On hating one's body & love as praxis
Sep. 12th, 2017 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThere is a tendency, in some of the circles I move in, to react strongly and negatively to exhortations to "love your body". Says Hel, inadvertently prompting me to finally get around to writing about this:
Which is a very helpful translation for me to see, because I find it Really Rather Difficult to be around the Very Definite "it is absolutely okay for me to hate my body, it's preposterous to suggest that I wouldn't hate my body, it doesn't do me any good at all in any way ever" line of discussion. (Because of empathising with distress; because of wanting to Explain why this is an Incorrect Approach, and being well aware that's inappropriate and unhelpful; because. Because because because.)
But: oh. It's yet another mistranslation, yet another skewing (as of gratitude exercises to snide and condescending "count your blessings"), I think? When I talk about loving my body, I don't mean the superficial "I have to feel positive about my body all the time": that's not what love is. I mean it as compassion and kindness and working-in-good-faith, as recognition that my body is doing the best it can.
You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver. ... your body, your most personal of assistants,/in its own awkwardly earnest way/really wants to make sure
you get all your messages: Sensuum,jjhunter. There is a kind of love called maintenance: Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe.
It doesn't mean rotten, as my maternal line says, in exasperated understanding. It's doing its best. And being kind to it doing its best turns out to be pretty good practice for being kind to me doing my best, and working out what that might look like on any different way. Love not as a variable state, but a process (The Indelicates); love as a verb, not a noun; love as work. It is cruel to tell someone that you love them, if what you mean is that you're enamoured of the idea of a static and unchanging snapshot of them, filtered through your own perceptions; love should, surely, embrace messiness and uncertainty and wobbles and mistakes, should think I don't yet know how but I trust we can sort this out.
And so: I love my body.
I think there is often an impetus to turn "it sucks that people are conditioned to feel negatively about their bodies and we should resist that conditioning" into "everyone has to feel positive about their bodies all the time".
Which is a very helpful translation for me to see, because I find it Really Rather Difficult to be around the Very Definite "it is absolutely okay for me to hate my body, it's preposterous to suggest that I wouldn't hate my body, it doesn't do me any good at all in any way ever" line of discussion. (Because of empathising with distress; because of wanting to Explain why this is an Incorrect Approach, and being well aware that's inappropriate and unhelpful; because. Because because because.)
But: oh. It's yet another mistranslation, yet another skewing (as of gratitude exercises to snide and condescending "count your blessings"), I think? When I talk about loving my body, I don't mean the superficial "I have to feel positive about my body all the time": that's not what love is. I mean it as compassion and kindness and working-in-good-faith, as recognition that my body is doing the best it can.
You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver. ... your body, your most personal of assistants,/in its own awkwardly earnest way/really wants to make sure
you get all your messages: Sensuum,
jjhunter. There is a kind of love called maintenance: Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe.It doesn't mean rotten, as my maternal line says, in exasperated understanding. It's doing its best. And being kind to it doing its best turns out to be pretty good practice for being kind to me doing my best, and working out what that might look like on any different way. Love not as a variable state, but a process (The Indelicates); love as a verb, not a noun; love as work. It is cruel to tell someone that you love them, if what you mean is that you're enamoured of the idea of a static and unchanging snapshot of them, filtered through your own perceptions; love should, surely, embrace messiness and uncertainty and wobbles and mistakes, should think I don't yet know how but I trust we can sort this out.
And so: I love my body.
THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-12 10:52 pm (UTC)And "misery" here is chosen specifically, as opposed to pain, because they're not necessarily the same thing. I think your body probably causes you a lot more pain more often than mine does me? But that I have observed, I have not seen the state of your body directly being responsible for you being MISERABLE.
And I think it is inherently unfair/unsupportable to demand that people have warm-fuzzy positive feelings about something that is making them miserable.
Pragmatically, the solution to this may be to find ways to enable them not to be miserable, whatever those happen to be (less pain, more empowerment, etc), but for some these are really not available yet or likely to be in their lifetime: for someone who really, really wants, with all their heart, to do something that their body simply does not allow them to do . . . well sometimes that problem is not solvable, and that misery is hard to relieve, and at that point it becomes kinda out of line to demand that they find Positive Feelings about it.
And in this case I don't think it's "degree", as it were, of Disabled (or Dysphoric) that does it as such? But whether or not the body is at the core of that misery.
It's not cool to demand that people Feel Positive and Fluffy and Fuzzy-Warm Good about something that's making them miserable, which is more or less what the body-positivity movement often comes off as being/doing*. And which does get pushed at particular kinds of disabled people a lot, tangling up with other ways in which it's demanded they be Positive and Upbeat and Happy, and thus hits over into I GET TO FEEL AS FUCKING NEGATIVE AS I FUCKING LIKE GO TO HELL kind of thing.
Basically crosses over into "I get to have the emotions that I have, I get to feel the way I feel about things". Which has ways it connects to the "gratitude excercises" issue too: a lot of the people who have very negative reactions to the idea are those who have had Positivity Demanded of them at great length (which I tentatively get the sense is not something that happened to you so much? You more had abusive parental negativity shoved at you 24/7? I could be wrong!), who were NOT ALLOWED to have/express negative feelings or to be upset?
So then it becomes "this body you have that causes you misery all the time? You must LOVE it and feel GOOD about it and be POSITIVE about it because it is GOOD and POSITIVE and - " and at that point one wants to eat everything's face and then light it on fire.
Now I think there are actually a LOT of other options other than either WARM FUZZY SUNSHINE FEELINGS ALL THE TIME or "of course I loathe my body and it is awful horrific and I hate it how dare you suggest otherwise."
But I think even broaching them, it's important to start with "you know what? you are absolutely ALLOWED to hate your body. And it is an absolutely reasonable thing to have hugely negative feelings towards something that causes you to be miserable." And from THERE you can move on to "so it is significantly possible that it will lessen misery if we approach it like this: your body is not actually a malignant force out to get you, and it doesn't MEAN to be terrible, and while it's frustrating and unhappy-makiing that it does X or won't do X or whatever, it's probable that you will get better results in Being Less Miserable if however you feel, you approach treating it with some basic kind of compassion and care, and here are some ways to do that."
*and note: they usually do this because they're fighting back at a culture that is telling them that their body is not ALLOWED to make them Positive, Happy, Feel Warm Fuzzy Feelings! And when one's perspective is that this is ALL AROUND ALL THE TIME, it can be hard to remember that other people are experiencing the other direction.
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-13 09:31 am (UTC)Oh gosh, yes to this.
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-13 08:15 pm (UTC)So in fact some of where I'm coming from is having non-trivial experience with being made miserable by or being scared of my body, and knowing how much happier I am over here. (It was kind of a Revelation when I was, temporarily, on a drug regime that meant I didn't hurt. I hadn't realised how afraid I was of being in pain until I... wasn't. And then the drugs stopped working, because of course they did, but luckily I managed to keep hold of "not being afraid of pain" and wow was that a significant improvement in my quality of life.) This does, of course, mean I'm a bit prone to doing the autistic evangelism thing of "but this approach is making you sad, I promise you don't actually want to do it, do this instead" + blank incomprehension at people struggling with that because of course I've forgotten the emotional specifics of the grieving process I went through to get here, in the visceral sense, so it's very easy (isn't it always) to default to "but if you just..." when there's no "just" or "easy" or "simple" about it.
(I think this also shows up in my approach to counselling -- a lot of the time, if I'm feeling agitated or angry or distressed, it's because My Model Was Wrong and things didn't happen within expected parameters and therefore I understand Nothing about the entire world and that's terrifying. A lot of my distress and almost all of my anger just... evaporates, once I've got a working model for What The Hell Just Happened. Similarly, now that I've wrapped my head around the complex version of "loving my body", I've got the working model of "my body is not an antagonist" and it's Completely Obvious to me that All Other Models Are Broken -- that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean -- and that therefore if I just EXPLAIN this one well enough...)
(... and on top of that, of course, there's the layered and contradictory thing of second-hand distress at, more than anything else, my body remembering how miserable hating myself like that was. I'm intellectually sort of indifferent to it? But I get a significant physical and apparently subconcious stress response to people talking about how much they hate their bodies, and talking this through is at least in part an attempt to gently persuade myself that people who are in that place aren't trying to tell me that I have to go back to hating my body.)
So. I think you are quite right about approaches, and I in fact have a post brewing (revisiting the antifa discussion) about our tendency as a species to reduce things to handy shorthand mnemonics that are actively counter-productive if they're not supplied with, as you say, all the footnotes, and about needing to try out both "extremes" in order to develop the skills to end up somewhere nuanced in the middle, but that is... not a job for tonight.
(Engaging with the permission-to-express-negativity is going in a different comment because I think it's a bit tangential and it might be easier to manage the conversation if etc etc etc!)
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-14 12:36 am (UTC)Because it's not even express, I think is an important thing here: for a lot of people who struggle with the idea of "body positivity", they weren't allowed to feel negative about things (or aren't being allowed to now, or whatever). So that for them, they have at the same time been stuck in the middle of experiencing their body as Something That Causes Them Misery, while also having often been forced not only to outwardly praise and tolerate things that cause them misery, but have been told if they don't INTERNALLY ALSO have Wonderful Warm Feelings towards these things, they are Bad.
And it may actually be that for this person, being allowed to actually Feel Things is a much bigger issue/impediment than whether or not they view specifically their body as an antagonist or an ally. So it's not even that they're on a metaphorically different spot in the journey of grieving/etc, but that their journey is actually a totally different one, with different Points of Importance.
Now I happen to actually agree with you that not actively engaging with one's body as an enemy is a better idea? But that's also part of why when talking about it I tend to foreground the "you are allowed to have these feelings, these feelings are a totally reasonable response and there is no MORAL imperative for you to change these feelings. That said you may have better practical effects from changing this approach slightly, if that's available."? Sometimes it still doesn't work, because their journey is that different, but sometimes it's better.
(And I mean: I picked that up because 95% of body-positivity creates exactly that hostility in me. Because I absolutely got the "you are not allowed to have these negative feelings" crap force-fed in many, many spheres and my slightly inconvenient protective adaptation became "my negative feelings are going to get so big and so scary that YOU CANNOT DENY THEM". Which ironically means that being encouraged to love my body increases my intense antipathy for it. >.>)
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-14 08:46 pm (UTC)And, right, okay, the ways in which I'm dealing with disability involve loving-my-body-as-defiance, also, because if I can stubbornly piss people off by Not Behaving then yeppppp that is a thing I am primed to do.
Yep, this all makes sense, and possibly a useful thing for me to do here would in fact be to get around to writing up my latest round of experience with a pain clinic, which had a significant effect on my understanding of what pain clinics think they're for in ways that... yeah. Mmm. Okay.
Thank you, as ever, for babble; I very much enjoy you making words at me and making me think. <3
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-15 02:17 am (UTC)*nodnod!* I am in many ways glad that I came at the body-positive movement in general via knowing
. . .cuz otherwise my reaction would have been very very negative in ways that in and of itself would not have contributed to More Health and Understanding in the world! XD
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-13 09:25 pm (UTC)So, ahahaha, this is actually also one I have... sideways problems with? In that:
... and so on and so forth. A lot of what I'm able to do these days in terms of saying "I'm not happy or okay about this" can be traced directly to the point at which I finally got the endometriosis diagnosis and abruptly started standing up for myself a lot more. And all the subsequent counselling. So... yeah, I have a bunch of difficulty expressing negativity, but a lot of it is in the context of internalising "I shouldn't feel anything at all" throughout a childhood and adolescence of severe chronic untreated depression/trauma, which is not quite the same thing, and also in a context of honestly being more afraid of having/expressing positive feelings, such that some of what's going on when I flinch away from people defending their right to hate their bodies is... the above-mentioned automatic interpretation that they're telling me that I'm not allowed to love mine, and if I think I do I'm deluded, and... you can see where that one goes.
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-14 12:25 am (UTC)And yeah I think that results in a sort of . . . thirty-degrees-off clash with people who are struggling with having been fed, often force-fed, the "YOU MUST BE POSITIVE, HAPPY AND UPBEAT, YOU MUST FEEL THIS WAY ALL THE TIME, AND IF YOU DON'T YOUR UNHAPPINESS IS YOUR OWN FAULT" so that anything at all that has the shape of "loving your body is good!" [where, it's worth noting, "love" IS MEANING the "have warm fuzzy positive feelings about it" meaning] means they think YOU'RE (or whoever is) telling them "you're not allowed to be unhappy about things that cause you pain or the situation you're in."
And since it's not a nice clear even 90-degrees clash, but a weird sideways 30degrees one, that's a bit harder, I think.
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-14 06:38 pm (UTC)Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-14 08:27 pm (UTC)Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-19 12:56 am (UTC)