The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

by Sonya Renee Taylor

One of the most impactful, difficult, and underexplored ways we form early messages about our bodies is a result of abuse and trauma. Not only have we grown up in societies that shame difference and judge by the metric of body-based oppression, but many of us grew up navigating personal physical and sexual harm. These memories can shape how we understand touch, pleasure, pain, and whether we experience our bodies as sites of safety or danger. When physical and sexual abuse happen in our childhoods, we are far more likely to personalize the harm, believing we must have done something to cause it. Survivors of abuse may often come to see their bodies as bad or wrong, blaming themselves and their physical form for the violations they endured. This internalization can set survivors on a lifetime path of body shame. In Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s book All about Love, she notes, “Abused children have been taught that love can coexist with abuse. This shapes our adult perceptions of love. As we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us.”