Help! I'm an Overthinker with Body Image Issues

So a few years ago, I explored somatic therapy : an approach to processing stress that focuses on the body's experience rather than just cognition's.

At first, I didn’t get it. Because damn, it's hard for intellectualizers to stop intellectualizing.

But after about a year, I started to understand that my body was having physical responses to stressful moments right before my brain interpreted them and took over.

For example, in a body image flood: my jaw freezes. My breath gets shallow. My mouth goes into this lock down thing, and my eyes narrow, losing sense of peripheral vision.

That’s how my body sends data to FREEZE BECAUSE F*CKCKCKCKKCKCK!

But this was where I'd get lost.

As a thinker, I analyzed that sensation into a story before the stress response had a chance to finish.

But the signal isn't a story with a conclusion. It's just the body saying: based on information from my experiences, something feels off. I don’t know if we’re safe. Are we?

The intellectualizer turns that communication query into a job.

The discomfort gets translated into yes by God there is something wrong with me! -- and then into a plan to fix it.

Thinking becomes the actual coping mechanism: observe, conclude, strategize. 

Anything to feel like you’re back in control.

The problem is that control doesn’t complete the stress cycle; it just freezes it for later.

The body never gets to discharge the energy that came with the original signal.

What somatic work taught me is that regulation isn’t about changing the feeling or making it go away, even.

It’s about staying with the physical reality of it long enough for the body to realize it’s not in danger.

For me, that might look like stretching my jaw, taking a deeper breath, and even vocalizing something to unlock my freeze.

When you notice threat as sensation instead of immediately translating it into shame, you create a space within which to respond instead of react.

You remind your body that the threat it’s remembering isn’t happening now.

This is how empowerment takes place -- we replace old stories with the understanding that we are not inside of those stories anymore.

That we can change the pattern by interrupting old cycles instead of buying into them again.

This podcast episode explains how sensations can impact your body image triggers of getting dressed, especially if you need to size up or get more comfortable clothes after weight gain.