Part One: What I was told
I was seven years old the first time I understood that my body was not entirely mine.
He was family. The life of the party. Big hands, big ears, big laugh, the kind of man who makes a room louder just by walking into it. He especially loved the children. He chased us around gardens at family gatherings while the adults drank wine and called it wholesome.
The hugs lasted slightly too long. His hand moved somewhere it should not. Five times. The fifth time, I told my mother.
She said: “That is just what uncles do.”
Something rewired in that moment. If what felt wrong was normal, if a person who loved me could touch me in a way that made my skin want to leave my body and that was simply how uncles were, then I could not trust what I felt. My body's signal was wrong. Being seen, being a girl in a room, being noticed. None of it was safe.
I did not decide this.
My body decided it.
Part Two: The weight
From age eight, the weight began to arrive.
I did not understand what I was doing. Nobody does. The body does not explain its logic. It does not send a memo. It simply begins to build something. A layer. A buffer. A way of taking up space that, paradoxically, makes you less of a target. Less visible. Less reachable.
Research confirms what the body already knew before there were words for it. Women who experience unwanted touch in childhood are significantly more likely to carry excess weight in adulthood. The body is not malfunctioning. It is following an instruction.
Nobody asked the eight-year-old why she was getting bigger.
They just told her to eat less.
Part Three: The loud dress
I also went the other direction.
A sequin skirt that catches light from across the room. A denim jacket covered in rainbow stars and coloured stitching that no dress code could have anticipated. A feathered military hat that belongs to no era and no occasion. A hot pink dress with a print so loud it arrived somewhere before I did.
I wear things nobody else is wearing. I put combinations together that should not work, and I know, in the moment I am getting dressed, that they do. Because of how they feel.
The little frisson when the sequins touch my skin, hard and cool and slightly rough. The way feathers at a bustier's edge tickle my neck, like a lover tracing something very slowly along my jaw. The weight of a jacket settling onto my shoulders, grounding me into my own body before I have walked into a room.
This is about being inside a body I can feel.
The woman who learned to make herself invisible also learned to go numb inside the invisibility. The armour and the going quiet arrived together.
What came back, when it came back, was sensation. The scratch of sequins. The cool slide of silk. The way a print so bold you cannot look away from it somehow makes you feel most like yourself.
I love my body at every size I have been in it. It has been doing something brave the whole time. Making decisions I had not yet caught up with.
Part Four: The instruction
What I was told, and what most women I sit with were told, runs something like this.
“You would be so pretty if you just lost a little weight.”
Said by a mother who was told the same thing by her mother.
Said with love, received by the body as: you are not enough as you are. Earn your softness. Earn the right to take up space. Earn the attention, earn the touch, earn the dress you actually want to wear. After.
After the weight loss. After the discipline. After you have made yourself smaller first.
The cruelty dressed as care. The comment at the dinner table that the person who made it does not remember and the body that received it never forgot.
Underneath all of that, for so many of the women who come to me, there is something that happened before there were words for it. Something in the body that decided, below the level of conscious thought, that less visible was safer. That wanting less was wiser. That taking up space, real space, felt space, desired space, was not available to her.
Almost every woman I have worked with who carries body shame also carries something in her relationship to touch, to intimacy, to being known.
They are not separate.
The body that cannot be touched is almost always the body that learned, somewhere and from someone, that touch was not safe. Or that it was something to be endured. Or that being fully felt was dangerous.
Part Five: Three women
Let me tell you about three women.
The first came from New York. A lawyer. Successful in the way that looks, from the outside, like everything is fine. She could not gain weight, no matter what she ate, what supplements she took, what specialists examined her. Her body refused to hold.
The doctors found nothing wrong.
What we found in the work was something no doctor had a test for. She had left Ethiopia. Built a life in America. Achieved everything her family had sacrificed to make possible. Her country had known famine for decades. Generations of her people had not had enough.
Her body, carrying that history in its cells, had decided, completely, subconsciously, with total commitment, that she did not deserve to be full. To hold weight felt like a betrayal of everyone who had gone without.
You cannot talk the body out of its instructions. We worked with where it lived. Below language, in the nervous system, in the cellular memory where these things are stored. When the guilt began to move, her body began to change.
The second came from France. An aristocratic family. The kind of upbringing that has a rule for everything, including how much space a woman should take up.
Her mother had been clear. “Larger women are common.” To carry weight was low class. To be controlled, in body, in appetite, in how much you allowed yourself, was refinement. Was correct.
She had held that instruction for decades. She ate carefully, joylessly, obsessively.
Her husband was having an affair. The woman he was seeing was fuller, softer, warmer in ways his wife had been taught to refuse herself.
We worked. The grip began to loosen. The rituals around food softened. She started to eat without punishment. To feel without immediately classifying the feeling.
She and her husband went to Vietnam. A second honeymoon. Something between them had at last become spacious enough to breathe.
The third came in her forties. Just slightly absent from herself. Dressing for what fit rather than what suited her, moving through her life and her marriage like a woman who had quietly stopped arriving.
Her husband loved her. She could not quite receive it.
In our work together, something surfaced that had no clear memory attached to it. Pre-verbal. Before she had language, before she could have named it. The body had stored it below the floor of conscious memory. As an instruction. Want less. Be less here. Take up less.
She had been following that instruction for forty years without knowing it had been given.
When it began to clear, she started dressing differently. Just wearing what suited her body rather than what apologised for it. She started asking for touch differently in her bedroom. Asking for what she actually wanted.
Her husband noticed. He was, in her words, delighted.
Because she had arrived in it.
Part Six: The real question
Shame does not disappear when the body changes.
I have watched women lose significant weight and become harder. More critical of other women's bodies, harsher in their judgements. Because they remember too well. The shame stayed. It just changed direction. It turned outward instead of inward.
I have watched women discipline their bodies into thinness and still feel enormous inside it. Still feel like too much. Still dress for what fits rather than what delights them.
The body was never the trouble. The body is always responding to something.
The question worth asking, gently, in a way the nervous system can actually receive, is not how do I change this body.
It is: what was this body told, and by whom, and is any of it still true?
Because the instruction is not permanent.
The body that learned to hide can learn to feel the scratch of sequins and know it is safe to be here. The body that learned to disappear can learn to walk into a room in a feathered hat that belongs to no occasion and feel, in its bones, that this is exactly right.
Just as a body, at last, that has come home to itself.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette