An Act of Rebellion

Camus wrote it plainly:

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

I think about this in the context of body image work constantly. Because the world our clients are navigating is, in this particular way, profoundly unfree. It is a world that has opinions about their bodies before they walk in the door. That has been forming those opinions since they were children. That delivers those opinions now through algorithms and advertisements and well-meaning relatives and medical providers and a culture so saturated with body judgment that most people have stopped noticing it as judgment at all.

It just feels like reality.

And into that world, we are asking our clients to become free.

What freedom actually looks like as a clinical goal.

Not symptom reduction. Not the absence of a bad body image day. Not compliance with intuitive eating principles or a score on a screening tool.

Freedom.

The kind Camus was pointing at—so complete, so embodied, so genuinely inhabited that the mere fact of existing peacefully in your body becomes a quiet act of defiance against everything that told you otherwise. Against the diet industry. Against the algorithm. Against the voice in the fitting room and the comment at the Thanksgiving table and the before photo that was supposed to represent failure.

That is what we are actually working toward with our clients. Not management. Liberation.

And that is a significantly more ambitious clinical goal than we sometimes allow ourselves to name out loud.

The question that follows.

If that is the goal...if we are genuinely trying to help clients reach a place where existing unapologetically in their bodies is its own rebellion, then we have to ask ourselves something uncomfortable.

Are we free enough in our own bodies to lead someone there?

Not perfectly. Not completely. Freedom in a body is not a destination you arrive at and stay.  It is a practice, ongoing, and imperfect...and worth continuing. But are we actively in that practice? Are we doing the work, honestly and consistently, on our own relationship with our own body?

Or are we guiding clients toward a freedom we have not been willing to pursue ourselves?

What we carry into the room.

Most of us absorbed the same cultural conditioning our clients did. The same messages. The same early experiences of being looked at and evaluated and found wanting or acceptable or somewhere in between. The same ambient noise of a culture that has never once stopped having opinions about bodies.

We did not become exempt from that conditioning by getting a graduate degree. We did not metabolize it completely in our own therapy, however good that therapy was. We carry it with us... into our offices, into our clinical perceptions, into the subtle ways we respond or don't respond when a client talks about their body.

And if we haven't examined what we're carrying..if we're moving through our own body conditioning on autopilot while asking clients to examine theirs...that is a problem. Not a character flaw. A clinical problem. One that deserves the same honest attention we bring to any other countertransference.

We cannot lead someone somewhere we haven't been willing to go ourselves.

The rebellion starts here.

I want to name two things that might be useful if you're doing this work, or if you're starting to realize you want to be.

The first is the Living Outside the Diet Trance email series, which I wrote for a general audience but which clinicians have told me lands for them too. It's a short series that gently explores what becomes possible when we stop trying to fix our bodies and start actually living in them.

The second is the Body Integration Manifesto — written specifically for clinicians and helping professionals who recognize that the work we invite our clients to do is work we need to be willing to approach ourselves. With honesty. With curiosity. With compassion for how hard it actually is.

The rebellion doesn't start in the therapy room.

It starts with us.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.