Most people come to their first massage with an invisible inventory. What am I comfortable with? Where are the limits? What does it mean if someone touches me there? What will they think? What might happen? How do I make sure I stay safe? That inventory isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do based on a lifetime of data about what touch has meant and who it has served. For a lot of women, the consistent touch t

Before we begin: I can only speak from inside my own experience. I grew up a white woman in the Pacific Northwest, raised in a household that was patriarchal, Christian, and often chaotic. That’s my water. Yours may be different. But if you’ve ever felt like taking time for yourself was something you had to earn, justify, or apologize for — I suspect some of this will land anyway. There’s a question that runs underneath a lot of women’s relationship with self-care. It doesn’t

There’s a request I get more than almost any other. I need really deep work. Like, really deep. I want it to hurt. I understand where it comes from. I really do. We live in a culture that equates suffering with effort, intensity with effectiveness, and ease with laziness. No pain no gain is practically a civic virtue at this point — imported from military culture, reinforced by fitness culture, baked into a Protestant work ethic that has been telling us for centuries that if

In elementary school we showered after PE and Mrs. Fast supervised to make sure we actually got clean. In junior high and high school, post-gym showers were just part of the day. Pool locker rooms, communal changing areas, women of all ages and all bodies moving through various states of undress like it was completely unremarkable. Because it was. Then I joined the Army. Communal showers. Communal bathrooms. At one point, outhouses that were just a wooden board with multiple

There’s a thing people say about therapists — that most of them are just damaged children trying to understand themselves and the people who made them that way. They mean it as a critique. I’m not sure it is one. The helping professions attract people who needed help. Who grew up in households that required them to read rooms, manage emotions, anticipate needs — who got very good, very early, at understanding what was happening inside other people because their survival depen

There’s a reason you can’t smell your own perfume. You’re in it. You’ve been in it so long your nervous system stopped registering it as information. It’s not gone — everyone around you knows it’s there — but you’ve lost access to it as something separate from yourself. Which just how immersion works. My relationship with my body is like that. So deep, so long-held, so woven into the baseline of how I experience being alive that it stopped feeling like a belief a long time ag

I have been petite, plus-sized, and all the things in between, and no matter where in the size spectrum my body was, I looked down and saw the same thing. Soft, round tummy. Thighs that spread when I sit. A body that needed to be smaller, tighter, more contained. The number on the tag changed. The story didn’t. I was an active kid — well-muscled in the way girls who climb things and run hard get muscled. Soft in the places girls are supposed to be soft. But I couldn’t see any