Body Relational Work: Supporting people in healing their relationship to their body

A light blue background with a deeper blue outlined face. The face is covered with blue outlined flowers over the eyes. Below the neck there are three lush blush colored camellia flowers cradling the artwork.

I wrote last year about how I don’t like the language around “body image” a topic that many clinicians have trouble working with because of the lack of resources and appropriate framing for how to do this work with individuals. I don’t like it because it re-enforces the prevalent and suffocating idea that our body is about an image. It re-enforces objectification of bodies. The experience of “bad body image” is also a deeply painful and shame riddled experience- to be in constant odds with how your body size is, and so many humans are looking for some relief on this topic. Many people are guided towards “relief” within the same systems that created the problem and will seek out relief in dieting, lifestyle changes disguised as dieting, bariatric surgeries and now the new dizzying environment of GLP-1 medications for weight loss. Sadly, we consistently know from research that these attempts fail for the vast majority of people and side effects can be minimal to deadly. 

And the reality is, our bodies are not objects, they are living, breathing, digesting, metabolizing beings. They are vehicles for our souls, they hold us through our lives, they hug our loved ones, they experience sensations and pleasures and hold us through traumas and terrors. 

We are told to cram these dynamic, complex, sometimes painful beings, our bodies, into smallness. Also sadly, sometimes the ways that we are told this, depending on our body’s size, is in increasingly violent ways like being denied medical care, denied access to spaces and events, denied jobs, and forced to face increasing stigmatizations. The industry of diet culture, propped up by medical industry neglect at updating outdated models of care and increasingly joined in wellness industry spaces, offers “solutions” to the problems that they created by promoting and propagating anti-fatness. An icky and abhorrent business model.

When we think about body relational work we have to hold all of this. We have to confront that we have all been stewed in this soup- that produced these ideas and these rules, this insistence on shrinking and staying small. Somewhere along the way it got knitted in with morality, and so body control becomes a moral pursuit, making it all the more toxic and violent. 

A lot of my clients struggle with this work because they think they are failing if they 1. Still have objectifying thoughts about their bodies and or 2. Still want to lose weight and or 3. Still have biases towards other people’s bodies. And I think if we are all being honest with ourselves we can admit that these things to varying degrees still impact us, too. And this makes sense because at some point, before we could consent and before we understood the wrong-ness of all of this, we embodied these harmful ideas, these harmful ways of be-ing, as Truths. 

I think that THIS is the place we need to start when we think about body relational work. Not staring at the mirror and finding one thing you like about yourself, definitely not that. But here. Where we recognize that this is a soup that we have all at some point simmered in. 

Body relational work starts here and then it can move towards what would it be like to feel different? What would it be like to begin to see your body as less of an object and more of a companion to hold you through your life (while it keeps you alive, automatically without any effort or thought from you, by breathing for you)? What would it be like to invite your body into the conversation more, while asking your brain to step back a bit and see what the other parts have to say? What sort of information can you get and how can that aid you into reforming a relationship that is less about domination and more about connection and care?

And in this process it is always vitally important that providers can help clients recognize that always this process has been about coping and survival, and it may continue to be that way. If someone needs to make a choice about their body and how they interact with it because they need to feel safe, they need to be safe, that absolutely must be honored. People get to choose how they move through this mess, and personal identities matter in this 100% in a way that will never be mapped out in a body image handout. 

So, I’m offering that in these conversations, with ourselves, with our loved ones, with our clients, we start with 1. Context 2. Curiosity and 3. Autonomy and Sovereignty and that alongside all of that we pour as much grace and compassion as we can for the fact that we have to navigate the ways we’ve been socialized, our unlearning towards healing, and the ways that there is still so much harm and violence for bodies in this world. Our healing is our resistance, and it matters.