuit shaped which ideas reached mass audiences through the 1990s and 2000s. That editorial gatekeeping arguably had more effect on the field than her own writing did. The line also runs forward into the law of attraction boom of the mid-2000s, since much of what The Secret popularized is New Thought material Hay had already made commercially viable.

Was Louise Hay part of the New Thought movement?

Yes. Louise Hay trained and worked as a practitioner in the Church of Religious Science, a New Thought denomination founded on Ernest Holmes's Science of Mind. Her books drop the explicit theology but keep the framework: mind as causative, affirmative statement as the tool, and a benevolent intelligence responding to belief. Reading Holmes or Emmet Fox makes the inheritance obvious.

Did Louise Hay influence the law of attraction and The Secret?

Indirectly and substantially. Louise Hay did not write about the law of attraction as such, but she made New Thought ideas commercially mainstream a generation before Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, and Hay House published several authors associated with that wave. Shared ancestry, rather than direct borrowing, explains why the two bodies of work sound so similar.

How is Louise Hay different from Wayne Dyer and Byron Katie?

Louise Hay differs from Wayne Dyer mainly in scope and method: Hay worked on one narrow lever, the sentence you say about yourself, while Dyer built a broader philosophy drawing on Taoism, Advaita, and Christian mysticism, aimed at aligning with intention or source rather than at repairing self-esteem. Dyer wrote about ego, purpose, and surrender across dozens of books; Hay essentially wrote one idea repeatedly and gave it a physical practice anyone could perform in a bathroom. The two were closely linked, since Hay House published Dyer for decades, but their instructions differ. Dyer would have you contemplate a verse from the Tao Te Ching; Hay would have you say your name into a mirror four hundred times. The contrast with Byron Katie is sharper and more useful. Katie's method, The Work, takes a distressing thought and interrogates it with four questions about whether it is true and who you would be without it, then reverses it. Hay replaces the thought by repetition. Katie dissolves the thought by inquiry.

That difference matters for choosing between them. Byron Katie's approach suits people whose objection to affirmation is that it feels dishonest, because The Work never asks you to assert anything you do not believe; it only asks whether the painful belief can be verified. Louise Hay's approach suits people who already know intellectually that their self-criticism is unfounded and cannot stop repeating it anyway, since her method targets habit rather than logic. Two other comparisons are worth naming. Abraham Hicks, channeled by Esther Hicks, shares Hay's optimism but organizes everything around emotional state as a guidance signal, where Hay stays focused on self-worth and health. Kristin Neff's self-compassion research covers similar ground from a different footing: it is built on controlled studies, and it makes no claim that self-criticism causes physical disease. For readers who want Hay's territory with an evidence base, Neff is the closer fit.

Is mirror work the same as cognitive behavioral therapy?

No. Mirror work asserts a replacement belief through repetition, while cognitive behavioral therapy tests the accuracy of a belief against evidence and often uses behavioral experiments to check it. They overlap in targeting self-talk, but CBT would examine whether your harsh self-assessment is true rather than override it with a competing sentence.

Should you use Louise Hay's method or Byron Katie's?

Use Louise Hay's mirror work if your self-criticism is habitual and you want to build a competing habit, and Byron Katie's The Work if affirmation feels dishonest and you would rather examine whether the painful belief holds up. They are compatible: some people run inquiry on a belief first, then affirm the conclusion once it stops producing argument.

What are the honest limits of Louise Hay's approach?

The clearest limit is medical: Louise Hay's approach does not treat disease, and the parts of her work implying otherwise should be set aside entirely. Affirmation and mirror work can plausibly affect mood, self-talk, and willingness to act, none of which is the same as affecting pathology. Anyone using this material alongside treatment for a serious condition should be explicit that it addresses how they are relating to the illness, not the illness. The second limit is structural. Louise Hay teachings locate the cause of nearly everything inside the individual, which leaves no room for poverty, discrimination, violence, or plain bad luck, and a framework that reads every misfortune as a signal from your own mind will eventually blame you for things you did not cause. Third, the method suits a particular temperament. People who find repetition soothing and language powerful tend to get something from it; people who experience affirmation as forced positivity usually do not, and pushing through that reaction rarely helps. Fourth, it is not treatment for depression, anxiety disorders, or trauma, and sustained mirror focus can worsen distress for some people.

Stripped of the claims it cannot support, what remains of Louise Hay's work is a small, testable proposition: that how you speak to yourself is a habit rather than a fixed trait, and that habits respond to deliberate repetition. That proposition is modest and defensible, and it is what most readers who report benefit are actually describing. It also costs nothing to test. The failure mode to watch for is subtle. Because the method treats resistance as material to work through, it can quietly discourage the reasonable conclusion that a practice is not helping you, and it supplies a ready explanation for that too, namely that you were not willing enough. Set a fixed trial period before you start and hold to it. If seven days of honest practice produces no change in how you talk to yourself after a mistake, try a different tool rather than affirming harder.

Can mirror work replace therapy?

No. Mirror work is a self-directed habit practice with no diagnostic component, no relationship with a trained observer, and no evidence base for treating any clinical condition. It can sit alongside therapy as a daily exercise, but Louise Hay never trained as a clinician and her material was not designed for diagnosed conditions.

Who should avoid Louise Hay's mirror work?

Anyone with body dysmorphic disorder, an eating disorder involving mirror checking, active dissociation, or untreated trauma should approach mirror work only with a therapist, since prolonged self-focus in a mirror can amplify distress rather than relieve it. People in acute crisis need support, not a self-directed exercise.

What is worth keeping from Louise Hay's work?

Keep the mirror practice, the willingness formula for when affirmations feel false, the habit of writing down the objection that surfaces, and the observation that self-criticism is trained rather than innate. Discard the ailment list and every claim connecting thought to disease. That division leaves a usable practice and removes the part that caused real harm.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is mirror work in simple terms?

Mirror work is looking into your own eyes in a mirror and speaking to yourself out loud, usually starting with your name and a statement of approval. Louise Hay used it because people who recite affirmations easily on paper often cannot say the same words to their reflection without flinching. The mirror is a check as much as an exercise.

How long does mirror work take to have an effect?

Louise Hay built her book Mirror Work around 21 days, but that is a training period rather than a cure date. Most people find the first few sessions awkward and the discomfort fades within a week or two. What shifts first is tone of voice and willingness to hold eye contact, not circumstances.

What is the most well-known Louise Hay affirmation?

The affirmation most associated with Louise Hay is the plain statement that she loved and approved of herself, which she recommended repeating hundreds of times a day in front of a mirror. She treated it as the base layer under every other affirmation, reasoning that someone who does not approve of themselves will quietly sabotage whatever specific goal they affirm.

Is You Can Heal Your Life worth reading?

You Can Heal Your Life is worth reading as the founding document of a large part of modern self-help, and its chapters on self-criticism and forgiveness hold up better than its reputation suggests. The section that has aged badly is the alphabetical list assigning a mental cause to each physical ailment, which no medical body supports.

Did Louise Hay really cure her own cancer?

Louise Hay said that in the late 1970s she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, declined surgery, and cleared it within about six months using forgiveness work, affirmations, dietary change, reflexology, and colon cleansing. That account comes from Hay herself and recurs throughout her books. No independently verified medical documentation of the diagnosis or recovery has been published, so the claim rests on her testimony alone.

Why do doctors criticize Louise Hay teachings?

The core objection is that Louise Hay teachings assign a psychological cause to physical disease, which turns illness into evidence of a personal failing. Her booklet Heal Your Body lists probable mental causes for hundreds of conditions, including AIDS entries referencing defenselessness and sexual guilt. Critics writing after her death argued this reached gay men when no effective treatment existed.

Can you do mirror work if you cannot stand looking at yourself?

Yes, and Louise Hay treated that reaction as the reason to start, though she was not writing for people in crisis. If eye contact is unbearable, begin with a few silent seconds, then your name only. People with a history of trauma, dissociation, or body dysmorphia should raise this with a therapist first, since sustained mirror focus can intensify distress.