Living with chronic disabilities means that your body often feels like your greatest enemy. Living with neuro disabilities or mental health conditions means that you can’t always trust your body signals to be accurate. So for decades, whenever I would hear messages about loving your body or trusting your body, my reaction would be: “Why would I love someone who fails me so much? Why would I trust someone untrustworthy?”
It took a couple near death experiences before I found the answer to my question: Because it’s the only way to live.
Like it or not, there’s no getting away from your body while staying alive. It’s all you’ve got. It’s also the only way to get any joy out of this human experience as it offers you the pleasures of sensation, communication, and connection. Making an enemy of your body will ruin your life.
Your body is your only true ride or die, and you are the only way it has of getting it’s needs met. Society will pressure you to deny your needs and ignore your body sensations, but your body needs you to stand up for it. You are forced together in a partnership, and your satisfaction in life depends on the strength of that partnership.
I’ve seen so many movies that show how a dysfunctional partnership turns around and it’s the same steps every time. They start out untrusting and disliking each other, they have some experience that helps them see each other’s humanity, they show each other loyalty in a tense situation, then boom: Family. Entire franchises have been built on this formula.
You and your body are lab partners. Co-workers. A heist team that starts out skeptical and eventually grows to deep loyalty after working together to get out of a jam.
Loyalty is the key. You don’t have to repeat affirmations that feel false or ignore all your negative feelings in order to improve how you feel about yourself. You can learn to recognize your own humanity, treat your body with loyalty, and then eventually you will feel like family. You might always fight with it, but you can fight with it like a sister, instead of like an enemy.
“Take Your Body’s Side” is the Mind that governs your recovery needs. It is the change in mindset approach that will help you prioritize your need for rest and quiet. “Take Your Body’s Side” makes two points: 1) Be loyal to your body over the people and systems that want you to neglect your needs. And 2) Consider the perspective of your body.
Advocating for your body will require going against the norm. We receive an incredible amount of social pressure to ignore and minimize our needs, to be ashamed of body needs, to think of them as a personal problem.
We are rewarded for going along with society and ignoring our body. Learning to advocate for yourself means sacrificing those rewards. Busy people seem important, people who work extra hours get the job, people who harm their bodies are socially rewarded if the harm matches beauty standards. Those are real consequences. But none of them are worth more than a sense of peace and a life that isn’t painful to live.
I learned this lesson through Atticus. For most of his life experts dismissed his autism as part of his other disabilities, which left us as a family cut off from tools and support. I had no idea how to help him or what was even happening when he was having what I eventually learned was a meltdown triggered by sensory overwhelm. All I could do was let him lead, even when it didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know why the air conditioner seemed to cause him pain, I just knew that when I turned it off his obvious discomfort abated.
I created a home and family life where his needs could be met without question, so it has made him absolutely shameless about meeting his needs. There are so many times I watch him and think, “Wait, we can DO that??” He shows me my own conditioning and teaches me how to be shameless about meeting my own needs like I met his. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, if my body needs it, I should listen.
Showing your body loyalty also means standing up for it against anyone who would treat it poorly. It means sacrificing the social reward of bonding over body hate or laughing along with jokey insults. Refusing to play along with self denigration will cost some social points, but you will never develop a positive relationship through betrayal.
Would you befriend someone who was always critical of you, who berated you in private and mocked you publicly? Who made promises of rest or food and then broke them? Who ignored you when you needed health care? Why would you expect good results from your body if that’s what it’s getting from you?
The shift in perspective that came from viewing my body as a persona changed so much for me. Perspective taking is an important tool to have for productive relationships, so when I turned that tool towards my body I should have expected a change. But I was shocked at how moving and emotional it was.
When I look at my life through the perspective of my body, I don’t see so many of the failures or limitations. Instead, I see the ways she protected me, the consequences she bears, the things she remembers. I see how she kept me company throughout my life. I see the ways she kept me safe.
The body keeps the score like the protective friend who keeps receipts. Your body is the one that says, “yes, that happened and it hurt. No matter what anyone else says, we know.”
Your body depends on you for care, and in return it offers you survival, protection, and sensation. It offers you the ability to communicate and connect. It deserves your loyalty.
You are your own advocate. We are rewarded for ignoring, minimizing, and denying our human needs. But when you take your body’s side you choose to sacrifice that reward to care for yourself. Take the perspective of your body and examine what it has gotten you through. Then stand up for it.