Being human means living in a body.

Your body belongs to you.

And yet, when we experience trauma we often feel like our bodies do not belong to us.

Whether our bodies are specifically attacked or targeted during our traumatic experiences or not, we all experience abuse, complex trauma and oppression in a body.

And these experiences can have the impact of disconnecting us from our bodies, and also often make us believe our bodies do not belong to us.

Disconnection from our bodies happens on many levels. From how our bodies (including our brains - which are part of our bodies) often repress memories, leaving huge parts of our memory, identity and experiences with our bodies feeling fragmented, to the ways the natural impacts of trauma are stigmatized and pathologized by the cultures and systems we live in, causing us to feel like our bodies are betraying us in our responses to trauma. It happens in the ways we hold our trauma in our bodies and in how we are conditioned to feel shame around our trauma, and so we avoid connection with our bodies because they no longer feel safe to us. It happens in how our trauma responses often create or intersect with other challenging body experiences such as chronic illness, grief, eating disorders, addictions, and self-harm.

To add to this, many trauma experiences, such as abuse, involve serious consent and boundary violations. Consent and boundary violations can create a sense of unsafeness in our bodies, and when our boundaries and consent are violated over and over, when we live through chronic and complex traumas, it is understandable that we often begin to distrust and disconnect from our bodies and the memories they hold. And the violence that we live through in these ways can also make us believe (or have us believing from the earliest age) that our bodies are not our own and that other people’s claim on them is valid.

Then, for many of us, we add in the trauma that comes from oppression. In addition to the physical or emotional violence that happens within oppressive systems and relationships, these oppressive cultures tell us that some bodies are better than others, that some bodies are more worthy than others, that some bodies should be cared for over others. For those of us who are marginalized in any of these cultures, we are given the message daily, in both implicit and explicit ways, that our bodies are not as good as other bodies and that we should strive to normative oppressive 'ideals' at all times. These harmful messages can have the impact of disconnecting us from our bodies even further, deepening our body shame and making us believe our bodies do not belong to us.

But the truth is our bodies do belong to us…

My body belongs to me.

Your body belongs to you.

One of the biggest elements of my own processing of my trauma has been reclaiming my body. Reclaiming my body includes all kinds of practices that I return to over and over, because this work is never linear and there is no finish line - it is work and a kind of being in my body that, given my complex trauma history, is continuous and unfolds with deeper layers as I continue living in my body.

What is Body Reclamation?

Body Reclamation does not mean you have to love your body. It does not mean you have to change your body in any way. It does not mean you have to go into deep trauma processing work. It does not mean you have relive your traumas over and over (although often as we reconnect with our bodies things do tend to come up - there is space for this here). It does not mean you have to show up naked online. It does not mean you have to show up online at all, or in any way that does not feel right in your body. (And it might mean any and all of those things to you, too.)

Body Reclamation is about reclaiming what is already yours: your body.

It is about reconnecting with your body. It is about exploring what it means to live in your body. It is about learning to trust and care for and stay with your body, returning to what that means to you (even where that means needing to check-out sometimes). It is about exploring and reclaiming your complexities as a human in a body. It is about reclaiming your body while living with trauma and all the complex intersections of your being human.

(If you want a PDF of the above image, listing the topics covered during Body Reclamation, please email sarah@traumaandco.com)

Body Reclamation has been created by:

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