This first session is one idea, the one everything else rests on. It explains why the mirror always seems to prove the worry right. The explanation has less to do with your face than with attention, and with how closely it has learned to look.
Attention can only light a small area at a time. Whatever it lands on gets brighter, bigger, sharper, and everything around it dims. In body-image distress, attention has settled on one feature and stayed there, at high magnification. Skin, nose, hair, symmetry, size. Which one matters less than the fact that the zoom is stuck.
Under magnification, anything looks wrong. Hold your own hand two centimetres from your eyes and it becomes a landscape of pores and lines and small asymmetries. The hand is fine. Close-up does this to every surface there is, which is worth sitting with for a moment: the zoom produces the flaw as part of how it works.
This is the trap that keeps people stuck for years, so it is worth going slowly here. When you go to the mirror worried about the feature, you do not see your face the way a passerby does, a whole face, in a glance, in motion. You go looking feature-first. You find the spot, move in close, and inspect at magnification. So you find what you went looking for, magnified. The mirror feels like evidence. It is the zoom, handed a surface.
This is why the mirror can never settle the question. Every visit goes feature-first, and every visit ends the same way. The mirror is only being aimed, and the aiming decides what it shows.
While the zoom holds one feature, the rest of you sits outside the frame. Other people see the whole: your face in motion, your expression, you. What you see is a magnified fragment. This program is not going to debate the fragment. The work is to widen the frame and loosen the zoom, and to let your own log tell you whether it is working.