Some version of this might sound familiar. Someone you love rests a hand on your stomach while you're cuddling, and your whole body goes still. A long hug starts to feel less like comfort and more like being inspected. Someone tells you that you look good, and you immediately want to change the subject. Or you're the partner who keeps saying "I love your body," and it never seems to land. It can show up in sex, too, but it often starts much earlier, with ordinary caring touch or a simple compliment.
Underneath a lot of these is the same thing: it's really hard to be present in a body you're busy surveilling and judging. And most of us aren't even arguing with that inner critic. We mostly agree with it.
I know this one from the inside. I've struggled with body image since I was young, and I still do some. For me it has looked like holding my breath, positioning myself a particular way, keeping the lighting dim, and immediately rejecting compliments, if I even notice them at all. Self-love still feels light years away.
What has moved things in a better direction has been smaller than that: moving toward neutrality, softening the judgment a little, lessening the surveillance, and getting curious about who is even doing the surveilling. Things still pop up. But there's more room than there used to be.
In Presence Over Performance, I described embodiment as being in your body and noticing what's happening there, instead of watching yourself from the outside. There are a lot of reasons we end up on the outside, and trauma is a big one. This post is about another: what happens when the watching comes from us, and how much of it is tied to whether it has ever felt safe for our bodies to be seen.
Watching Instead of Feeling
Michel Foucault wrote about the panopticon, a prison built so that people could always be seen but never knew when someone was actually watching. Eventually the guard becomes unnecessary, because people start watching themselves. Susan Bordo carried that idea over to bodies, showing how diet culture, advertising, and media teach us to keep an eye on ourselves and keep correcting.
That self-surveillance can follow us right into closeness. Part of our attention leaves the body and watches it from the outside, like a camera up in the corner of the room. Can they feel my stomach. What do I look like from this angle. How long is this hug going to last. If you've spent years checking your reflection in every window you pass, it makes sense that the habit doesn't switch off just because someone you love is holding you.
The trouble is that attention can't fully be in two places at once. The part of us that's busy watching isn't available to notice warmth, comfort, or what it actually feels like to be held. Over time, touch and compliments can start to feel like something to get through rather than something to receive.
Who decided?
Most of us didn't come up with our ideas about which bodies are desirable. We absorbed them from diet culture, fatphobia, ableism, racism, ageism, porn, before-and-after photos, comments at the dinner table, and a friend picking apart their own body in front of you when you were twelve.
It also shows up through things that have nothing to do with appearance. Chronic pain or illness, a body that changed after pregnancy, surgery, or medication, aging, disability, or a body that was hurt by someone else can all make your body feel less like home and more like a problem to manage.
For a lot of people whose bodies are policed or treated as less safe in the world, including fat, trans, disabled, and Black and brown bodies, that watching isn't only something absorbed from culture. It can be a reasonable response to actually being watched. I can only speak from my own body, and people living in those bodies have written about this far better than I can (I've included some of their work in a resource list at the end of this post). But it feels important to say that self-surveillance isn't always a flaw to fix. Sometimes it has been protection, and it makes sense that it doesn't soften or shift easily.
Naming where it came from doesn't make it disappear. It can make it a little easier to hold as something you learned, rather than the truth about you.
Why "You Look Good" May Not Always Land
This is a place a lot of partners get stuck. One person feels bad about their body. The other says, sincerely, "You look good. I love your body." And it bounces right off, or sometimes makes things worse.
In Losing the Plot, I wrote about psychic equivalence: when we're stressed or ashamed, a feeling can harden into a fact. "I feel unattractive" becomes "I am unattractive, and you're just being nice." Once that happens, reassurance has nowhere to go. It turns into a debate, and both people can feel unheard. One isn't believed about their own desire or attraction to their partner. The other feels pushed to perform being okay or feeling attractive.
What can help is curiosity instead of reassurance or correction. Something like, "Is it an off body day?" That names the feeling without arguing with it, and it quietly reminds both of you that feelings about our bodies come and go. Today isn't forever. Or, "Do you want my hand here, or somewhere else?" That offers a choice instead of an interpretation, so the other person gets to decide what feels okay right now. If you're the partner, your job isn't to "fix" or "guess at" something. It's to stay present and curious.
The In-Between
I'm wary of "just love your body" advice. Going from hating your body to loving it is a huge leap, and for a lot of people, being told to love their body just becomes one more standard to fail at, myself included.
What feels more attainable is body neutrality. Body neutrality means you don't need to feel a particular way about how your body looks in order to let it be here, feel things, and be cared for. You can feel lukewarm about your body, or even pretty negative some days, and still have pleasure in it. Presence doesn't require perfection or approval.
It also helps to remember that how we feel about our bodies isn't fixed. It shifts with the day, the season, what someone said last week, how tired we are, where we are in a cycle, or what's going on in the relationship. Feeling bad in your body on a Tuesday doesn't mean you've lost progress, and it doesn't mean that's how you'll always feel.
Feeling bad in your body also isn't just something to get past. It can be information. Is it an old, familiar voice? Exhaustion? A real lack of safety in this moment? A need for less exposure, or a slower pace? Noticing that discomfort and getting curious about it is a way of being present, too. Presence isn't pushing through how you feel. Rather, it means listening to it, and letting it shape what you say yes, no, or not right now to.
Some Things That Can Help
None of these are about fixing how you feel about your body. They're about finding small ways back into it.
Notice where you go. With curiosity, start paying attention to when your mind leaves your body, whether you're with someone else or on your own. Is it a certain thought, a position, a moment of being seen? Sex is one place this happens, but so are a massage, a haircut, putting on lotion, your skin care routine, or getting dressed in the morning. Any of these can be a place to practice. You don't have to stop the drifting away. Just noticing "there I go" is already a small step back in.
Come back through sensation. When you notice you've drifted, you can try to bring your attention to something you can feel rather than see: temperature, the weight of a blanket, the texture of skin or fabric, your breath. That inside-out sense of your body (interoception, if you want the clinical word) is the opposite direction from the surveillance camera in the corner of your mind. If you're neurodivergent, interoception may work differently for you. Some autistic and ADHD people feel body signals very loudly, some barely at all, and some sensations can be more overwhelming than grounding. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. A neurodivergent-affirming therapist can help you find ways back into your body that actually fit how your body works.
Talk often. That might include where hands go when you're cuddling, how long a hug lasts, lights on or off, clothes on or off, or positions that feel more or less exposed. This does not mean that everything needs to be planned out perfectly all the time. Spontaneity has a place here too. What helps most is noticing what's happening and staying curious enough to create a space for good communication before, during, or after. Talking about sex and other more intimate forms of touch can be hard on its own. So can eye contact, or just being present together without touching at all, when we're all so distracted. Non-sexual things can be part of the conversation, and part of the practice, too. If you're the one struggling, that might sound like, "I don't need you to fix it, I just want you to know where I am." If you're the partner, it might sound like, "How's this feeling for you right now?"
A Note on Eating Disorders, Trauma, and Dysphoria
If your body image is tangled up with restricting, bingeing, purging, or compulsive exercise, that deserves eating-disorder-informed care, not white-knuckling on your own. The Oklahoma Eating Disorders Association is a good place to start.
If leaving your body during intimacy feels less like self-consciousness and more like numbness, panic, or not being there at all, that may be dissociation. As I wrote in Presence Over Performance, that's your body doing what it learned to do to protect you, and it deserves its own trauma-informed care.
And if the discomfort is about gender, a body that doesn't match who you are, that's dysphoria. It's different from body image in the usual sense, and it deserves gender-affirming support, not a push toward acceptance.
If you want to read more, there's a resource list at the end of this post.
So, now what?
None of this is about getting to a place where you never feel weird about your body again. That place probably doesn't exist, and you don't need it to have intimacy that feels good. What helps is having more room to notice, more paths toward embodiment, and people around you who can stay with you while you're figuring it out.
If body image is getting between you and the closeness you want, whether that's with partner(s) or with yourself, that's work we do at Here We Are. We offer individual and partnered therapy, sex and relationship counseling, and workshops on intimacy and sensate work. You can reach out here. If we're full, we have a referral network and enjoy helping people find someone who's a good fit.
Some resources
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
Laura Kate Dale (editor), Gender Euphoria
Laura Erickson-Schroth (editor), Trans Bodies, Trans Selves
Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat
Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People
Da'Shaun L. Harrison, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker, How to Understand Your Gender
Hillary McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology
Virgie Tovar, You Have the Right to Remain Fat
Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary
Alice Wong (editor), Disability Visibility
Cat Bishop, LPC, is the founder of Here We Are Therapy, where we offer individual and systems therapy, sex and relationship counseling, and support for grief, depression, anxiety, trauma, neurodivergent experiences and more.
