Reclaiming the Body After Prolonged Body Shame: A Gentle Way Home to Yourself

Before the thought comes the feeling. Before the feeling comes the holding. You have been holding your stomach in, or holding your shoulders up, or holding your breath, or holding your thighs away from each other on a chair, for so long that you have forgotten you are doing it. The holding is not a thought. It is a posture your body learned when it was much younger, in a room with other people who did not know what to do with a body like yours.

A lot of people arrive in somatic therapy here. Not in crisis, not needing language for what is wrong, just exhausted in a way that rest cannot touch. When I ask gently what their relationship with their body has been like over the years, something shifts in the room. They do not always have words yet. They have a long, slow exhale. They have a memory from when they were nine. They have tears that surprise them.

This post is for readers who know that particular tired. I write as a Vancouver-based therapist working online across Canada, and as a trans and queer person who has done this work in my own body as well. What follows is not a plan. It is a map of territory.

Reclaiming is not a plan, it is a return

The rupture

Most of us were not born at odds with our bodies. Somewhere along the way, we learned that our body was a problem. The lesson might have come from a family member who commented on what we ate. From a doctor who weighed us and spoke as though we were not in the room. From a bully at school. From an early assault. From a church that named our body sinful. From a culture that could not hold our fatness, our brownness, our disability, our gender, our chronic pain, our autism, our scars, our sexuality. From puberty, or the medical system, or a mirror that was never going to reflect us kindly.

Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, who write about this work in their book Reclaiming Body Trust, call this moment the rupture. It is the point at which a body that once belonged to you becomes a thing to be watched, corrected, reduced, hidden, or overridden. Rupture is a heavy word. I use it because the softer ones, the ones about body image and self-esteem, do not say what happened. What happened was a break in a relationship that was supposed to be whole.

For trans and nonbinary readers, the rupture often has a particular shape. The body you were given was read as something you were not, and you were asked to manage the mismatch, sometimes for decades, before anyone offered language for it. The psychologist Sand Chang writes about this with care in a letter included in that same book, naming how for many trans people the construct of gender itself is the trauma the body is carrying. I hold that understanding in session.

The reckoning

The reckoning is the part where you stop being surprised. You stop being surprised that the last diet did not work. You stop being surprised that the weight returned. You stop being surprised that no amount of trying harder has changed how you feel in your skin. You stop being surprised that the people who taught you to hate your body are still out there, still teaching the same lessons, and still making money.

Reckoning is often when grief arrives. Kinavey and Sturtevant name this body grief, and it is one of the most useful phrases I know. Body grief is what comes up when you realise you have spent years, maybe decades, in a fight you were never going to win, not because you were weak but because the fight was rigged. It is grief for the time you did not get back. For the meals you did not enjoy. For the clothes you would not let yourself wear. For the hands you did not hold. For the way you stood just outside your own life.

Body grief is not self-indulgent. It is accurate. And it has to be let in somewhere, because grief that has nowhere to go turns into either more shame or more numbness. Therapy is one place where it can arrive at a pace you can bear.

The reclamation

Reclamation is not the end of the story. It is the part where you start again, and again, and again. Kinavey and Sturtevant are clear that reclamation is not a destination. It is a practice of return, and the returns will be small.

A small return looks like this. You notice, at 3pm on a Tuesday, that your shoulders have been up by your ears for an hour. You let them drop. Nothing dramatic happens. Your afternoon continues. But the noticing is the reclamation. The letting down is the reclamation. The way you were, for a full ten seconds, more inside your body than outside of it, is the reclamation. Done enough times, these small returns rewire something. Not through willpower. Through repetition.

Other small returns look like eating what you actually want for lunch and letting yourself taste it. Like wearing something your body enjoys. Like letting a partner touch a part of you that used to be off-limits to your own hands. Like moving in a way that is not trying to fix you. Like buying clothes in the size you are, not the size you have promised yourself you will be. Like staying in the bath for a few extra minutes because the water feels good.

The reclamation is not the day you love your body. It is the day you stop fighting it.

What therapy can hold

Talking about your body is not the same as changing your relationship with your body. A lot of people know this. They have done the work of understanding where their body shame came from. They have read the books. They have had insights. And the shame is still there, quieter but present, showing up in how they hold themselves and how they flinch away from a mirror.

This is where sensorimotor psychotherapy can hold what talking alone cannot. Sensorimotor work pays attention to the body in the room as we work. It notices the tension that arrives when you are describing something difficult. It pauses there. It listens for what the tension is holding. It lets the body finish movements that were interrupted a long time ago. None of this is fast work. It does not need to be. The body that has been managed for forty years does not need another person asking it to hurry.

What the work offers, over time, is the gradual experience of being in your body without performing. That is not a small thing. For many of the people I sit with, it is the first time that has felt possible.

A few small returns you can try on your own

These are not homework. They are options.

• Once today, notice what your body is doing when you are not paying attention. Let one small thing soften.
• When you eat something, take one bite without thinking about what it means. Notice how it tastes.
• If you catch yourself speaking about your body as though it is an enemy, try speaking to it as though it is a tired friend you have not seen in years.
• Find one piece of clothing that your body is glad to wear. Wear it more often.
• Let grief be part of the practice. You do not have to arrive somewhere before you are allowed to mourn what was lost.

A closing thought

Body shame is not your failing. It is what happened to you. Reclaiming the body is not a project you can complete. It is a relationship you can return to. The returning is the work, and the returning is the point.