When you start up therapy, one of the first things the therapist will do is warn you that things may get intense and they may get worse before they get better. This is part of the ‘informed consent’ medical practitioners need to provide to patients or clients prior to providing services. In my experience, it’s a good warning. Healing is beautiful and worth it, but can also turn your whole life upside down. If healing upends your life then it needed to be upended, but that doesn’t make the process easy.
Healing is hard, because it can bring a lot of unexpected change. You notice things you don’t like that used to feel normal. Relationships that you used to really value can take a sour note if someone resents your changes. If someone is not willing or not in a place where they can come along with you to your healed self, it can be incredibly painful to lose the closeness that was once in that relationship.
Healing can be really threatening to people nursing their wounds. There are some people who will undermine your efforts so that they can keep their own misery company, or so they won’t have to do the scary and hard work of reconstructing their beliefs about the world.
Some people get stuck in their trauma – because they don’t have access to the healthcare they need or because they have learned to weaponize it to manipulate people – where seeing someone else find their way to healing means its possible, which threatens their beliefs about themselves. Nihilism is often much more seductive than hope.
A lot of people think that they are helping. At least, that’s the story they’re telling themselves. They think that by hounding someone to force their body smaller they are saving them from abuse, without any awareness of how abusive their own actions are.
We live in a society that makes bodies into status objects. The people that tell themselves they’re helping are trying to get you to acquire more status by making your body more compliant. I think this is behind a lot of parent’s body shaming actions. They seem to believe that status is what will save us, so they push to qualify for more of it.
They’re not entirely wrong! Some bodies are rewarded with status just because of how they look. Lookism and Halo Effect means that people whose appearance fits the status quo are objectively treated better. Some parents will do whatever it takes to get their child treated better by society, even if they treat them worse to do it. If healing makes your body stray further from the status quo – increasing in size, say, or unmasking neurodivergence – that healing can become a threat to their attempts at safety.
I call these types of people Body Cops. They’re the people who deputize themselves to criticize the health choices of others, comment on others’ bodies or their food, chronically put down their own appearance, or preach false promises of health as a reward for compliance to the status quo.
Body cops are the gatekeepers of power. They are enforcing the status quo as they tell themselves they are just concerned about health. White women in particular can be really dangerous here because the status quo we enforce leads directly to white supremacy, and we get rewarded for doing it. The standards for what bodies society approves of were made to keep Power where it is. By choosing to play along with how Power wants things, we are enforcing what Power wants.
I have a lot of empathy for all of us struggling along in this system, trying to feel OK and look out for the people we love. Empathy and understanding are necessary in order to make change. But so is accountability.
If you have someone in your life who comments on your body/food/appearance, it’s OK to ask them to stop. Even if it’s your mom. If there is someone who has a strong reaction to your healing, you don’t have to share your journey with them. If someone objects to changing the way you do things, it’s OK to say “you can do it your way and I’ll do it mine.”
Your body built a boundary for you, to know where you end and other people begin. Your skin and fascia draws a really firm line. You can build a boundary for your body in return. You don’t have to prioritize anyone else’s traditions, expectations, or feelings about you. You can return the boundary favor by offering loyalty to your own body over any one else.