We live in a world with a long history of pathologizing women’s bodies.
Our culture offers endless messages about what it means to be healthy, and, more importantly, about what our symptoms might mean. In many ways, these messages are useful. They help us understand ourselves and develop more agency over how we feel. We can learn how our hormones work, understand why certain foods leave us feeling better or worse, identify deficiencies, recognize patterns in our cycles, and seek support when something in our bodies isn’t working as it should, especially when it isn’t getting better.
But at what point do all these health messages become an obstacle to our well-being, encouraging us to fixate on symptoms long after we’ve understood how they make us feel?
And at what point does paying close attention to our bodies turn into constantly monitoring them for evidence that something is wrong? Over my years as a women’s nutrition consultant and health coach, these questions have become central to how I approach health, both with clients and with myself. They’ve become even more important as I’ve trained to work with complex trauma, learned how closely agency and healing are connected, and come to understand the helplessness many of us fall into when symptoms don’t go away as quickly as we’d like.
Obviously, most of us want to live in healthy bodies that work well: bodies that don’t react to harmless triggers, shut down under small amounts of stress, or disrupt our lives every day without clear explanations.
The desire to resolve our symptoms is completely valid, and I’d argue that seeking answers and taking action to feel better are important expressions of agency. But there’s a trap we can fall into when we struggle with our health for a long time, don’t get clear answers, and try many things without the improvement we’re hoping for. Over time, we can slip into helplessness and hypervigilance, where every little symptom becomes something to excavate, examine under a microscope, assign meaning to, and somehow try to control.
If this goes on long enough, we can lose trust in our bodies’ ability to repair, adapt, and keep us safe.
That loss of trust doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t always obvious while it’s happening. It can show up in how much time we spend gathering more data, getting more labs, seeing more practitioners, trying new supplements, consuming more books and podcasts, and changing our diets again, essentially turning fixing our bodies into a full-time job. It’s important to say that we can have genuinely complex health issues, with real physical disruptions driving this behavior, and the behavior itself can still pull us further out of trust with our bodies over time.
These things aren’t mutually exclusive, and recognizing the second doesn’t require dismissing the first.
After years of coaching women through their healing, many of whom had struggled with their health for years, I’ve come to understand healing as something larger than the absence of symptoms. It also includes the safety, trust, and agency we can access toward our bodies, no matter what they’re doing on a given day. Part of what shapes our experience of our health is simply how we feel about how we feel.
This isn’t a call to bypass real pain or put a positive spin on something disruptive and stressful. It’s a call to notice the patterns that exist beneath and around our symptoms, because those patterns shape how we experience our bodies and how we respond to them.
I believe we can have a different experience of our bodies and our health, whatever is happening with them right now. We can reclaim the trust and peace many of us once had: the trust that we can care for ourselves, that we’re safe in our bodies, and that we can even enjoy being in them! Here are three places to begin rebuilding that self-trust.
Strategy #1: Pay Attention to Your Relationship With Your Health
The first strategy is becoming aware of your relationship to your health, which is different from becoming more aware of your health itself.
Many of us who’ve struggled with symptoms for years are already intensely aware of what’s happening in our bodies. We know what we ate yesterday, which supplements we’re taking, where we are in our cycles, how our digestion has been, how we slept, which symptoms are better or worse, and which variables might have contributed. What we may notice less is what happens around all that information.
What do we tell ourselves about our bodies when symptoms arise? What meaning do we immediately assign? What do we do next? How do we talk to others about our bodies, hormones, immune systems, and diets? And how much of our internal attention goes to our health on any given day?
For example, we might notice indigestion after a meal and immediately start mentally reviewing everything we ate, wondering whether we’ve developed another food intolerance, or whether something that had been improving is getting worse again. We might have a difficult cycle and start questioning whether our hormones are getting further out of balance, or whether the progress we thought we’d made all month was fake because of this month’s period pain.
We might break out after months of clearer skin and feel we’ve done something wrong, just when we’d found some relief from a long-standing insecurity.
The symptoms themselves may be uncomfortable and worth understanding. But there’s also a whole internal response happening around them, and over time, that response can make the experience much bigger and more threatening to our nervous system. This is where it helps to start observing our immediate reactions, without necessarily trying to change them right away.
Do we contract and shut down when something feels wrong? Do we dissociate, use a substance to escape the feeling, or disappear into media? Do we impulsively search for more information or reach for something that gives us a sense of control? Do we immediately change our diet, add a supplement, cancel plans, or ask others to help us figure out what’s going on?
This might sound dramatic, but I’ve witnessed every one of these responses countless times in clients, and they consumed most of my twenties.
When we don’t feel safe in our bodies, when we have little trust in our bodies’ ability to be well, or in our own role in that, we can develop all kinds of unconscious and semi-conscious reactions that only amplify and exacerbate how we feel. In my twenties, I’d stay up late “researching” my symptoms (this was before social media as we know it, so it was mostly Google) and writing desperate, inappropriately long emails to practitioners I thought might save me.
And while I did have a lot of imbalances, I wasn’t in chronic pain or so ill that I feared I was dying. I was in distress because I had symptoms that wouldn’t go away.
I went from naturopath to naturopath. If I didn’t feel better the way I thought I should, in the time frame I thought I should, I’d give up and move on to someone new who offered fresh hope. I also talked about my health with everyone in my life. Years later, I’d run into people who knew me back then (friends of housemates, friends of boyfriends, classmates), and they’d often remember me by the strange diet I was on, the green juice I always carried, or some other health signal that had essentially become my personal brand.
But all that focus, energy, and money didn’t actually make me feel healthier.
In fact, it left me feeling broken and distrustful of my body, because working overtime to be healthy while still not feeling healthy can lead to disappointment, despair, and a sense of inadequacy. I did have real issues with my metabolic health. But I was also missing a foundation of safety, peace, and trust in my body that would have made that level of focus more manageable. Instead, I often felt helpless over how I felt.
That helplessness, the opposite of agency, showed up as impulsive attempts to feel better on the spot, like doing enemas, buying random expensive supplements, and cutting out more and more foods. And when the stress of feeling at odds with my body became unbearable, I’d escape through alcohol or cannabis.
I see these patterns in women all the time.
One of the biggest ways they show up is in the sheer volume of health information my clients seek, whether through chasing perfect labs or consuming endless social media posts, podcasts, and books. Often, that information is meant to protect them from how they feel. It took me years to look back and see how stressed I was, and how trapped I felt in the way I related to how I felt.
We can also get curious about how we talk about our health with others.
Are we regularly enrolling other people in our diagnoses, reinforcing our limitations every time we describe what our bodies can and can’t handle? Have our symptoms become one of the main lenses through which we understand ourselves and our lives? This isn’t about policing how we talk or pretending we aren’t struggling. It’s about noticing the stories and identities that gradually form around long-term health problems.
Just as people from my twenties remembered me through my health issues and dietary quirks, becoming aware of our own unconscious health “branding” can help us create different, more empowered identities that aren’t centered on our limitations.
The only way to notice it is if someone points it out to us, as happened to me, or if we start paying closer attention to how we present ourselves to the world when it comes to our health.
Finally, we can notice how much time our symptoms get each day, especially how much internal attention. This one is trickier, because it happens beneath the surface, often automatically. This is where we can develop a heightened threat response to our own internal signals. For example, we notice our heart beating faster, and the brain reads it as a threat. We feel some indigestion after eating, and the brain reads that as a threat too. If this goes on long enough, we can start having outsized threat responses to any internal sensation that feels unpleasant, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable.
Behaviorally, this can look like hyper-fixation or compulsive checking: giving an unusual amount of attention to bodily sensations, nutrition, or symptoms.
There’s a difference between spending twenty minutes preparing a meal that supports our health and spending four hours mentally reviewing why we reacted to yesterday’s meal. Most people occasionally have an unexpected reaction to something they ate. But if it happens often enough, we can develop a stress pattern around eating that fires automatically, without any conscious thought.
There’s also a difference between booking a needed appointment to go over our lab results and repeatedly searching the internet for explanations because one practitioner’s protocol isn’t enough to quiet our anxiety about the results.
To use myself as an example again: I jumped between practitioners so often that a functional medicine doctor finally called me on it during an appointment, clearly exasperated. I’d abandoned the protocol he put me on and seen another practitioner who recommended something different, so when I came back to him, I was doing something completely different from what we’d agreed on.
He said something like, “You cannot go from witch doctor to witch doctor, applying different and often contradictory methods, and then be surprised when none of them work, or when you’re stressed and can’t track your results.” He was completely right, of course.
He was also the practitioner who explained that I wasn’t getting my period because my body fat was too low, and who insisted I start eating animal foods again after veganism had worn down my health.
He had a huge impact on me in my twenties. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only practitioner who struggled to help me while my capacity to follow through on any one protocol, and trust any one process, was so low. The main reason my capacity was so low was that I had so little trust in my own body’s ability to repair itself and function well. Every little symptom was a stressor to my brain and a reason to work harder. I didn’t know how to relax in the body I had, so I kept working overtime to change it, bypassing relaxation altogether.
But as we get better at recognizing these patterns in ourselves, as I gradually did, we gain opportunities to make different choices.
We might still investigate a symptom, but decide we’ve gathered enough information for today. We might acknowledge that this month’s period is particularly hard without immediately taking it as evidence that our body is failing, or that what we’ve been doing isn’t working. We might notice the urge to control something we can’t immediately control, and practice staying present with the discomfort instead, knowing we’re still okay.
This is an area I spend a lot of time on in my coaching containers, because deeply established patterns are hard to see from the inside, especially when we’ve lived with them for a long time.
We can look at what happens around symptoms in real time and identify the thoughts, protective responses, urges to control, and nervous system patterns running automatically around them. Not only is this possible, it can change our entire experience of the symptoms themselves.
To do this, I combine somatic work with cognitive practices to help women develop more options for how they respond to how they feel. We work with the feelings that arise in the body when we focus on our symptoms. Using somatic IFS work, we get to know the parts that have formed in response to carrying such a heavy load, often alone. We process suppressed emotions like guilt, shame, and grief using AEDP principles. And we address cognitive distortions head-on, using techniques like Socratic questioning.
The bottom line is that we often don’t realize what kind of world we’ve built around our health until we slow down, pay attention, and start disrupting the patterns we’ve created.
When we do, we can create a new one, where symptoms are experienced differently and mean different things about us, our bodies, our potential, and life itself. That can change how we live our whole lives. The goal isn’t to become less attentive to our bodies. It’s to become more discerning about the kind of attention we give them, and to trust ourselves enough that every uncomfortable sensation doesn’t have to become an emergency. I write more about finding the right balance in my article on tracking, if you want to check it out here.
Strategy #2: Integrate a Pleasure Practice Into Your Daily Life
The idea of a pleasure practice doesn’t always land well at first, for a few reasons.
One is that the word “pleasure” itself can make women uncomfortable, and we often stop at sexual pleasure without considering what else it includes. Another is that many of us have what I think of as a pleasure cap: our capacity to experience pleasure and stay present with it shrinks when stress, vigilance, and contraction are our more familiar states.
If we have a history of developmental or complex trauma, or long-term chronic stress, slowing down and feeling good for its own sake can actually feel confronting.
Many of us are far more practiced at analyzing, fixing, anticipating, controlling, and pushing forward than at simply letting something feel good without needing to make it productive. Without an excuse for why we deserve it, pleasure can feel indulgent, even wrong. That’s also why pleasure isn’t usually what comes to mind when we think about improving our health. We might hire a nutritionist or health coach to analyze our data, dial in our nutrition, address symptoms, or improve our metabolic health. Intentionally making room for pleasure can seem secondary to the “real” work.
But pleasure does more than temporarily make us feel good, especially when it comes from experiences that already support our well-being.
Stress and trauma tend to contract our experience, physically and emotionally. When pain, stress, vigilance, or fear become where we spend most of our time, our attention naturally narrows toward what’s wrong, what might go wrong, and how to prevent it, and our sense of what’s possible in life and in our bodies narrows along with it.
Pleasure gives us a different experience of reality to practice and integrate.
When we regularly expose ourselves to small moments of delight, awe, connection, beauty, warmth, and enjoyment, we remind ourselves that our bodies aren’t only places where discomfort and symptoms happen. Our bodies are also where we experience sunshine, delicious food, beautiful music, warm water, physical affection, mind-altering orgasms, belly laughter, the awe of nature, deep rest, human connection, and all the sensory experiences that make being alive in a body so enjoyable.
A pleasure practice doesn’t need to be elaborate. Ideally, it’s something we weave through our days in small doses — microdosing chemical and experiential moments that remind our brains that its good to be alive — that life is good, that we are good.
It might mean lying in the grass or on the beach and really noticing the sun’s warmth on your skin. It might mean eating or drinking something delicious slowly enough to enjoy every bit, instead of consuming it while distracted. You might listen to music that settles you and pulls your attention out of your thoughts, feel a breeze on your skin, have an orgasm, take a hot shower, massage scented oil into your skin, light candles at dinner, cuddle with a partner or child, or stop to take in a sweeping view of nature.
What matters isn’t which experience you choose, it’s whether you let yourself actually be present for it.
Instead of checking “pleasure” off another health list, slow down long enough to notice what feels good, and let yourself stay with it. That’s why I think of pleasure as a practice. When stress is familiar, feeling good takes practice too. It may be unfamiliar, and it may stir up old feelings about what we deserve. You might notice that slowing down makes you restless, that enjoyment brings up guilt, or that you can tolerate pleasure for about thirty seconds before your mind starts hunting for something productive to do or something wrong to think about.
These reactions are useful information about your current capacity for pleasure, not evidence that you’re doing it wrong.
This is where somatic work can be especially helpful in coaching sessions. Instead of turning pleasure into another assignment to perform perfectly, we can get curious about what happens in the body when we slow down, receive something good, or loosen our grip on control. Gradually, we build the capacity to stay with these experiences instead of immediately leaving them. If we’re already dedicating significant time and energy to our health, I think there’s tremendous value in giving pleasure an intentional place alongside the supplements, nourishing food, exercise, sleep, and medical care.
We don’t have to earn the right to enjoy our bodies by getting rid of every symptom first. We’d never expect that of someone we love, especially a small child. So I believe we can offer ourselves the same access to feeling good that children naturally reach for, regardless of what any measurement says we deserve.
Strategy #3: Create a Life Worth Healing & Showing Up For
The third strategy is something I call “creating a life worth healing for.” It asks us to zoom out from our bodies altogether and look at the larger life our health exists within.
When health becomes one of the central projects of our lives, everything else can become secondary, or some important parts can be ignored entirely. We might be quietly telling ourselves that once our digestion improves, our hormones balance, our energy returns, our skin clears, or we finally feel like ourselves again, we’ll have the capacity to focus on the rest of our lives.
Sometimes that’s partly true, since better health can absolutely free up energy for other things.
But if we aren’t careful, life can become something we’re waiting to participate in until our bodies finally cooperate. Creating a life worth healing for means paying attention to everything that isn’t technically health, but feeds our experience of health in countless ways. That includes our finances and whether we feel secure, our relationships and whether we feel connected or chronically lonely, the quality of our marriages and friendships, our spiritual lives and communities, our work, our homes, our sense of purpose, and whether our days feel meaningful and enjoyable.
None of us has a perfect life, whatever someone’s Instagram highlight reel might suggest!
But if entire areas of our lives are leaving our needs unmet, where we’re leaking energy, stressed out, and avoiding, that won’t go away because we raised our stomach acid or improved our lab numbers. In fact, sometimes building financial security lowers our symptoms altogether. Or we improve the quality of our relationships and find we care much less about those pesky symptoms in the first place. Both of those examples come from my own life, by the way.
So this can be a prompt to take inventory of the areas of life that matter most to us.
We can ask whether we have close relationships where we feel supported and seen, or whether we’ve become increasingly isolated and lonely. (I write more about why that matters so much for women’s health in my article on loneliness and oxytocin.) We can look at whether our finances give us a basic sense of security or keep us in constant stress. We can consider whether we have a spiritual framework or community that helps us navigate grief, uncertainty, mortality, aging, and the parts of life we can’t control or distract ourselves from.
We can look at whether we like where we live, whether we have enough say over how we spend our days, whether our work matters to us and lets us stay connected to our body’s signals, and whether we have goals that have nothing to do with getting healthier and everything to do with our intellectual, spiritual, and emotional well-being.
The relationship certainly goes both ways. Sometimes improving our health is exactly what gives us the capacity to leave a difficult relationship, change careers, become more social, travel somewhere meaningful, or pursue something that matters to us. But it’s important to remember that our health exists in service of a larger life. It isn’t meant to become the entire purpose of that life.
This is also why clear values, meaningful goals, relational support, and spiritual depth matter so much when our health is hard, because they give us places to direct our attention, and sources of meaning that don’t depend on how our bodies happen to feel or look that day.
These things remind us that we can have a hard cycle, digestive symptoms, low energy, or a frustrating flare and still take part in something meaningful, connect with someone we love, make progress toward a goal, or experience something beautiful. We still belong here and have something to offer, even when we feel like crap! That can be such an important lesson for those of us with sensitive systems.
I explore this broader context with women in my coaching, too, because our health behaviors don’t happen in isolation from the rest of our lives. Sometimes nutrition needs more of our attention; sometimes our nervous system does.
Sometimes we need to look at our relationships, boundaries, habits, work, or the amount of meaning and enjoyment in our days to understand why we’re feeling bad. Personalized coaching gives us room to look at the whole picture and decide what actually needs attention, instead of assuming the next answer will come from another health protocol. That doesn’t mean I’m the right person to help a client navigate a difficult relationship or get her finances in order. It means we can look honestly at the areas of her life that are seeping into how she feels, and account for them as much as possible while we focus on what she hired me for.
Creating a life worth healing for doesn’t mean waiting until we’re healthier to start building that life. It means letting the building become part of how we heal, and, perhaps more importantly, part of how we stay connected to ourselves when our health isn’t where we want it to be. Think of it as an insurance policy.
“Are We Just Supposed to Think Positively and Distract Ourselves?”
At this point, you might be wondering whether I’m simply telling you to think positively, or to distract yourself from your health after spending years learning to listen to your body!
On one basic level, yes: sometimes it’s healthy to redirect our attention toward something positive or outside ourselves. But there’s much more to it than that. I’m definitely not recommending ignoring your health, avoiding reality, or no longer investigating symptoms that genuinely need attention. Nor am I saying we should accept our health exactly as it is and trust our bodies to take care of themselves once we change our mindset.
In fact, that’s part of what I criticize about German New Medicine, which holds that if we can locate where a symptom began emotionally, we can resolve it, potentially without doing anything else! I see similar ideas in some New Age and manifestation circles, and I dislike them just as much, because they go beyond respecting the power of the subconscious mind and often lead women to believe they have unlimited control over how they feel. That simply isn’t true.
Feeling better and resolving symptoms are completely sane, valid goals, and they’re the main reasons women hire someone like me. We should have agency in seeking answers and making changes that support our physiology when something isn’t working.
AND I believe we have limited control in this life, and that we suffer a lot less once we accept it. Symptom resolution is only one part of healing. If the only way we know how to feel safe in our bodies is for our bodies to stop producing symptoms, we could spend the rest of our lives chasing every symptom that arises. Human bodies get sick, depleted, stressed, injured, hormonally disrupted, and affected by circumstances we can’t always control. Even when we take excellent care of ourselves, there will be times when our bodies don’t feel or function the way we’d like.
The larger goal of this work is to increase our agency over how we feel about how we feel, because we don’t always have immediate control over the symptoms themselves, at least not on the timeline we’d prefer.
We can keep working toward resolving symptoms while learning not to be completely taken down by every one we experience along the way. Imagine having a breakout, indigestion, a low mood, or a difficult cycle, and still being fundamentally okay with yourself at the same time!
We can acknowledge that we don’t like what’s happening, investigate why it might be there, and work on the root causes, without automatically turning the symptom into a larger statement about our safety, our worth, or whether our bodies have failed us. We can simply have some symptoms and keep our intimate, loyal relationship with ourselves and our bodies anyway.
Rebuilding Trust in Our Imperfect Bodies
Reclaiming trust and safety in our bodies starts with recognizing that how we feel about how we feel can matter just as much to our experience of health as the symptoms themselves.
We can pay attention to our relationship with our health and the patterns that happen around our symptoms, rather than only gathering more information about the symptoms. We can make intentional room for pleasure, giving our bodies regular experiences of goodness, enjoyment, connection, sensuality, and expansion alongside everything we’re already doing to support our physiology.
And we can keep creating lives worth healing for, with relationships, values, purpose, spiritual depth, security, and experiences that remind us there’s so much more to our lives than how our bodies feel or look on any given day.
When these practices become as regular as eating well, exercising, and sleeping, our experience of our bodies can begin to shift. It’s entirely possible to feel less helpless in the presence of symptoms and more in charge of how we respond to them, while still taking our health seriously and working toward greater resilience and robust metabolic health. I know this because I’ve lived it! The goal isn’t to finally earn the right to trust our bodies once they’re symptom-free. It’s to build enough trust in ourselves that we know we can care for, listen to, and respond to our bodies even when they’re imperfect, because they’ll always be imperfect in some way.
So will we, and that’s part of what makes us beautiful.
If This Work Speaks to You
If this article spoke to you, I’d love to hear what resonated, and why.
I’ve found that low body trust and stress about how we feel can take up an enormous amount of a woman’s energy as she works toward her health goals, and addressing these pieces has moved mountains in my own healing and in the healing of so many of my clients.
Noticing deeply set patterns, slowing down, getting familiar with your nervous system, and making difficult habits stick without regular accountability can be a lot to navigate on your own. My coaching is personalized to each woman and combines somatic work with cognitive practices, so we can work with the whole system while building trust and agency over time through consistent action.
If having support through these patterns sounds like a helpful next step, you can explore my coaching containers on my website, or book a free chat with me to ask what coaching with me is like.
We can still work toward resolving symptoms and building a healthier, more resilient body, while doing it from a place that keeps you connected to yourself and your full worth along the way.
