Body Image

What words would you use to describe your relationship with your body?
Where & how did you learn to have that perspective toward your body?

So often, the narrative around body image struggles is that it’s an individual problem, and that we should just "learn to love our bodies”. And that if we can’t, it’s our own fault, and a failing as an individual.

The reason this narrative is so limiting and harmful is that it completely dismisses the environment and culture we live in - a place where we’re constantly surrounded by messages stating that certain bodies are “good” or “bad”, that we “should” move our bodies in certain ways, or we “should” feed our bodies with certain foods. These messages can come from family/friends, social media, ads, spam emails (everywhere, it feels like!), and can often have overlaps of racism*, fat phobia, sexism, classism, and ableism. Sometimes they’re obvious, and sometimes they’re strategically snuck in.

Sound familiar?

These messages, often alongside experiences of trauma (where people often feel as if they “leave their bodies” until the danger is gone), make it feel unsafe for many people to be in their bodies, (much less ‘simply love and respect’ them) and keep them disconnected from their bodies.

It can be hard to be in a body that exists within fat phobia, racism, sexism, sizeism, ableism, etc.

It might feel safer to think rather than feel; it might feel safer to align with diet culture and body-shame ourselves; it might feel safer to criticize our bodies (it’s what everyone else is doing, right?) rather than lean in to potential grief for what happened to them.

“Body shame has to be named not merely as a “thinking error”, but as the very real experience of having a body that is subject to othering and pathologizing.”
-Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC & Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD, of *Center for Body Trust*

Whether you have had a “Big T” trauma, experiences of disconnecting from your body, or simply exist within diet culture, it can feel unusual, uncomfortable, intimidating, or scary (maybe all of the above?) to be in your body. You might even notice what feelings or reactions come up at the thought of this. This is normal, it makes sense, and it’s protective, given what I’ve stated above.

You are normal.

Take a deep breath.

I’m inviting you to pause, back up, and “zoom out” for a second - look at the bigger picture of yourself as a person who might be influenced by the environment they’re in. Working with body image issues, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves if we aren’t also challenging the oppressive systems that create and uphold negative or critical views toward our bodies. We’re also doing a disservice if we don’t acknowledge the understandable, protective reasons for disconnection from our bodies.

If you struggle with body image, it’s not an individual failing - it’s a systemic issue.

Sonya Renee Taylor (author of “The Body Is Not An Apology”) says it’s important to be “recognizing that we have all been indoctrinated into a system of body shame that profits off of our self-hatred”.

We can ask ourselves, “Who benefits from our collective shame?”

My work includes a trauma-informed and size-affirming informed approach to help you think critically of oppressive systems impacting your relationship with your body. It’s time to shift the shame away from yourself (it was never yours to carry in the first place) - read that again: it was never yours to carry in the first place - and build a more compassionate, nurturing relationship to your body.

Be sure to check out my Bookshelf for supplemental books & podcasts to the therapy process for body image work.

* Read “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings for ways diet culture is rooted in white supremacy & anti-Black racism.

“Body trust is your birthright.” -Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC & Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD of Center for Body Trust

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