Healing Embodiment & Integration

I’ve often thought about taking pictures of my stomach, with all its stretch marks. I’ve had a perplexing relationship with it for much of my life. I have felt despair and disgust, but for a few moments, I have also felt fascinated by it.

I can still picture myself crouched as she stood in front of the wide bathroom mirror, her eyes moving between her body and mine. Some of my earliest memories aren’t of my own reflection, but of watching my mother look at hers—with disgust. I can still hear her say, “I didn’t get stretch marks until I was pregnant with you.” That was one of her milder comments when insecurity took hold. As a child, I couldn’t understand that her self-hatred had nothing to do with me. I only knew that something in me had caused it. I didn’t feel seen. I felt targeted, as if my body were the problem she was trying to strike. My body felt like the evidence. Instead, I became the bad object—the cause, or maybe even the curse.

In school, my shame grew more visible. Climbing a rope in P.E. was mandatory, and I dreaded the locker room. The red scratches and stripes on my hips and thighs made me feel exposed. I was already the “big girl,” and those marks only deepened my isolation, widening the gap between me and the body I lived in.

Years later, after giving birth to my twins seven weeks early, I needed nursing bras but couldn’t find any in my size. Swollen from preeclampsia and exhausted by a traumatic childbirth, I found myself at Frederick’s of Hollywood—of all places—standing in front of a full-length mirror for the first time. Our one-bedroom apartment had been too cramped for such a thing.

I was stunned by what I saw: deep red rivets tracing from below my breasts to my groin, a map of transformation and endurance. My body had carried a high-risk pregnancy, held more than I thought possible, and brought one living child into the world while surviving the loss of another. For a brief moment, before judgment returned, I looked at my body with curiosity—almost awe. The marks felt less like damage than evidence of what my body endured for my children.

The older saleswoman, petite and polite until she wasn’t, kept bringing bras that were too small. It was as if she couldn’t grasp my size at all. When I finally asked what the largest size was, she answered, “Up to an R,” with a thin, almost cheerful smile. I wasn’t close to that size, but by then I was already doing the work—absorbing her incredulity, trying to explain my body to someone whose own smaller frame could not comprehend it. She seemed to believe she was being kind, even encouraging, as if positivity were something she needed to offer me.

The shame deepened—not only because I was being watched, but because I was not being seen.

For a moment, though, before her judgment reached me, I had looked at my body with curiosity—with awe, even. It was a fleeting but powerful shift: to see myself not through shame, but through wonder.

Since losing 185 pounds, my body and I have begun to understand those marks in a new way. They’re no longer evidence of failure or lack of control, but symbols of endurance—proof that my body carried me through illnesses, pregnancies, multiple surgeries, and transformation. Those once-disgraced lines now feel like rivers—streams that carried the emotions I was never allowed to express.

My body expanded so I could keep going. Those marks remind me that resilience and survival take many shapes and sizes—and that beauty is sometimes written in the lines we once tried to hide.

When I look at or touch my stomach now, there is a softness where there used to be vigilance. My shoulders release. I don’t brace. For so long, my stomach felt separate from the rest of me, as if it carried all the shame my body could not hold alone. Now, it feels returned to me—part of my body instead of apart from it. My own body hasn’t changed—but my entire body has changed.