Do you actually live inside your body? Or have you spent years living outside it, watching yourself the way everyone else does?

For most of us, that's a genuinely hard question to answer. So many of us learned, very early, to exist from the neck up and to live in our heads rather than in our bodies, because somewhere along the way we got the message that being in our bodies wasn't safe. Instead, we were praised for the opposite. For being easy, mature, and suppressing what we felt and needed. And piece by piece, we learned to leave ourselves.

In this episode, I'm sharing an analogy that completely changed how I think about this, one that makes it so clear how so many of us have quietly moved out of our own bodies over time, learning to see and evaluate ourselves from the outside rather than within. It's the lens I want to use to kick off a deeper conversation about self-objectification, body image, and what it actually costs us to live disconnected from ourselves in this way.

Because this is what self-objectification really is: internalising someone else's gaze until it starts to feel like your own. And once that shift happens, it touches everything: how safe we feel in our own skin, how we experience hunger, rest and pleasure, and how we relate to others (but most importantly, ourselves).

In this episode you’ll learn:

✨ The house analogy (from embodiment psychologist Hillary McBride) that makes self-objectification click instantly, and what it means to live ‘on the front lawn’ of your own body instead of inside it

✨ Why so many of us learned, very young, that living fully in our bodies wasn't safe and how we got praised for leaving

✨ The moment self-objectification usually begins for girls (often as early as 9 or 10 now) and why puberty is the seismic shift point

✨ How covert messaging through culture and media quietly teaches us to adopt an outside observer's eyes as our own

✨ The real, often serious costs of this: disconnection from sensation, bodily cues, emotions and in more severe cases, depression, disordered eating, and self-harm

Resources & Links:

Download your FREE 10 Minute Breath Reset and find calm again within minutes
Learn about my upcoming in-person events in Melbourne on Eventbrite
Subscribe to the Podcast so you don’t miss an episode
Follow me on Instagram @therachelbale