Are We Naming That Out Loud?

They come in carrying commentary they didn't ask for.

The stranger who said something at the grocery store — casually, like it was a compliment, like their opinion about someone else's body was welcome. The friend who joked, the way people joke when they want to say something cruel and need plausible deniability. The commercial that showed a before photo like it was something to be ashamed of, and promised that being a better parent, a better partner, a more fully realized human being was waiting on the other side of a smaller body.

By the time a client sits across from us, those voices have been living inside them long enough that they no longer sound like they came from somewhere else. They sound like the truth. They sound like their own thoughts.

I just need to get this under control.
I know what I need to do, I just don't do it.
I've always had a complicated relationship with food.

Listen closely enough and you can hear the cultural ventriloquism underneath. These are not original thoughts. These are absorbed ones, collected over a lifetime of unsolicited opinions, ambient advertising, and a culture that has never once stopped telling people that their bodies are problems to be managed.

Part of our work is helping clients hear that distinction.

Externalization isn't just a narrative therapy technique.

It is, of course — and for clinicians trained in narrative approaches, the move to externalize the problem from the person is foundational. The body shame is not who you are. It is something that has been done to you, applied to you, layered onto you by a culture with a vested financial interest in your believing it.

But externalization in this context is also just...accurate.

When a stranger comments on someone's body, that is not feedback. It is an intrusion. When a commercial tells someone their before photo represents failure, that is not health information. It is a sales strategy. When a well-meaning family member says something at the dinner table, that is not love expressed well. That is the culture speaking through someone who absorbed it without examining it.

None of that originated with the client. None of it reflects something true about who they are. And yet it lives in them now, shaping how they move through the world, how they feed themselves, how they look in the mirror, how much mental energy they spend on a body that was never the problem to begin with.

Are we naming that out loud?

The stranger and the commercial are running the same play.

This is the part worth saying clearly — to ourselves and eventually, carefully, to our clients.

The unsolicited comment at the grocery store and the weight loss commercial are not different in kind. They are different in scale. Both are communicating the same message: your body as it is right now is not acceptable, and the people around you have not only noticed but feel entitled to say something about it.

One comes from a stranger with bad boundaries. One comes from a multibillion dollar industry with sophisticated behavioral scientists and unlimited ad spend. But the message lands in the same place — in the body, in the nervous system, in the quiet internal voice that starts to wonder if they're right.

We live in a culture that has normalized the surveillance of other people's bodies so completely that people apologize for receiving the commentary rather than for delivering it. Clients come in apologizing for not being further along, for still struggling, for not having fixed this yet.

Fixed what, exactly? The problem was never theirs.

What this looks like in the room.

This is not about turning every session into a media literacy lecture. It is about developing the clinical ear to hear when a client is speaking in a voice that doesn't belong to them,  and gently, persistently, helping them notice it too.

It sounds like pausing when a client says I just need to get this under control and asking, "Whose voice is that? Where did you first learn that your body needed controlling?"

It sounds like naming, when the moment is right, that the shame they're carrying was handed to them. That it was constructed. That it has authors — and those authors had motives.

It sounds like being the one person in the room who does not, even subtly, even accidentally, participate in the cultural consensus that their body is a problem.

That last one is harder than it sounds. Because we are swimming in the same water. We absorbed the same messages. The work we do with our clients around body commentary is also, quietly, the work we are doing on ourselves.

An invitation.

The next time a client uses language about their body that sounds like it came from somewhere else — because it did — slow down.

Get curious about the origin. Name the intrusion for what it is. Help them hear the difference between their own voice and the one that was handed to them.

Unsolicited opinions about someone's body say everything about the culture that produces them and nothing about the person receiving them.

Our clients need to hear that. Clearly. From someone who means it.

Be that person.

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.