Is Body Terrorism Making You Anxious?
Content Warning – this blog contains references to racism, ableism, suicide, rape, misogyny, queer, fat and transphobia.
In this blog post I’ll explore Sonya Renee Taylor’s wonderful book “The Body Is Not An Apology” along with the ways that body terrorism shows up, and how we can resist it using radical self-love.
Body terrorism is the way we are taught to hate our own bodies. The discourse of a “normal” body is used to reinforce a hierarchy of what is worthy and beautiful: white, young, thin, affluent, able-bodied. If our own body fails to meet those standards, (as it does for most of us), it is seen as worthless, ugly, expendable and deserving of at the very least “modification” through dieting or aesthetic interventions, through to violence against it from others or ourselves. Even if we do meet those standards right now, remember, nothing lasts forever...
Body terrorism can be found in a number of spaces:
the interpersonal: overhearing family conversations about your weight, or witnessing another child being teased at school for bald spots caused by traction alopecia,
the structural: being profiled and frisked by airport security and it crossing a boundary into state sanctioned sexual assault, navigating environments designed for able-bodied people of a certain height/weight/race/gender. Body terrorism intensifies the more that a body expresses difference – Black, Queer, Fat, Disabled, Transgendered – and intensifies even further the more that those differences intersect with each other and with the world,
the legal: laws that codify what is an acceptable, normal body, and sanctions those that aren’t in a series of hygiene or wellness trolling “health interventions”. Here in the UK we can look at the ongoing ‘Culture War’ against trans, fat or disabled bodies, or attempts in the US to define bodies that perform sex work as “against the laws of nature” or the ways in which Black and Brown bodies are murdered by the police, or the more recent revelations around misogyny in the police and how this impacts female bodies in terms of rape, assault and murder, to see how this works.
It’s no surprise then, that anxiety, depression, self-image and the body itself are all often interwoven with these wider issues. My body tells me when things aren’t right often way before my brain catches up. Headaches, gastrointestinal issues, numbing or checking out by dissociating, all of these experiences are a message about the space(s) I am in. My brain also lets my body know when things aren’t right, and I can experience this as anxiety, panic, emotional flashbacks, intrusive images, exhaustion or depression.
Taylor writes:
“...Society at every turn will reject our attempts to exist unapologetically in our bodies [and this] is to live in a state of terror. Dragging ourselves through a lifetime of self-hate endorsed and encouraged by our media and our political and economic systems is a terrifying way to live, and yet millions of people exist in this constant state of fear every day. It is an act of terrorism against our bodies to perpetuate body shame and to support body-based oppression. I call this ‘body terrorism.’” (p.56)
There are “Three Peaces” and “Four Pillars of Radical Self-Love" that will help us all to resist body terrorism:
Make peace with not understanding: be curious, open and accepting of things as they are, rather than trying to categorise, assign value to, or analyse the diverse range of bodies that exist.
Make peace with difference: “bodies are diverse not only in size but in race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, physical ability and mental health...” the default healthy body rests on a system of medicalised, inequality and injustice.
Make peace with your body: how we view our own body is learnt through the messages we receive about it. Body shame makes us miserable. We have to unlearn what we’ve been taught through a process of de-indoctrination.
The Four Pillars of Radical Self Love – How to Make Peace with Our Bodies
Taking out the toxic – the first pillar is to consciously choose and curate the media that we take in. As Taylor writes “if you have a body-shame hangover after you watch, read or listen to something, it’s time to take out the toxic...” and stop encouraging/putting money in the pockets of those who are doing us harm. They want to sell us stuff that actively harms us, and we have to stop buying it.
Mind matters – the second pillar is to reintegrate the body and mind, we have to give the same amount of care to our brain as we do to the body. This involves disentangling our experiences of body shame from examples of neurodiversity, such as depression and anxiety, along with learning to analyse our thought habits and patterns in order to create new ones. We can reframe depression and anxiety as “another unique way my body exists in the world rather than as a shame to avoid or hide...” (P.76)
Unapologetic action – the third pillar involves befriending the body and deconditioning ourselves from the belief that our bodies are “bad, wrong or disgusting”. This also involves a process of remembering the body – that it loves to move, dance, be sensual and/or sexual (for some of us). This will also involve processing trauma stored in the body too. Finally, unapologetic action invites us to write new, better stories about our bodies and what it’s like to be in one. As Taylor writes: “we must no longer be bound by crappy stories. Humans made them up. You are human. Make a better story”. (P.78)
Collective compassion – the fourth pillar is perhaps the scariest one: opening ourselves up to others in order to “move beyond self-reliance to collective care. We must learn to be with each other if we plan to get free...Radical self-love is honoring how we are all products of a rigged system designed to keep us stuck in stigma and shame. The only way to beat that system is by giving ourselves something the system never will: compassion.” (p.80)
There is so much more to this approach to de-indoctrination and radical self-love including new ways of thinking, doing and being, negotiating unapologetic agreements about how we will be in the world, and how this will help dismantle fat phobia, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, racism and white supremacy. If this is landing with you, I’d strongly encourage you to investigate Sonya Renee Taylor’s work further.
Therapy can play a role in this process of thinking, doing and being by providing a space to safely explore ways of integrating body and mind, or uncovering and changing our unhelpful beliefs about the body and writing new stories. Therapy can also help with the process of compassionately disentangling body shame from other ways the brain has adapted to survive toxic systems. Once we’re able to do that perhaps it’s also possible to resist, heal from, and then dismantle, body terrorism itself.
