The Body

As adults, we are called upon to teach our Child and Child Self to love their bodies and not disconnect from them. 

The Body 

We only get one body. We receive it at the beginning of our lives and leave it behind at the end.  Our bodies facilitate where we go, how we interact, and what we do.  The body is a blessing, the original source of our satisfaction, comfort, and pleasure. We were born trusting our bodies. 

Yet, throughout our lives the body has many curses imposed upon it. It takes deliberate conscious effort not to blame, abuse, or be overly fascinated with our bodies to the point of injury. For the Child Self, we may have experienced early on shame around our bodies that causes us to mistrust it. 

In childhood, we begin to disconnect from our bodies and our physical needs for many reasons.  From cultural norms as interpreted by our families, communities, and institutions, we get the message that our bodies can be the source of shame, mistrust, and betrayal. For instance, we could have been told that our natural smells, excretions, and emotional breakdowns are disgusting and should be hidden. We may have received the impression that our sexual pleasures are sinful and should be denied and that our hungers, biological urges, and physical suffering are inconveniences that should be controlled for the sake of others.  Perhaps we heard that our physical traits were imperfect and flawed and loathsome, or our unpleasant sensitivities and discomforts were weaknesses to be overcome. 

Whatever the source, the message is clear: we should not love, listen to, or attend to our bodies’ needs. It’s no wonder that we disconnect from our bodies for our own survival: “If I separate from my body, I don't have to experience how it feels, or how others react to it.” This often leads us to a distorted relationship with our bodies. Perhaps we learn to use the body only as a tool: “I'll use it, abuse it, but I won't love it.” Perhaps we develop a detrimental narcissistic focus on our bodies: “My body determines my worth in the world, the rest of me does not.” Our relationship to our bodies is shaped by our original injuries, which then become our defenses, then our habits, and finally our unconscious and stubborn resistance to seeing ourselves differently. 

Your gorgeous son is full and big and healthy. People on the street who see him remark on his size: “ Wow he’s a big one, look at the size of those thighs, you can tell he is well fed”. How do you react to this external judgement which may even have undertones of criticism? How do you create in your child a love of his body and give him the ability to do that regardless of what anyone else says about him.  

Try this with your Child:

“Wow that person really likes to talk about people’s bodies. Sometimes that feels really yucky, sometimes that feels good, sometimes we wish they would just notice something else about us. They don’t really know you. They don’t know what is amazing about you and all the parts of you we know and love”.

When you tell the Child that people can’t help remarking on how we look, and that it can feel good to be told you are handsome or pretty, tell them that what’s considered beauty on the outside differs from culture to culture. Your family might think red hair is beautiful, but another family might like no hair at all. You need them to know that the most beautiful part of a person is how they are on the inside and how they act towards themselves and others. 

It’s important to tell your child how to react when people remark on their appearance. Make it simple, “You can just say, thank you.” But give them alternatives: “What would you like Uncle Harvey to say about you? How will we suggest that?” 

We have all been affected by how others have expressed approval or disapproval of how our bodies look or function, causing significant injury to the Child Self. Marion Woodman—Jungian analyst, author, lecturer, teacher, and poet—predicated her therapeutic work on healing the psyche/body/soul split in people affected by the patriarchal values of perfection, productivity, and goal-directed behavior through somatic, dream work, and spiritual methods. At a class at the Marion Woodman Institute, a teacher told us to begin a practice of rubbing cream or lotion into our feet each day for the sole purpose of giving ourselves tender loving care and grounding ourselves in our bodies. I was amazed at how hard it was to do this without thinking of winning some kind of “foot approval.” In the end, I made it a concrete practice, which helped me reclaim the body I had been separated from as a child. To my Child Self, I say:

“Little one, I know you are feeling like you must dress a certain way to get everyone to say that you are beautiful and are doing the right things. You got the message that you can’t break the rules or your body will not be appreciated. But you are free to be in love with your body and break the chains of judgment. If you feel that you must comply for now, let’s make a date so I can show you how beautiful you are by taking really good care of you.”

In most cultures, there are strong and rigid norms about how we identify with our bodies. The female body is subject to harsh standards of perfection and scrutiny. Girls and women often get the message that their value as humans is based on how they measure up to these standards and how attractive they judged to.  Many girls and women go to great lengths to make their bodies acceptable, often through deprivation, denial, shame, and guilt, and still feel that they fall short. And all too often male violence and abuse against female bodies is ignored and tolerated. 

Boys and men suffer a different form of objectification and at a different level. They are taught that their value as humans is based primarily on what they do, not how they look. However, they are taught to use and abuse their bodies for their own purposes, gains, and power over others. It is also clear that handsome, tall men have the advantage in much of the world. Still, they are not taught to love their bodies, to listen to the natural voice of the body, nor to take good care of the body for its own sake. 

In some cultures, we are just beginning to recognize and accept that LGBTQ+ individuals suffer from enormous pressures and judgments, abuse, and danger with regards to their bodies and how their bodies present in the world. Although their experiences and needs are finally being addressed, researched and supported, it is beyond the scope of my experience to address this here and even think of doing the topic justice. I can express how grateful I am that the LGBTQ+ Child and the Child Self will have a better chance of having their needs met as we move forward into greater understanding. Fundamentally the injury begins for them as it does for any child, it rests with the family and how these individuals are or are not protected and supported. 

As adults, we are called upon to teach our Child and Child Self to love their bodies and not disconnect from them. To reconnect our Child Selves to our bodies in a loving way, we have to ask ourselves these questions: “How did I learn to disregard my body? What was the origin of the messages I received, e.g., family modeling, religion, mass media, and communal norms?” Such messages may sound like: “The body is full of imperfections, waste materials, sexual sensations, and urges and is inferior to the mind and the spirit. As such it should be controlled and disregarded because it gets in our way, leads us astray, betrays us, and eventually dies.” But the truth is that we are human. We are messy, leaky, and juicy, we bleed, ache, and scar. But we crave contact, connection, and relationship with others, the success of which depends on our relationships to our own bodies. 

My mother both hated and was obsessed with her body. She was never satisfied with it and wanted to be taller and thinner. She dieted constantly to lose “ten pounds.” Yet, on her death bed at 66, she grabbed my arm with a pinch and said: “Tell all your girlfriends not to waste their time, their lives, trying to lose ten pounds, it is not worth it.” And I listened to and agreed with her and have sought, with varying degrees of success, to live her message. I decided early on that I would not make my own children squirm by listening to me degrade my body with statements that are all too common: “My boobs are too big, my stomach is fat, my hands are too puffy.” 

My young adult daughter told me that she and a friend confided to each other that their mothers never denigrated their own bodies in front of them. From this, she said, they learned to love their bodies and tune out, as much as possible, the denigrating messages in the world around them. This is as significant an accomplishment as I could have wished for as a parent. I told her that I intentionally tried not to do that in front of her and her brothers. I never wanted to expose them to self-hate, self-denial, and self-rejection. And even so, in my interactions with myself, my friends, or perhaps in front of her and her brothers, my unconscious negativity and self-rejection unintentionally slipped out and may have affected them.

I am so proud that my daughter takes a strong stance against the prevalent cultural messaging by fighting for women to love their bodies and to celebrate their varying luscious forms. She also advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals as she continues to develop her own body consciousness. She is now my teacher. 

In supporting my daughter to love her body, my Child Self, my inner little girl, has benefited, as well. It has served as a self-reinforcing and healing practice for me. 

Teach your children to love their bodies, even if you have to lie. Lying to tell the truth is accepted in poetry, art, and literature so doing it to change generations of body rejection and self-loathing is more than justified. 

“I hate my hands,” my friend’s twenty-year-old daughter tells me and I recoil. Her mom did all she could to keep her own self-loathing at bay, praising and supporting her daughter, who suffered for not having the culturally idealized “lithe” body. However, my friend also suffers with her weight and tries hard to change her appearance. She believes her body is not good enough and resents herself for believing it. Despite her conscious efforts, her daughter got the message that she should not love her own “imperfect” body. And we, as parents, are not the only influence on our children’s self-image. Cultural norms and influences are strong, making our efforts to help our children navigate these damaging messages even more significant. 

To respond to her I shared with my friend’s daughter my relationship with my own hands. 

“I love my hands, but I didn’t always. They have grown more lovable and beautiful to me because I have developed a deep appreciation of their value to me.  I recall being young and cringing when my mother gasped in disgust, ‘I hate my hands, they are so big, fat and ugly.’ My hands looked exactly like hers.  I even purposely lied to my own daughter, telling her ‘I love my hands,’ I said, ‘they look just like my mom’s,’ leaving out my mother’s self-loathing.  I love that I can make things with my hands. 

I remember being eight years old in the small basement workshop, hammering nails into blocks of wood to create sailboats and secret boxes, feeling the magic of my hands tear cloth, spread paint, and knit. Sometimes, I think I can fly, catch the wind, and take off.  I’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by loving my hands. It is probably the first part of the body I learned to love in glorious defiance of our body-hating culture. And I’m working to love the rest of my body, piece by piece, for my sake, my children’s sake, and in defense of my Child Self.

The educator, Maria Montessori, understood that children’s hands are a universal key to learning.  She also insisted that the child’s body needs to be in motion to develop and gain self-confidence. She prepared learning environments that kept children moving and using their hands, developing facility and competence with them. She believed children develop confidence by meeting their bodies’ needs based on their natural wants and desires. 

The body is the vehicle for “doing.” We can teach our children to love and celebrate their bodies by giving them the opportunity to do things for themselves. Every step along the way we can teach the Child Self and the Child to pay attention to how the body feels and what it needs and tend to it. This is something that has to be learned.  When a friend was working in his studio and deep in production mode, he would regularly skip a meal, and this made him feel awful. In time he came to understand that he was too consumed with placing production over the needs of his body from what he had learned his whole life. Eventually, he consciously broke this habit. 

Our false beliefs that we “don’t belong here” or “are not good enough” originate from what we are taught about our body’s needs, perhaps even from the moment of birth. For Erik Erikson, a foundational developmental psychologist, the first stage of human development is the resolution of trust verses mistrust: “I am hungry and cry, someone feeds me, and therefore I develop trust.” If the body’s hunger calls out and no one responds, we understandably may conclude that our bodies don’t matter.

From the moment of birth, the will is expressed. Do any of us remember observing our own hand passing in front of our eyes and the moment we wanted it to happen again? A cry of hunger would bring food, but what would bring the hand back? As infants, just at the edge of muscle control, we wanted to see that hand pass again, just for the pleasure of seeing it and for the desire to do it ourselves. What would bring it back was the power of the will and the vehicle of the body to satisfy it. 

Adults are responsible for recognizing and celebrating the Child’s body, its sensing and striving, its expression through the will.  The Child Self needs questions answered: When I was an infant, did my parent’s reaction to my expression of will go unnoticed, create glee, or lead to the misinterpretation of my frustration? Did they think I needed to rest or was in danger of some unknown physical injury? Did they put me on my stomach where I could not possibly see my hand? Did they cover it tightly in a swaddling blanket when I needed to flail it about? Whatever your child is doing with their body, encourage and provide for it. But don’t expect to understand it. Remove obstacles to facility and movement and let them do as they want. Children build confidence and gain a sense of belonging through successfully expressing their wills in their bodies. This is an essential building block to loving the body. 

It is important to pay attention to your Child’s body and to your Child Self’s body.  I’ve seen too many parents striding long halls with their little ones running heartily to stay by their sides. I have seen children pulled along to keep up. In what ways do you disregard the length of your own adult pace and drag yourself or your Child Self along? We do this to our Child Selves because we think we “should” rush. Slow down and give your Child an intermittent lift. For your Child Self, slow down, take a breath, and look around you, give yourself a helping lift. It comes down to loving the glorious body we are granted for this existence and doing everything we can to give the Child and the Child Self a chance to celebrate it. 

The Child Self needs to be reassured that the body is a gift. 

“Little one your body is innocent. You were born that way, your body deserves love. You have to say NO to anything in the world or in your mind that tells you otherwise. And as your body does its job sometimes you have to be patient and compassionate. “

To the Child you are raising, the task of teaching them to love their body is about tending to the Child Self so that you can be conscious of what comes out of your mouth, and then lie to tell the truth so things can change.  

©D'vorah Horn 2025. We invite you to share this work, but please do not copy any portion without attribution to D'vorah Horn.