🦋 Can You Have a Trauma Bond With Your Own Body?
For years, I believed my body was something I needed to fix, fight, control, or somehow overcome. It wasn't until I began listening with compassion instead of criticism that everything started to change. If you've ever struggled with your weight, chronic illness, neurodiversity, body image, grief, trauma, heartbreak, aging, or simply feeling at home in your own skin, I hope this personal story reminds you that you are not alone.
This isn't medical advice or a quick fix. It's an honest reflection from someone who has spent a lifetime learning how to rebuild trust with herself—one small step at a time. My hope is that wherever you are on your own journey, you'll discover that healing doesn't begin by becoming someone else. It begins the moment you stop abandoning yourself.
Thank you for spending a little time with me today. I truly hope something here encourages you to be a little gentler with yourself and reminds you that there is always hope.
Learning to trust the one relationship you will have for the rest of your life
Written by Tré Taylor & Bleep the Tattoo
Category: Personal Reflections | Trauma Recovery | Neurodiversity | Body Image | Reinvention | Self-Compassion
🦋
The thought came out of my mouth before I had time to make it respectable:
Can you have a trauma bond with your own body?
I think I did.
To be precise, a trauma bond is a psychological term generally used to describe an intense attachment to someone who repeatedly harms you and then offers intermittent affection, relief, or reassurance. I am not suggesting that your body is an abusive person—or inventing a new diagnosis between breakfast and the Pacific Ocean.
I am using the phrase as a metaphor.
Because for much of my life, my relationship with my body contained the same bewildering ingredients: fear, dependence, mistrust, anger, occasional relief, and the desperate hope that tomorrow it might finally behave.
I needed my body to survive.
I also felt betrayed by it.
🌊 When Your Body Does Not Feel Like Home
I grew up profoundly neurodiverse without having language for it.
I had dyslexia. I struggled to organize words, numbers, time, sensations, and thoughts in ways other people seemed to manage automatically. Decades later, during a formal autism assessment, it became clear that I had many overlapping traits but was more likely dealing with ADHD, trauma, and a nervous system that had spent years operating at full emergency volume.
When you have an unusual brain but no framework for understanding it, you do not necessarily conclude that you process the world differently.
You conclude that you are defective.
My body hurt. My mind raced. My emotions arrived like weather systems. I struggled with eating disorders, chronic shame, and an exhausting search for safety. I was sexually abused as a child, gaslit about my symptoms and repeatedly told versions of, “Nothing is really wrong,” while my entire system was screaming that something was.
Eventually, my body became both my armor and my prison.
At my heaviest, I weighed more than 330 pounds. The weight protected me, punished me, comforted me, and helped keep people away. Food was not merely food. It was regulation, companionship, anesthesia, rebellion, and relief.
That is why telling someone to “just eat less” is about as useful as telling a thunderstorm to lower its voice.
Bleep the Tattoo would like to add, "Have you considered simply becoming an entirely different person before lunch?”
Thank you, Bleep. The medical community will be contacting you shortly.
💛 My Body Was Not the Enemy
For years, I treated my body like an unreliable employee I could not fire.
I starved it, overworked it, ignored it, and criticized it. Then I became furious when it broke down.
But eventually, my body sat me down for what I can only describe as a hostile performance review:
You are not drinking enough water.
You are working yourself to death.
You need medical care.
You need boundaries.
You need affection.
You need reciprocal friendships.
You need somewhere safe to sleep.
It was not trying to sabotage me.
It was trying to keep me alive with whatever tools it had available.
That understanding changed everything.
🌿 The Difference Between Love and Attachment
Love does not require you to abandon yourself.
Love can tolerate the truth. It respects boundaries. It does not need you frightened, diminished, or dependent in order to remain connected.
A trauma bond, by contrast, is strengthened through instability. Pain is followed by relief. Fear is interrupted by affection. The nervous system begins confusing the end of suffering with love.
Something similar had happened inside me.
When my pain briefly subsided, I felt euphoric. When my weight dropped, I praised my body. When it became sick, hungry, exhausted, or visibly imperfect, I rejected it again.
That was not unconditional love.
It was conditional approval with flattering lighting.
Healing required something quieter and far less glamorous: consistency.
🪶 How I Began Rebuilding Trust With My Body
There is no universal ten-step formula for making peace with a body that has survived trauma, illness, disability, eating disorders, or years of shame. This is not medical advice, and healing may require physicians, trauma-informed therapists, dietitians, or other qualified professionals.
These are the promises that helped me.
1. I believed what my body was telling me
Pain is information.
Fatigue is information.
Hunger, tension, numbness, panic, and overstimulation are information.
Not every sensation means catastrophe, but every sensation deserves curiosity before condemnation.
2. I stopped demanding instant forgiveness
I had ignored and punished my body for decades. I could not expect it to trust me because I bought vitamins on Tuesday.
Trust is built through repeated evidence.
3. I pursued appropriate medical care
Mindset mattered, but positive thinking could not replace my knees, repair my teeth, or perform bariatric surgery.
I needed practical intervention.
I eventually underwent major physical transformations, including weight-loss surgery, bilateral knee replacements, dental reconstruction, and other procedures. Those decisions were personal, serious, and sometimes difficult. They also helped remove enough physical pain for me to participate in my own life again.
There is no spiritual prize for refusing legitimate care.
4. I separated health from punishment
Movement did not have to mean penance.
Food did not have to be earned.
Rest was not laziness.
Health became a relationship rather than a sentence handed down by a bathroom scale.
5. I practiced safety before I completely felt it
Sometimes I could not feel safe, so I practiced the shape of safety.
I breathed near the ocean. I walked. I swam. I listened to music. I made jokes. I created rituals. I let animals sit beside me. I imagined my nervous system plugging into the Pacific like a USB port connected to the largest charger on Earth.
Was it a placebo?
Perhaps partly.
Placebos are proof that meaning can affect the body. I decided to use meaning deliberately.
6. I learned boundaries
My body could not feel safe while I continuously allowed unsafe people access to it.
I began noticing which relationships offered reciprocity and which demanded self-abandonment. I learned that compassion does not require unlimited admission to my life.
Some people belong in the front row.
Some belong on the balcony.
Some need to be escorted gently but firmly off the property.
7. I stopped using shame as a motivational coach
Shame is loud, but it is not especially intelligent.
It can force short-term compliance, yet it rarely creates sustainable care. I needed honesty, accountability, and humor—not another internal bully wearing a wellness badge.
Bleep’s second clinical observation: “Your body has reviewed your complaint and would like to know why you have been feeding it coffee and panic since 1978.”
Fair question.
8. I gave grief somewhere to go
Trauma does not disappear because we understand it intellectually.
Grief lives in breath, posture, muscles, sleep, digestion, and the places we instinctively protect. I needed safe ways to experience emotions without allowing them to drive the van.
Therapy helped. So did solitude, swimming, music, writing, comedy, and time in nature.
9. I allowed my body to change
My body is not the body I had at 25.
Thank God. That woman was exhausted and dating poorly.
Aging asks for surrender, but not disappearance. I can accept reality and still enjoy beautiful hair, good skin care, fabulous breasts, painted nails, and whatever flattering little nip, tuck, or miracle cream I decide is right for me.
Self-acceptance does not require pretending that appearance means nothing.
It means appearance is no longer the sole authority on my worth.
10. I kept showing up
My transformation was not one heroic decision.
It was thousands of ordinary acts performed imperfectly: appointments, surgeries, recovery, water, protein, walking, resting, telling the truth, and beginning again.
Consistency slowly taught my body the following:
I am not leaving you.
🚐 The Van That Helped Save My Life
Living in a van during COVID was not an inspirational montage.
It was frightening, lonely, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous. It was also one of the most transformative choices I ever made.
Instead of pouring thousands of dollars each month into rent, I paid off and maintained the van. I used pet- and house-sitting opportunities to recover from procedures in safe homes, often surrounded by elderly animals who also needed medications, naps, and gentle company.
We made a fine little rehabilitation ward.
I still do not have permanent housing, and my nervous system is not irrational for noticing that. Safety is difficult to embody when you do not have a guaranteed safe place to live.
But the van gave me something I had rarely possessed:
Time.
Silence.
Distance from the programming.
A place to hear myself think.
🦋 I Am Still Becoming
I have lost nearly 200 pounds, but this is not simply a weight-loss story.
It is a story about recovering occupancy of my own life.
My transformations page will eventually tell the deeper stories: bariatric surgery, knee replacements, dental reconstruction, mental-health treatment, eating disorders, recovery, aging, beauty, and the strange practical ingenuity required to rebuild a life while living on wheels.
I will tell you what helped me, what hurt, what surprised me, and what I would do differently.
I am not a physician or psychotherapist. I am not promising to cure anyone. I am a woman who applied these lessons to herself, survived the experiment, and kept the receipts.
What I offer is honest conversation, lived experience, practical workarounds, and hope with a little leopard print around the edges.
The real love story was not that someone finally rescued me.
The real love story was that I stopped abandoning myself.
My body and I are no longer locked in combat. We are learning to collaborate. Some days we create music, recipes, and beautiful things. Some days we negotiate over fiber and bedtime.
But we are finally on the same side.
And after everything we have survived together, that feels remarkably close to home.
🌿 Three Questions to Sit With
When your body asks for attention, do you respond with curiosity—or criticism?
What promise could you make to your body that is small enough to keep consistently?
Whose voice do you hear when you judge your appearance, needs, or limitations—and does that voice still deserve authority in your life?
