When the Body Carries the Story
From Dissertation to Essay
We do not merely have a body.
We are body.
This may seem like a simple difference in language, but it contains two very different ways of understanding the human being. When we say that we have a body, the body may appear as something we own and use: an instrument that carries us through the world. When we say that we are body, it becomes clearer that the body is the very way in which we are present.
It is through the body that we see.
Hear.
Touch.
Are touched.
Approach others.
And withdraw.
The body is not merely an object in the world. It is the place where the world is experienced.
A bodily violation therefore never affects only the body.
It affects the human being’s way of being.
The Body as Lived Experience
In my doctoral dissertation, I used the expression the body as subjective experience. Behind this academic language lay a simple but important insight: the body cannot be fully understood from the outside.
The doctor may examine it.
The physiologist may describe its functions.
Other people may see its shape, movements, and visible wounds.
But only the person themselves can experience what it is like to live in this particular body.
Two people may have bodies that appear fairly similar from the outside, yet experience them in entirely different ways. One may feel the body as safe and self-evident. The other may experience it as alien, restless, or dangerous.
The body is therefore more than what can be seen.
It is also the body that is felt from within.
In the interviews, several participants described how the relationship between body and self had been disturbed through sexual abuse. Some said that during the violations they experienced leaving the body or observing themselves from the outside. In the dissertation, I chose to meet these accounts as descriptions of the subjectively experienced body, rather than primarily as symptoms that had to be placed within a diagnostic category.
This was not a claim that body and consciousness could literally be separated. It was an acknowledgement of how an unbearable experience might be felt:
I could not remain in my body while this was happening.
When the Body Becomes Alien
We usually move through everyday life without thinking very much about the body. We rise, walk, eat, work, and meet other people. The body is close, yet it is not constantly the object of our attention.
Illness, pain, or violation may change this.
The body comes to the foreground.
What was previously a silent companion becomes something the person must relate to. It may feel heavy, threatening, or alien.
After sexual violations, the body may be experienced as the place where the unwanted still exists. Not because the event is literally preserved unchanged in the tissue, but because bodily situations may awaken the experience again.
A touch.
A smell.
A dark room.
A particular movement.
Nakedness.
Sexual intimacy.
What is an ordinary situation for another person may be experienced as danger by the violated body.
The body does not then necessarily respond only to what is happening now. It also responds in the light of what happened before.
We may therefore say that the body carries the story.
Not like a book in which everything has already been written, but as a lived sensitivity. The past may be felt in the way the body tenses, withdraws, or attempts to protect itself.
The Feeling of Being Unclean
One of the strongest themes in the chapter on the body was the feeling of being dirty or unclean.
These were not descriptions of actual uncleanliness. They were the language of shame.
What another person had done to the body was experienced as a quality of the body itself. The violation was no longer merely something that had happened. It became something the body seemed to have become.
I was not only subjected to something unclean.
I am unclean.
Here shame repeats the movement we have already encountered in this series: it transforms an experience into an identity.
It was the adult who performed the act.
Yet it was the child who came to experience their own body as dirty.
The moral impurity that belonged to the perpetrator’s act was transferred to the body that had been violated.
This is a profoundly unjust displacement.
The body is made responsible for what it was subjected to.
A Body Others Can See
Shame does not only make the body difficult to feel from within.
It also makes it difficult to show.
Nakedness usually means more than the absence of clothing. To be naked is to be visible without the protection that clothing provides. It may be connected with trust, intimacy, and freedom, but also with vulnerability.
For the person who experiences the body as dirty, damaged, or different, nakedness may become a risk.
What will the other person see?
Will the body reveal the story?
Can what happened be read in the skin?
Some participants described how they covered their bodies even in situations where others would have removed more clothing. One of them said that she avoided the mirror and imagined a body covered with wounds and injuries that others could not see. She did not want the body to become visible.
This reveals something important about shame.
A person does not necessarily see the body as it appears to others. They see it through the meaning the body has acquired.
The mirror does not merely reflect an external form.
It is met by an inner story.
The Mirror as Judge
A mirror appears to be neutral.
It shows what stands before it.
Yet no one sees themselves entirely neutrally in a mirror. We do not merely see a face or a body. We see through experiences, expectations, and ideas about how others judge us.
For the shame-filled person, the mirror may become a judge.
The gaze does not look for the living human being, but for evidence that shame is right.
There is what is ugly.
What is damaged.
What is unworthy.
What must not be shown.
The mirror then does not reveal the body as it actually is. It shows the body through shame’s interpretation.
In the dissertation, one participant said that her work at the incest centre gradually made it possible for her to look at herself in the mirror and say, “I like you.” This was not merely a new opinion about her appearance. It expressed a change in her relationship with herself. New experiences with others had made a new way of seeing her own body and person possible.
Perhaps this is one of the most important things a mirror can show.
Not the perfect body.
But a body from which the person no longer needs to turn away.
The Body and Worthlessness
Shame may make the body appear worthless.
Not merely unwanted, but without a right to protection.
If the body is first understood as dirty or damaged, it may become more difficult to establish boundaries around it. The person may begin to think that it no longer matters what happens to the body. It has already lost its value.
This may affect food, self-harm, sexuality, and the relationship with one’s own health. The dissertation examined these areas separately, but they meet in one common question:
Does this body have a right to care?
This is a moral question, not merely a psychological one.
The body is not valuable because it looks a certain way.
It is not valuable because it functions well.
It is not valuable because others desire it.
The body has value because it is a human being’s body.
It is through this body that the person lives their only life.
The Body as Object
Sexual abuse involves treating a human being’s body as an object for another person’s actions.
The other does not see a Thou.
They see something that can be used.
It is therefore not only the boundaries of the body that are violated. The person’s status as an acting subject is also violated. The one who should have had the right to say yes or no is turned into the object of another person’s will.
This objectification may continue within the person’s own relationship with the body.
The body becomes “it.”
Something that must be controlled.
Hidden.
Punished.
Changed.
Or abandoned.
The person looks at their own body through an alien gaze—sometimes through the same devaluing gaze that was once directed towards it from the outside.
The violation then continues as an inner relationship.
The perpetrator may be gone.
But the objectification remains.
The Right to One’s Own Body
We often say that a human being has the right to their own body.
Legally and morally, this is fundamental.
But after a violation, this right may have to be experienced anew.
It is not enough for others to declare:
The body is yours.
The person must gradually be able to feel:
This body belongs to me.
I decide who may approach.
I can say no.
I can also say yes.
I can stop.
I do not have to explain all my boundaries.
The right to one’s own body involves more than the right to protect it from others. It also involves the right to live within it without meeting oneself with contempt.
This is a slow reclaiming.
It may begin with something as simple as choosing where to sit, whether the door should remain open, or whether an examination should stop. It may continue through noticing hunger, tiredness, pain, or pleasure and taking these experiences seriously.
In this way, the body may gradually move from being something others decided over to becoming once again the person’s own place in the world.
The Helper’s Relationship with the Body
The professional helper may also objectify the body.
This happens when the body becomes only a symptom.
When it is measured, examined, and explained without allowing space for the person’s own experience.
Examinations and professional assessments may be necessary. But the body must never be reduced to what can be recorded from the outside.
The question is not only:
What is wrong with the body?
It is also:
What is it like to live in this body?
What feels safe?
What feels threatening?
When do you need distance?
How can you retain control?
The dissertation emphasised the importance of beginning the helping process where the other person is. In encounters with the violated body, this means respecting the boundaries the person actually has, even when they may seem incomprehensible to the helper.
The person who withdraws from touch does not immediately need to learn to tolerate it.
The person who covers the body does not immediately need to reveal it.
The person who avoids the mirror should not be forced to look.
The relationship must first provide an experience that no one will take liberties again.
Reclaiming the Body
In the dissertation, I used the expression taking oneself back.
This also concerns the body.
Reclaiming the body does not necessarily mean learning to love every part of it. That is a great demand to place upon a person, and often an unnecessary one.
Perhaps it begins more modestly.
To stop hating the body.
To listen to it.
To protect it.
To allow it to rest.
To give it food.
To establish boundaries.
To recognise that it did what it could to survive.
The body was not the betrayer.
It was the place where the violation occurred.
It was also the place that carried the person through it.
This is an important distinction.
The body experienced as damaged is at the same time the body that still breathes, moves, and makes new experiences possible.
It is not only the archive of history.
It is also the place where a continued life may begin.
New Bodily Experiences
Words alone are not always sufficient to change a person’s relationship with the body.
The material in the dissertation pointed to the importance of new experiences. Those who sought help did not only need to understand the past in a new way. They also needed situations in which the body could experience something other than violation, fear, and shame.
It may be the experience of a boundary being respected.
A touch one has chosen.
A room one may leave at any time.
An activity in which the body feels strong or free.
A relationship in which closeness does not lead to demands.
Such experiences do not contradict the past.
They make the future larger.
Through repeated encounters with respect, the person may gradually experience that the body is not always in danger. That visibility does not always lead to violation. That closeness may also contain care.
In this way, the lived body may acquire a new story without the old one being denied.
The Body Is More Than What Was Done to It
A violation leaves traces.
Some traces are visible.
Others are felt only by the person who carries them.
But the body can never be reduced to these traces.
It is also the play of childhood.
The effort of work.
The hands that have created something.
The feet that have walked long roads.
The arms that have carried a child.
The face that has laughed.
The breath that still moves in and out.
Shame attempts to gather the entire meaning of the body around the violation.
It says:
This is the body it happened to.
This is the dirty body.
This is the body that must be hidden.
But the body always contains more than shame’s story.
What was done to it is part of its history.
It is not the whole of its meaning.
A Home One Can Return To
A human being cannot leave the body and begin again in another.
It is our first and final home.
Healing is therefore not about escaping the body, but about slowly making it possible to live within it again.
Not without memories.
Not without vulnerability.
Not necessarily without pain.
But with a greater right to decide.
With less contempt.
With a beginning experience of belonging.
Professional social work cannot give a person their body back. It has never ceased to be their body.
But the social worker can contribute to relationships in which this belonging may once again be experienced. Through respect, care, and recognition, the other may be met as a bodily, living subject—not as a damaged object.
Perhaps this is what it means to reclaim the body:
To be able to say that this happened to my body without continuing to believe that the violation tells the whole truth about it.
To be visible without being exposed.
To be naked without being without boundaries.
To be able to see oneself in the mirror without seeing only the other person’s act.
And gradually to recognise:
This body is not unclean.
It is not guilty.
It is mine.
This body is not unclean.
It is not guilty.
It is mine.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This essay is number 12 in the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based particularly on the dissertation’s chapter on the body, including its discussions of bodily shame, the body as subjective experience, worthlessness, nakedness, and the mirror image, as well as the dissertation’s concluding perspective on taking oneself back through respect, recognition, and new experiences: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work
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