Although I am not primarily a somatic practitioner, I do incorporate some body based techniques and perspectives into my practice. Traumatic experiences and chronic stress from oppression and discrimination can manifest in our bodies and our relationship with our bodies. As research is evolving, we can see that intergenerational trauma can be passed down both psychologically and physically down to our epigenetics. In the modern medical system, often the individual and the individual body are blamed for the impacts of both inherited trauma and the current stress of living within an oppressive, unhealthy context.
One of the ways this plays out is through anti-fatness which is an extension of anti-blackness and the dominant cultural focus on weight loss.
Health At Every Size® is a framework that focuses on health rather than weight. We can choose to pursue health without the focus on weight loss. In dominant culture, the narrative is that if you are fat than you are unhealthy, less desirable and you should want to lose weight. When in reality, many people are healthy at various sizes and a focus on losing weight can actually contribute to emotional and physical health issues.
Intuitive eating is a modality to approach our relationship with food, our bodies, and how we nourish our bodies. In the growing dialogue about the optimal ways of eating, there is usually an explicit or implicit anti-fat bias that is coded as “health.” Diet culture gives messaging that our bodies are untrustworthy and we need to listen to someone else tell us how and what we should eat. This messaging encourages a disconnect with our embodied experience. Intuitive eating is a practice to reclaim our relationship with our bodies and the natural rhythms in our relationship with food.
Many people enter treatment with body image issues without an awareness of the cultural context of these issues. The historical context is a hierarchy of what bodies matter and what bodies do not, what bodies have value and what bodies do not. We find ourselves somewhere on that ladder and can experience significant distress and tangible discrimination and violence if we are in bodies that are deemed as less worthy and thus less safe. This struggle is played out in our bodies and our relationship to them.
Living within a context where even our closest, most basic relationship is challenged, criticized, disrupted, this can contribute to both mental and physical health conditions. Although our bodies and health would be much more significantly improved if systemic issues contributing to chronic stress were addressed, therapy can be a space to reclaim and heal our relationships with our bodies. We can seek avenues for liberation, challenge the narratives that bodies must look or be a certain way to have value and envision what might be possible when we release these stories of inadequacy.
Our bodies carry over 13 billion years of ancestry. Much of what makes us up is star dust just like all that surrounds us in the Universe. Through reconnecting with our bodies, we can access the possibility of connecting with the support and power of that lineage that we carry with us in addition to a more active engagement with the community that our bodies are currently in relationship with and alive through such as the trees who we breath with, the plants and animals who nourish us and the water that sustains us.
Resource List:
Books
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness By Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Fearing the Black Body by Dr. Sabrina Strings
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
