In This Body

Botox Changes How You Feel And Read Others with Ailey Jolie

• Ailey Jolie

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What if Botox is not just changing how you look, but how you feel and connect?

In this episode, Ailey explores the quiet bind many women live inside, where beauty culture tells you your body is a problem to fix, and wellness culture tells you it is something to optimise. Both can sound supportive, yet both can pull you away from your lived experience.

Using Botox as an entry point, we look at research on facial feedback, emotional processing, and how expression shapes connection. She also shares clinical insights from somatic work, where micro expressions and co regulation are central to how we relate.

From there, we move into real life. Dating, friendships, and early attachment, exploring how reduced facial responsiveness may impact how we read and feel with one another. We also touch on objectification, interoception, and how self monitoring can distance you from your body long before any intervention.

This conversation invites you to step out of the cycle of fixing and into something quieter and more honest. Learning to listen. Learning to feel. Learning to be in your body.

In this episode:

  • 0:00 Welcome To In This Body
  • 2:25 The Beauty And Wellness Bind
  • 9:54 Facial Feedback In Therapy
  • 16:16 When Symptom Relief Hides Danger
  • 18:47 The Research On Emotion And Botox
  • 30:14 Objectification Cuts Interoception
  • 35:34 Wellness Culture Rebrands Self Surveillance
  • 40:51 Leaving The Loop Through Presence


Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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Welcome To In This Body

Ailey Jolie

Welcome to In This Body a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our share role? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me aleisurely. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body with Me Aleisurely. Today is a solo episode, and it's one I've been swirling around in my mind for a while. Today I want to talk about a bind, and it's a bind that most women I know are living inside without even realizing that they themselves are in a bind. And women often don't know that they're living in this bind because both sides of it look like care. And we've been told that they're care as well. One side of the bind is the beauty industry, six hundred and fifty billion dollars a year built on the premise that your body is a problem to be corrected. Your face is aging too fast, your skin is too textured, your stomach is the wrong shape, your pores are visible, and that is all apparently an emergency. The other side of the bind is the wellness industry. Four and a half trillion dollars built on the premise that your body is a temple to be optimized, regulate your nervous system, track your HRV, heal your trauma, come home to your body finally with this supplement, with this protocol, with this breath work certification, with this$60 adaptogenic latte that tastes like soil and salvation. One of these is saying your body's wrong, fix it. The other is saying your body is suboptimal, track it, change it. Neither of these are saying what is actually true, that your body is already intelligent, you've just forgotten how to hear it under all of the noise that's around us. And that forgetting that inability to hear is not a personal failing or something that's wrong with you that you need to fix or change. That is a design. Women have been put in this bind intentionally because when we are consumed by this bind, we're easier to manipulate, we're easier to market to, we're easier to control. There are many examples of this that I could choose to explore in our time together today. And I explore many of them in my upcoming book. And I'm gonna actually explore one that I don't really talk about in the book, just to keep the material, if you choose to read the book in the future, fresh and new and different. So today I'm gonna explore this mind through the lens of Botox. And we'll use Botox as an entry point because it's the example I know intimately, and because the research on what it does to the nervous system is a pretty clear illustration. It's the clearest one I've been able to find on how the beauty industry takes women out of their bodies in ways no one is talking about and no one is telling women. Today I'm also gonna go further than Botox and I want to talk about what happens to a woman's relationship with her own body before any needle, any procedure, any appointment, because the disembodiment starts long before we find ourselves in an esthetician's chair. And once we've spent some time exploring what gets us into an aesthetician's chair, I'm gonna spend some time exploring how the wellness industry promises to fix whatever disembodiment that was created through the beauty industry and how women find themselves on this loop of feeling like they need to fix or change their bodies so they engage in a beauty practice that actually increases their disembodiment. So they're more likely to be susceptible to marketing because they can feel something is off, and then they fall in wellness culture, and wellness culture doesn't bring them back into their body, it brings them more into their mind by encouraging them to track things, to optimize things, to see their body as suboptimal. And this is the buying today or the loop that I'm gonna really focus on spending time exploring with you. Before I jump into starting this exploration with Botox, I just want to say very clearly, I have absolutely no interest if you do or do not use Botox yourself. I have no judgment around it. I'm not personally interested in getting engaged in a conversation around what women should or should not do with their bodies. It is your body. Do as you like with it. My main interest is just providing information. You can hate that information, you can love it, that's really fine. I'm just in the essence of sharing and not interested in putting an expectation on you and your body. That's the last thing I want to do. So to really ground in the fact that I don't have any judgment around Botox, I can share and disclose that the first time I had Botox, I was 18 years old. I was so, so, so, so, so young. And at that time, I was preparing for a pageant where I was going to act as Miss Canada over in Europe. And the Botox was framed as preventative. At 18, I don't know what they were preventing from happening to my face, but that's how it was prevented. I didn't know what it was. That day I was told I was going to the dentist, so you can imagine that I was quite surprised and confused by the consent forms I filled out, and also really discompobulated, you know, with someone putting a needle in my face, and I didn't know what it was that they put in my face. I had genuinely no framework for understanding what was going on. I was 18 and definitely not an 18-year-old that knew how to use their voice or advocate for themselves. I also didn't know that the muscles being targeted were the ones my face uses to express concern, disagreement, anger, or confusion. I didn't know that the corrugator supersilia, the muscle between your eyebrows that contracts when you frown, didn't evolve to create wrinkles, that instead it evolved to communicate. I just knew after getting this procedure that I would then find out was Botox that something felt different, quieter. And I filed this experience away the way you file most of the small violences when you're young and female and working in an industry that requires your face to look a certain way. I didn't actually really even think that much of it. There was a lot of really strange stuff that was going on at this time in my life. And being taken to the dentist and getting Botox and lip fillers was not really high on the strange list of things that were happening. But this experience always stayed in the back of my mind. I remember in my mid-20s, I went to a physician. I had a lot, a lot of jaw pain, and they asked me if I had ever tried Botox. And I said yes, and we had a conversation around it. And they offered me Botox to relax the muscles around what I was told was TMJ pain. The pain was absolutely real and it was reduced. And then the practitioner, later, not at the start, was in the chair while my face was already numb, offered to balance out my eyebrows, just a few more units, nothing dramatic. And for me, that's how it started. I was, again, in my mid-20s at this point. It started quite innocently with TMJ pain and viral into something else. And to be honest, I didn't really think anything of it. All my friends were getting Botox at the time. And at the time, I really didn't think anything of it. But I did notice that something shifted in my clinical work between the periods when I would have Botox and when I would not have Botox again because it wasn't something that was highly prioritized in my mind of like, oh, I need to go every four months. I would have periods where I didn't have it because my jaw pain was fine and I didn't need it. And so I didn't book in again. Because I had these periods where I wasn't actively using Botox, I noticed something shift in my clinical work. And so I need to explain what I do for a living because it matters for what comes next and what I'm about to share. I'm obviously a chartered psychologist, a registered counselor in Canada, and I have a master's degree in somatics. I really frame my work as being a somatic psychologist. And what this means is that I sit with people while their nervous system is reorganizing in front of me. My face is how I do that work, not metaphorically. I mean literally. When I sit across from a client, my face is subtly mimicking their microexpressions below conscious awareness within milliseconds. And it's feeding that proprioceptive information back to my brain so my nervous system can simulate what theirs is feeling. That's not empathy as a concept, right? That's a mechanism through which empathy occurs. It's a physiological event that happens between two faces in a room. I know my body and my nervous system, and I've developed my introsceptive awareness to such a degree that when I am across from someone, this proprioceptive information can come into my system and I'm able to identify this is mine, this is theirs. I'm actually getting really good information about my client right now that they're anxious because I'm noticing all this sensation. This is how ideally every somatic psychologist is trained to know their body so well so that they can effectively work with the proprioceptive information that they're receiving from their client. However, when I would get Botox, something in that process went quieter for me. Maybe not for everyone, but definitely for me. I definitely also felt more anxious in my sessions. My clients also seemed to be more dysregulated in front of me. Not because their material had changed per se, but because something in the space between us had changed. I couldn't express what I was receiving back through my face in those real subtle, mimicking their microexpression ways. And therefore, my body was working harder to do what my facial muscles used to do on their own. And their nervous system registered the absence before either of us had boards for it. Because I have a background studying sciences and applied to medical school, I do understand a lot of neuroanatomy. I have a basic working understanding of anatomy and physiology and these concepts. I also have a community of people who have gone on to become trained physicians. And so I use the resources of my community to ask some questions about what I was experiencing and my choices around Botox. And I eventually asked an ex-partner of mine who's an ENT plastic surgeon who really understands the neuromuscular anatomy of the face from the inside out. When I told him what I was noticing, he wasn't surprised at all. He firmly believed that Botox should be more tightly regulated, restricted to practitioners who actually understood what the facial muscles do beyond creating lines. He gave an obviously much more complex and in-depth answer than that. He was very clear that he wasn't against Botox. Botox has been used for years in various different parts of the body. It's been really well researched to be safe. But he was against, and I think this is the really important part, he was against the casual way it's being administered by people who didn't understand what they were touching in the face. He was able to follow the research that I'm presenting to you today and make the distinction that individuals like himself, the neuromusculature of the face, know these kind of subtle ways of neuroanatomy, are able to put Botox in the face in a way where a lot of the stuff that I'm sharing isn't impacted because they have the skill set to be able to do this in a really safe way. So this is an important part to name. We're not throwing Botox out as being all bad and all wrong. And if we put it in our face, people can't regulate with us or can't feel connected to us. No, there's a way to use this safely, but a lot of people don't have the information to actually do that. And that's why in the research, women who get Botox experience more anxiety after. We'll get to that research later though. I need to go back in time because I want to be really honest. I had these conversations with not only him, but other community members that had gone on to become physicians. And I read all the research and yet I didn't stop, not immediately. I had clinical observation. I had a surgeon confirming what I was sensing. I had friends who validated my theories here. I spent hours looking at the research, and yet I still sat in the chair for a few more sessions. But not a lot, but I went back a few more times. And this is because knowing and feeling are different things. And the culture that normalizes the procedure is stronger than any study. At least that's been true for me. At that time in my life, every woman around me was getting Botox. And my phase with Botox looked like something that I still remembered from my youth that could be sold and marketed and used as a currency. There was a part of me that kept going back because I was a bit afraid. And it also took me a while to really honor the truth of the research in my embodied experience. And I want to name that this is not stupidity. You can get all this information today and still go to your Botox provider. And that will all make sense. That isn't a reflection on your intelligence. That's just how a system works. What did eventually make me stop was my clinical work. But because I had gotten really sick, I wasn't getting Botox. I hadn't had Botox in a really long time. And what I noticed when I was with my clients after not having Botox for a really long time is that I didn't feel anxious in sessions. They weren't anxious in sessions. And I was able to connect with them in a different way. Somatic work felt more available, even though I could look back and say, oh yeah, like when those months when I did or didn't have Botox, oh, I did notice these things with my clients, but nothing really made it as clear for me as when I hadn't had it in a really long time and I was able to be with my clients without Botox in my face and feel that co-regulation and proprioception connection. So again, I want to emphasize the importance of embodied experience and how embodied experience is often the catalyst for change. I can say that that's definitely my truth here when it comes to Botox and where I found myself in this. There's one more thing that I want to say in this conversation around Botox and just bringing in a little bit more of my own personal experience. As I named, I started using Botox in my mid-20s because I had jaw pain. I was clenching, there was tension, they thought it was muscular. But the reality was I was actually being caused by a tumor that I didn't know I had at that time. Nobody did. There's no way for anyone to have known had the appropriate MRI. But what I can say looking back is that the Botox was doing two things simultaneously. Yes, it was reducing the pain. I'm grateful for that, but it was also preventing my face from changing the way it would have changed as the tumor grew. The asymmetry, the swelling, the visual shift in my jaw that may have sent me to a doctor sooner. The Botox masked all that for me. It held my face in place while something was growing underneath it. And the pain itself, the pain that was my body's signal, its alarm, its attempt to get my intention and say something is wrong here. This is not just tension. This is not just stress. This is actually something wrong. I had been numbing on and off with Botox for years. Now I want to say this next thing really, really clearly. Botox obviously did not cause the tumor in my jaw. I'm not saying that in any way. But Botox did hide it. It intercepted the information my body was trying to give me about its own condition, and it suppressed that information at the level of both sensation and visible change. My body was trying to tell me something was wrong through pain and the shape of my own face. And I had paid someone to make sure I couldn't hear it. I know that this is a super rare and strange story. Having a tumor in your jaw is a super rare, strange experience. Most people getting Botox in their jaw do not have a tumor growing there that's additional weight that's causing stress on their jaw joints. But the principle here is not rare at all. Because the principle is the entire reason why I've dedicated this episode to this topic. Because when you suppress the body's signals, its pain, its expression, its attempts to communicate with you about its own state, you don't just lose the inconvenient information. You lose all of it. The body does not have a filter that says keep the important signals and only suppress the cosmetic ones. When you turn down the volume, it all goes quieter, including the volume on the things you desperately need to hear. Now that I've given you some backstory of around my experiences and the experiences that have led me to really dig in here and do some research and present this information to you so you can just be more informed with whatever choices you do or do not make, I'm gonna walk you through the research that I wish I had had at 18. Not that I think my 18-year-old self would have any dimension of her consciousness been able to say, no, I'm not doing that. But because I think that the things I'm sharing with you today should be included in a standard informed consent at some point in your journey of getting Botox. In 2002, there was a study that was published and it found something truly remarkable. And all of these studies are linked in the Substack article, so you can find them all there. This study by Quitter and colleagues found that when facial mimicry is blocked, the neural signature of the mirror neurons, the brain's primary mechanism for stimulating another person's inner experience, goes quiet, not reduced, quiet. The face was not just expressing connection, your face generates connection. Pen Letter's team used fMRI imaging to show that Botox in the frown muscles attenuates left amygdala activation with the imitation of angry expressions. I'm gonna say that differently so it's a bit clearer for you. The area of your brain that processes anger literally quiets down when the muscles that express anger are paralyzed. Let that sink in. When they put Botox into the muscles that express anger where your wrinkle lines come from, you are less likely to feel anger after. The muscles that are paralyzed by standard cosmetic Botox are overwhelmingly the muscles of concern, disagreement, displeasure, and distress. Not the muscles that smile, the muscles that object. 97% of individuals receiving Botox are female. Let's just put that in there. I'll invite you to sit with both of those pieces of information together. Another study for you to sit with is one by Neil and Charton. They found that Botox recipients showed significantly impaired emotion recognition compared to dermal fill out controls, meaning it doesn't just affect how others read you, it affects how you read them as well. Davis and colleagues found a measurable decrease in the overall strength of emotional experience. The dampening was most pronounced for moderate emotional events, not the dramatic ones, but the texture of ordinary feeling. The slight quickening when someone says something that catches you, the warmth that builds before anyone decides to name it. Lewis found that Botox to the crow's feet impairs the smile that we read as most authentic, the one your body reads as real. Havis and Glenberg found that Botox slowed the processing of emotional language. Reading sentences describing sad or angry situations took measurably longer. The face was helping the brain understand the words when the face couldn't move, comprehension was slowed. And the most recent work, Stark and Colleagues in 2023, demonstrated that the trimingular nerve, the main sensory nerve of the face, has a direct pathway to the amygdala, meaning the disruption isn't a subtle downstream effect, it's a direct line. I want to name something. None of this is a cosmetic side effect profile. This is a neurological one. Altered amygdala activation, impaired emotion recognition. If hearing that research felt a little bit overwhelming for you, I'm gonna say it super straight and super simple. There was found to be altered amygdala activation, impaired emotion recognition, dampened emotional experience, disrupted genuine smiling, slowed emotional comprehension, a minimized mirror neuron response. And none of this that's been found in the research I just named, peer-reviewed, is a part of the conversation we're having with women before the needle goes in. 94% of cosmetic Botox is performed on women. In my perspective, I don't really see this as a coincidence. Botox, if this research is real and valid as it appears to be in this moment, is making it harder for women to connect with other women. It's being harder for them to be known by other people. Their comprehension, their ability to comprehend and read is being challenged because the face has a role in that. They're more likely to not experience anger or rage because again, their face has a role in that. There's so many questions here around how something that so blatantly increases a Woman's disembodiment has become so culturally popular. We could dive into that for a very long time, but as someone who is so dedicated to embodiment and exposing all of the ways that our world keeps us out of our bodies, there is so much material there that is so rich and so interesting. And I really invite you to go read the research, to do your own investigating too, and to not just take the research that I've named as the forever truth to really study and learn and explore. Because at the end of the day, this is your body. It's your relationship with your body. And the more information you have on the way that culture is trying to take you out of your body, the more reason, the more grit, the more ferocity you're going to feel to want to stay inside your one and only body. So please take the time, go explore the research. Is all of it is referenced in the subsect article in the show notes. Now that I have explored these research findings, I want to take them out of the lab and inside the rooms where they actually live. Because research is looking at real life. So I want to explore what happens across a dinner table, what happens in a bedroom, what happens in a conversation between two women who used to feel close. I'm going to walk through several of these because I think each one reveals something different about what's being lost. And I want to be transparent about something before I do. What the research established directly is that Botox alters facial feedback, amygdala activation, emotion recognition, emotional experience, and mirror neuron response. What I'm about to do is take those established findings and place them inside relational contexts: dating, friendship, mothering, long-term partnership, the therapy room, where the implication becomes visible. In some of these contexts, particularly dating and emotion recognition, the research maps almost directly. In others, particularly mothering and long-term intimacy, I'm drawing on two separate bodies of research, the Botox literature and the attachment literature and the co-regulation literature, and making an inference about what happens when they intersect. No study has directly measured, for instance, how maternal Botox affects infant attachment, but the research on both sides points in the same direction. And I think the inference is important enough to name, as long as I'm honest, that it is an inference. The direct studies of these two things and how they intersect does not exist at this moment. We're going to start with dating. You're sitting across from someone whose frown muscles have been chemically paralyzed. Your brain reaches for facial signal to mimic it, and the signal is dampened. The loop that was supposed to happen between your nervous system and the one that lets warmth build and trust land and attraction deepen into something you want to lean into doesn't fully complete. You don't experience this as her face doesn't move enough. You experience it as something is off. I can't quite reach this person, the warmth isn't landing. He thinks she's not interested, she thinks he's not trying. Both of them are having a real experience. Neither of them is reading it just quite right. This is where the research is most direct. The Quittier finding on abolished mirror neuron response, the Neil and Chartland finding on impaired emotion cognition, on emotion recognition, the Davis finding on dampened emotional experience, the Lewis finding on the Dutchman smile, all of these dampened emotional experience, the findings on the authentic smile, all of these converge on the same moment. The early architecture of attraction depends on a cascade of micro signals between two nervous systems, and Botox dampens multiple points in that cascade simultaneously. Now let me move on from romance into something that might be harder to hear because it touches a wound most women carry. Friendships between women. You're talking to a woman and something feels off. You can't quite land with her. The word your mind reaches for might be cold or fake or something about her I don't trust. And because we have no language for my nervous system can't find yours, we convert a somatic signal into a character judgment. She's vain, she's plastic, she's trying too hard. The conventional feminist take is that the women who judge other women's cosmetic work are performing internalized misogyny. And that's partly true. But the research gives us a second layer as well. When you look at a face that doesn't move the way your brain expects, your mimicry system can't complete its loop. The Quittier finding tells mirror neurons system goes quiet that registers as not as she's had work done, but as a nuanced unease, a subtle sense of I can't be fully present with this person. I can't connect. And then the mind reaches for a story to explain the body's discomfort. And the story it often finds is cruelty. Both women are caught here. The woman who got Botox, again, not vain, not a villain. She is navigating an impossible system with so many loud, harsh, cruel voices coming onto her and her body. Additionally, the woman who feels repelled is not cruel. She's having an honest neurological response she doesn't have words for. Neither is the problem. The lack of conversation around what's happening is the problem. Lastly, is a topic I want to hold so gently and so carefully. And this is the experience of mothering. And this is where I want to be the most explicit about what the research does and does not establish. No direct study exists on Botox and infant attachment for obvious ethical reasons. No one is going to run that experiment, but two separate bodies of research point toward the same conclusion. And I think it would be irresponsible not to name that. On one side, the Botox research I've just described, dampened facial expression, impaired emotional signaling, minimized mirror neuron response. On the other side, decades of attachment research, the still-faced experiment showed what happens to an infant when the caregiver's face goes blank, the baby reaches for the face, tries to activate it, and when the face doesn't respond, the baby collapses into distress. If you limit the range of expression with very young children who are tuned to reading facial expressions, you limit the emotion they can communicate. I know that I'm drawing an inference here, and I want to be clear about that. But when one body of research says Botox dampens the signals the face sends, and another body of research says infants depend on exactly those signals for neurological development and attachment security, the overlap is not trivial. It's clinically provocative, and women deserve to have it in front of them before they decide whatever they decide to do. I'm not here to shame mothers who have had Botox. Full stop. I'm here to say that informed consent means being informed. Now I want to zoom out because everything I said so far is what happens after a procedure, and that's important. But if I stop there, I'm only telling half of the story. The beauty industry doesn't need a needle to take you out of your body. Doesn't need a scalpel either. It doesn't need a thread or laser or chemical peel. All it needs is your attention, redirected away from what you feel inside your body, away from what your body feels like from the inside, toward what it looks like from the outside. I know that I focused on Botox today because I wanted to explore a procedure that really highlights this. But a lot of the feedback, a lot of the ideas that I've brought forward through research by exploring Botox could be applied to lots of other things in the beauty industry because ultimately the beauty industry is pulling us out of our body and limiting our capacity for introspective awareness. This idea is not new. In 1997, Barbara Frederickson and Tommy and Roberts published a paper called Objectification Theory. The central argument is this women in Western cultures systemically trained to internalize an observer's perspective on their own bodies, to see themselves from the outside, to monitor, evaluate, and manage their appearance as though they were a spectator to their own physical form rather than the person living in it. Frederickson and Roberts proposed that this habitual self-monitoring, this constant positioning of yourself as a thing being looked at rather than the person doing the looking has a specific consequence that nobody was talking about. It diminishes awareness of internal body states, interception, the felt sense, the ability to know from inside what your body is telling you. And in 2013, Ainley and Tarski tested this directly. They gave women a heartbeat perception task, one of the most reliable measures of interceptive awareness we have, and compared the results with their scores on a self-objectification scale. The finding was clear. The more a woman experienced her body as an object to be evaluated for its appearance, the less accurately she could detect her own heartbeat. She was literally less able to feel her sigh from the inside. And here's what this means. You don't have to have had any procedure, you don't have to have bought any product, you don't need to have done anything at all. If you're a woman who has grown up in a culture that teaches you to monitor your reflection, to evaluate your body as a visual object, to stand outside yourself and assess whether what you see is acceptable, your interception may already be compromised. Not because something is wrong with you, because attention is a finite resource. And if it's directed outward toward the seen body, it is not available inward toward the felt body. Researchers call this a competition of cues. There's so much evidence available on this now. When our attention is occupied with I'm bloated, my skin, is my skin clear, do I look tired? Is my stomach flat enough in this stress? There is less attention available for am I hungry? Am I exhausted? Am I unsafe? Am I aroused? Am I in pain? Van De Vere and colleagues demonstrated this casually. They showed that simply looking at advertisements featuring models or being briefly exposed to a mirror was enough to reduce a woman's responsiveness to their own internal signals of hunger and satiety. The self-objectification didn't need to be extreme. It just needed to be activated. And in our culture, it is constantly activated. There was even a field study. Researchers surveyed women outside dunk clubs on cold nights and found that women with higher self-objectification were focused on their appearance and reported feeling less co less cold even when wearing less clothing. They were literally overriding temperature signals from their nervous system because their attention was occupied with how they look. This is why by the time a woman sits in the esthetician's chair, like my 18-year-old self, her body may already be partially unfamiliar to her. Not from a procedure, but from a lifetime of looking at herself from the outside instead of feeling herself from the inside. The beauty industry doesn't just sell products that create disembodiment. It cultivates the orientation that produces disembodiment, the habit of monitoring rather than inhabiting, and it sells those procedures on top of that. And the procedures just deepen the disconnection further. Threading, which requires you to endure significant pain to remove hair from your natural face, injections that numb you to your own expressions, surgeries that interrupt proprioceptive mapping, the felt sense of where you end the world begins, each one layered on top of a baseline of self-objectification that has already reduced your capacity to feel what's inside your own skin. Women walk around disembodied, not always from a dramatic event, sometimes from the slow accumulation of a lifetime spent looking at themselves rather than being themselves, floating slightly above their form, performing a body rather than inhabiting one at all. And this is where wellness industry arrives and says, come home, regulate your nervous system, do this breath work, track your HRV, buy this wearable, shake your body, do some somatic plotties, try a cold plunge, tap your vagus nerve, learn about your inner child, take this supplement, follow this protocol, and uh and the promise of all of it, the implicit promise is you will get back in your body, you will feel yourself again. But here is what I need you to understand, what I so want you to understand, because this is the part that nobody says. Embodiment is an academic discipline, it is a clinical field with decades of scholarship. Frederickson's Robinson, Roberts, Bordeaux, Barkey, Wolf, Tronic, Bibi, Porta's, Dana, Levine, Vanderkock, Ogden. These are not wellness influencers. These are researchers and clinicians who have spent careers studying what it actually takes for a nervous system to come home to itself. And what it actually takes is not a supplement. It's not a tracking device, it's not a 60-day protocol or breathwork certification or a wellness to retreat into loom, even though all those things do sound great and they probably help. But coming home to your body is slow, relational, unglamorous work. It is learning to sit with sensation without trying to change it. It is a practice of being with the body as it is, not as a project to optimize, not as a problem to solve. And when we honor that the body is an intelligence to listen, embodiment and our bodies inherently become political because our bodies are absorbing all of the messaging around us and being able to discern what is our body's story, what is our body's language, and what is the language or the story of the society around us. What stuff from society do we need to disembody takes years. Often in the presence of someone trained to hold the body while it reorganizes. The wellness industry cannot sell that. It is too slow, it is too intimate, it is too political, it is too risky, and it doesn't scale. So what I see so many women getting is a flattened version, embodiment liked, just enough to feel like something is happening, but not enough to actually change anything. Talks about befriending the nervous system rather than fixing it, about being in relationship with your body rather than managing it. But we can watch what happens when that message enters the wellness marketplace. It becomes another metric, another thing to optimize, another way to stand out, stand outside yourself and evaluate whether you're doing it right. Notice what just happened there. The same orientation that Frederickson identifies as a mechanism of disembodiment, self-monitoring, self-evaluating, standing outside yourself to assess is the orientation that wellness culture introduces. It gives it a different vocabulary. Instead of am I thin enough? It becomes, am I regulating enough? Instead of does my face look right? It becomes, is my vagal tone high enough? The surveillance continues, it just has different language. Wellness culture doesn't teach you to feel your body. It teaches you to monitor your body just in different language. So now that you see the bind, the beauty industry creates the wound, not just through procedures, through entire orientation of self-objectification, through decades of training women to watch themselves instead of feel themselves, through the monitoring and the mirror checking and the calorie counting and the skin evaluating that reduce interceptive awareness before a single product is purchased. And then through the products and procedures and pain that deepen the disconnection further, the wellness industry then sells us the bandage, the protocols and supplements and practices that promise to bring that promise to bring us back. But the bandages don't work not fully because what it's selling is not real and true embodiment. It's a consumer grade approximation, often based on real, often based on the academic discipline of embodiment, but has been repackaged in a way that reproduces the same self-monitoring orientation that caused the disembodiment in the first place, which means the wound stays open, which means you keep reaching for something else to get rid of the pain, which means both industries keep getting paid. They create the disconnection and disembodiment, they sell you the reconnection and they call both of them empowerment. A woman who's actually come home to her body, who can feel herself from the inside, trust what her nervous system is telling her. A woman who's done the slow and painful work of being present to what lives in her flesh is unmarketable. She cannot be sold the map back because she's already there. She won't starve past the point of her nervous she won't starve past the point her nervous system screams stop. She won't track her way to safety because she's learned to feel it instead. She's become the most dangerous thing either industry can imagine. A woman who doesn't need what they're selling. I want to be clear about something. I'm not anti-botox, I'm not anti-surgery, I'm not interested in again shaming anyone who's made any of these choices. I've had Botox, I've had breast implants, I have participated in the systems I'm describing. I know what it is to live in a body that culture punishes for aging, for existing in its natural form, for taking up the wrong kind of space. The fear that women have of disappearing because of how our society prioritizes youth and beauty is not female vanity. It is a survival response to a system that ties your value to your parents and then calls the evidence to your value. Women getting Botox are not the problem. The women selling wellness protocols are not the problem. The system that requires women to be at war with their bodies in order to keep spending, that's the problem. That's what I'm saying today. If you're gonna get Botox, you deserve to know what peer-reviewed research says it does to your amygdala, your mirror neuron system, your capacity to feel and read and be felt by the people around you. That's informed consent. And I haven't seen practitioners provide it. If you're gonna buy a wellness product that promises embodiment, you deserve to know that embodiment is an academic discipline, not a purchase. And because it's an academic discipline, there is nuance, there is history, there is legacy, there's complexity, there is branches. And understanding and honoring that this is an academic discipline with so many different divisions will help you navigate what you specifically need to come home to your very own body. And if you're tired, if you're exhausted by the loop of fixing and optimizing and monitoring and still feeling like you can't quite reach yourself, I want you to consider the possibility that the bind and the loop that you're on is the point. Both industries need you to stay it, stay in it. And that exit is not another product. That exit is presence, practice, the patient, sometimes devastating, sometimes extraordinary act of being in your body without trying to make it better or different or change it at all. I want you to know that a face is not a surface to be managed, it's a system to be lived in. The muscles of the face did not evolve to be beautiful. They evolved to keep us alive through connection, through the reading of each other's pain and pleasure and intention, through the micro movements that let a baby feel safe and a lover feel reached and a friend feel found. The cosmetic industry optimizes for the first frame. Your body was built for the whole story. Thank you for being here. I'll leave the links to every study I've cited in the show notes, and the full essay is available on Substack. If this resonated with you, please share with those in your life today. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast. This podcast reaches a larger audience and humans offering more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship with you with your family and bodies.