**warning: content describing trauma and could possibly trigger your own feelings or memories. If it does, please make sure you reach out or have someone to talk to. There are also sexual references and curse words, so if any of this offends you, this isn't the article for you.**
This is deviating a little from the Twinflame articles that I do, but is still connected. Indirectly. The work we do to heal our trauma has an incredibly beautiful affect on our connection.
This is hard to share but the more I remember, the angrier I feel, and it’s allowing me the courage to speak about my experiences. These have more to do with why I struggled with weight gain as an adult and centers around social and friend experiences. I will do another one on family interactions and experiences, I felt it was too much for one sitting.
I hope this helps someone make the connections they need to have a better relationship with their body.
To understand how we learned to interact and see our bodies is such a game changer. To know that we weren’t born hating it or always wanting to change it or feeling insecure about it.
I went offline shortly before my birthday. I, like many people have struggled with body image most of my life and it was at a breaking point because I was ready to release it. I truly believe we become more sensitive than and the clarity that comes as you release is mind blowing. I was deeply triggered by what I was experiencing and feeling. The amount of attention we give the human body, specifically other people’s bodies, is unbalanced. So many of us have been conditioned by society to believe that the desirability of our physical form equates the value we have as a human being.
At this moment it actually makes me sick to think about the way we are sold on the perfect body and how it means ultimate health and happiness. That anything less than that and you're a failure. You failed yourself, your life, your family, your partner, the list goes on. I want to share a little bit about my story and maybe some of you can relate period to understand how our experiences shape our lives, and literally our physical body.
When I was a child I was a picky eater, I was very active and had no weight issues. I know what it meant to be fat though. How I knew, I don't recall but I remember at a young age bragging about how skinny I was. Like a kid of seven or eight even knows what that means. When I started developing at around 12, that's when I became conscious to the conditioning. Meaning I remember these moments. But I'm sure they happened before, I'm sure I was being conditioned before those things that I remember.
For example, before my parents or family members would make comments about their bodies, and now they were making comments about mine. So, condition wise, I was already being conditioned to how we're supposed to treat our bodies based on how the people around me were treating theirs. We aren't born self conscious. I loved my body when I was a kid, I wore my bikini all day everyday. But when I began to notice others noticing me, I became self conscious.
Now this isn't about blaming, the people in this narrative we're conditioned too and perpetuated the conditioning without understanding that they were or the effect it has or had. Unconscious, if you will. This is, however, about understanding the impact it had on me so that I can be more conscious and awake. And have the ability to break the cycle with myself and my inner dialogue, as well as with others and maybe even my children.
I don't remember too many specifics but the moments I do remember help me identify what warped my truth about my body.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I experienced some form of sexual abuse but I can't tell you anymore than that. I have blocked it out like much in my childhood. I truly don't remember. It's important though because sexual abuse to a child creates body dysmorphia. And as a child with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex, like all children, I absorbed my experiences and the projection of others as my truth.
I do remember being 8 years old at the local park and some older boys wanting to play a game called let's go fuck in the Bush and I it didn't traumatize me at the moment but later in hindsight understanding what that meant it did. I was saved but there was just something around that time period for me where I learned very different things about my body or feeling the perverse energy that people were projecting on to me about my body.
I remember at 10 years old a classmate, my boyfriend at the time whatever that means for a 10 year old, writing the words sex in hickory sticks in the snow and that confused me a lot about relationships and expectations. Note we did not have sex but experiences like this shape the mind.
I remember being made fun of for wearing lip gloss in grade five that made me feel shame for how I looked when I was trying to creatively express myself.
I remember looking older than my age in grade 6 and thinking it made me prettier and more attractive.
I remember wearing my bikini in grade 7 and feeling insecure as people looked at my belly and made comments about it. Which was nothing to be ashamed of at the time as I look back but in the moment I felt gross.
I remember being kissed for the first time and dumped right after . Which made me feel like there was something wrong with me and my lips.
I remember riding on the handle bars on a bike while someone else pedaled and a boy riding beside us kept trying to touch my bum and how helpless and uncomfortable it made me feel.
I remember being at a pool party in grade 8 and diving into the pool only to come up with one of my breasts exposed. As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, I over heard my friends talking about me and laughing behind my back. Which I'm not sure I have to explain how that compound did things for me and how I felt about myself physically.
I remember the unwanted attention I received from older boys in high school who thought it was OK to try and touch my breasts, or corner me at my locker or make sexual advances.
I remember the girls at school hating me and bullying me about it, like it was my fault.
I remember telling in 19 year old that I was 16 when I was 14. And on our first date he actually whipped out his dick, like it was normal. I told him that I was out and he needed to take me home. He did. My mom found out and made me break up with him over the phone which was super embarrassing but I understand. He still pursued me after that and we will get to why that's important in a little bit. But it made me realize that at 14 I was conditioned to believe that I should lie about my age and be older in order to be prettier or attractive.
I remember all the times someone referenced or commented about my boobs or the size of them.
I remember hating them so much I had a breast reduction done at 19 years old.
I remember people calling my home pretending to do surveys and asking about my body, the colour of my nipples, etc. I was 14.
I remember boys trying to lean into me to try and touch my breasts on the bus.
I remember being on a date with a guy who told everybody that I tried to stick his hand down my pants so he could finger me in the Theatre, Ann I just felt so unbelievably even though I was on my period at the time period I actually had to tell people I was on that and so they wouldn't believe these lies about me.
And that's just the interactions from fears from peers at school. I haven't gotten into the family interactions yet I think that will be a Part 2. I just wanted to show just how deep that conditioning can go and maybe why it can be so hard to reconcile.
So what happened? I mean outside of getting a breast reduction done, which I was both supported and made to feel shame about.
I gained weight. I covered myself in a protective barrier that not only made me think I was undesirable but perpetuated the feelings I had toward my body. The irony, is that I thought if I was undesirable then I wouldn't be mistreated, but I was mistreated in a different way. Judged for my weight gain and how it would affect me finding someone to have kids with. Because people don't understand that other people’s bodies are off limits, under all circumstances.
I get more into this in the family interactions part, but this is sort of what I'm referencing when I talk about commenting on other peoples bodies. I saw a friend on Instagram recently that looks like she lost weight, and I wanted to comment and say wow you look really great. And then I had a moment of reflection and realizing that I was perpetuating that kind of behavior. I had to ask myself did I tell her she looked beautiful before, I probably did because that's the kind of person I am but why do we constantly have to comment on body parts or physical bodies of other people? It's conditioning and it doesn't really serve. It creates trauma and a trauma response from the individual being commented about or to.
Back to the point about being pursued. It is of my experience that whenever I have said no before, or that I'm not interested or I want to be left alone. It was not honored. I have noticed that things that happened to us in our childhood years and adolescent years tend to pattern into adult hood. I had an experience within the last three weeks where I had someone actually send me sex tapes of them and their partner, uninvited. And when I explicitly said I am not interested, and that I would not judge them but it is not OK or appropriate and do not send me those or talk to me about it. They continued on for days on end. Until I blocked them. I have had people tell me that my voice is the barrier not my body, the trouble with that is when you've been subconsciously conditioned through experience is that your voice has no meaning or no rights you do what you do to survive. So, I gained weight.
All of those experiences that I absorbed as the truth in my reality, however, was living in my subconscious and I couldn't figure out why I would constantly sabotage my weight loss.
I know now that it had a lot to do with the fear of reliving all of that trauma if I lost weight . As in if I lose weight I'm going to be sexually attractive again, women are going to hate me and men are going to disrespect me and continually force themselves on me energetically. Or otherwise.
I also recognized that I was divinely guided to keep the weight on so that I could learn to love and appreciate my body in all of its glory, as is.
The last couple weeks following my birthday have been a complete teardown of that conditioning narrative. It's something I'm still working on an know that every day I am honoring the part of me that was harmed and loving her even harder. I'm looking in the mirror and instead of seeing someone fat and gross. Which the two words are not synonymous. Because fat is not gross, we have been conditioned to believe that it is. I'm seeing however a loving human beings staring back at me versus someone who needs to fix something about herself in order to be acceptable or receptive of love.
I hope that this will help somebody, that maybe has had a parallel experience or have experienced things like this and it will help them understand or you understand how the relationship with your body began and how it was twisted from absolute love to conditional love and acceptance.
Be Your Peace
Love yourself
Share Your Light
Lots of love
xo
Candi