Episode 31: The Desire to Be Smaller Didn't Start With You

There's a question I come back to again and again in sessions with clients.

Is this actually your belief, or is it something you inherited?

So much of what women carry around food, their bodies, visibility, and taking up space was never consciously chosen. It was absorbed. Passed down through generations of women adapting to environments where being smaller, quieter, more agreeable, and less visible was genuinely safer.

In this episode, I explore the generational, historical, and nervous system roots underneath body image struggles, emotional eating, and the quiet pressure so many women feel to shrink themselves. Not just physically, but energetically, relationally, and in how much space they allow themselves to occupy.

I also share a personal memory from when I was twelve years old, a moment I didn't have language for at the time, and why it sits at the centre of something so many women experience but rarely talk about.

This episode is for the woman who has spent years trying to fix herself and keeps coming back to the same place. Because what you've been trying to fix may never have been fully yours to begin with.

Whose voice have you been listening to this whole time?

The waitlist for ⁠Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle⁠ is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing. 

Disclaimer: This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, body image, generational trauma, and unwanted attention during adolescence. Please engage gently. This podcast is not a substitute for professional support.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Self-Led Woman. This is a podcast about emotional eating, the experiences that shape our relationships with food, and the path back to self-leadership. These conversations overneath behaviour helped with deep respect for the wisdom of the body and the ways it learned to cope, adapt, and survive. And when we can peel back those layers and meet the parts of ourselves that need care, we begin to see that food was never the problem and we can return to who we really are. I'm your host, Megan Darnell. Let's dive right in. Before we get into today's episode, if you've been listening for a while and you're ready to go deeper, I have a course coming. It's called Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle. And it's the first thing I've created that takes you through the actual psychology of why you eat the way you do. Not the food, but the parts of you underneath it. To be the first to know when doors open and get founding member pricing. The link to join the wait list is in the show notes. Okay, let's get into it. There's a question that I come back to again and again in sessions with clients, and it tends to land a little differently every time I ask it. But this question of is this actually your belief? Or is this something you inherited? Is this something that's been passed down to you? So I want you to sit with that for a moment. Maybe you think about a belief that you have. Most of us move through our lives assuming that the way we think and feel about our bodies is just ours. It's personal. The result of our choices, experiences, and the way that we're wired. We just accept it. We don't often stop to ask where it actually came from. We just live inside of it. It's kind of like a wallpaper. It's so familiar that we stop noticing it's even there. When I sit with women and we start to slow things down and actually look underneath the surface, what becomes really clear is that so much of what feels so deeply personal, like the self-criticism, the monitoring, the constant negotiation with food or the rules, but they were never really theirs to begin with. It was handed to them, sometimes directly, sometimes silently, sometimes so far back that they can't trace where it started. Like not necessarily parents. It can be coming from grandparents, great grandparents, even further back. When we talk about diet culture, we almost always keep the conversation at the level of behavior, like willpower, discipline, consistency, control. And we talk about food and weight and routines and plans, and occasionally we'll acknowledge it's more than just food and that emotions are actually involved, that stress might play a role, and that it's complicated. But we rarely slow down enough to ask the deeper question. So, like, what does this actually mean emotionally and internally when a woman feels the need to make herself smaller? Not just physically, but energetically, emotionally, relationally, in how much space she takes up, in how loudly she speaks, in how many needs she allows herself to have, in how visible she allows herself to be. Because the desire to be smaller, to reduce and shrink and take up less room, it didn't come from nowhere. Many of the women I sit with are carrying beliefs that were never consciously chosen. They were absorbed over time in childhood, in family systems, in quiet moments that maybe just didn't even seem that significant at the time. Like a mother standing in front of the mirror criticizing her body, an auntie making a comment about weight at a family gathering, a grandmother equating thinness with worth, with desirability, with discipline. Sometimes it was direct and sometimes it was subtle. But we get these messages that are consistent enough to land. And although these things aren't necessarily malicious, well, I hope they're not anyway, these women weren't trying to cause harm. They were carrying something too. And they were passing on what they themselves had absorbed without ever being given the chance to question it. And in internal family systems therapy, which is the modality that I work from, we call this a legacy burden. And these beliefs are carried by different parts of us, but often shaped by families and generations that we come from that once helped us to stay safe. They were adaptations, strategies, and at some point they made complete sense. But if we zoom out for a second and look at history, this starts to make more sense in a way that can feel maybe a little bit confronting. Women being small was never just about aesthetics. It was about safety. There were long stretches of time, not ancient history, recent history, where women couldn't own property. We couldn't open our own bank accounts, couldn't leave marriages without severe consequences. In many places, marital rape wasn't even legally recognized until the 1990s. A woman's legal identity was often absorbed entirely into her husband's. In very real ways, she was treated as something that could be owned. So what kept women safer in those conditions wasn't expression. It wasn't taking up space. It wasn't having big needs or a strong voice or an unapologetic presence. It was compliance, being agreeable, being quiet, being non-threatening and digestible and easy, not taking up too much room, not having too many needs, not becoming too much. And being small in all the ways that that word can exist was protective. And your body remembers that, even if your conscious mind has never framed it in this way. Here's what's actually remarkable about how we carry our history. You were once in your mother's body, and she was in your grandmother's. And your nervous system, the part of you that decides what is safe and what isn't, or what to reach for and what to pull away from, doesn't just inherit physical traits. It inherits ways of interpreting the world. What's safe, what's dangerous, when to speak, when to stay quiet, how to smooth things over, how to avoid conflict, how to belong, what happens when you take up too much space. These patterns don't live in our thoughts, they live in our nervous system, in the tissue, in our bodies, in the parts of us that respond before our conscious mind has even had the chance to process what's happening. And if you can see this, if you start paying attention to how people move through the world, some bodies feel open, grounded, like they're allowed to be where they are. And others feel slightly curled in, protective, contained, taking up only as much space as seems permissible. You can see this in people's posture, like shoulders slightly rounding. The body is quietly constantly learning to be smaller. And this isn't random, like the body's always scanning for safety and adjusting long before the mind catches up. When a woman finds herself restricting food, monitoring or shrinking, and then she looks at herself and thinks, What is wrong with me? Why can't I just stop? I want you to hear this. There's often a part of you that is trying in the only way it knows how to stay safe. Safe from being judged or rejection or being seen, safe from receiving too much attention, safe from desire, safe from conflict. For many women, being fully seen has not always been safe. This is also why women go through life struggling to set boundaries. Or if they do, they might set a completely reasonable boundary, and she even knows that she has the right to do that and that it's not an unreasonable request, but then she'll spiral for hours afterwards. Sound familiar? And her heart will race, her mind will loop. Maybe I should have been softer, maybe I should have said something this way, maybe I need to send this person a text. Her body literally feels like it's under threat just because she set a boundary or made a request and she thinks something must be wrong with me or I'm overreacting and that I should be able to handle this better. But your system, if you experience that, is just responding to something that it perceives as being genuinely dangerous. And if she has stepped outside what once kept her safe, it's going to feel dangerous because at one point in time, like it wasn't safe. And there's one more layer here that rarely gets spoken about. But I want to share just a little example of this because there's various sides of the coin to being seen. So for some people, their bodies will keep weight on to not be seen. For some other people, they will keep weight off because they don't want to be seen. And women have mostly experienced men looking at them, older men even, before they were emotionally mature enough to even process it. Like they were children still. So I remember being about 12 or 13 years old. I was in year seven, I think. And I grew up in a small town, and I was walking through my small town to visit a friend. It's the kind of town where you know everyone. And I ran into one of my parents' friends. He's a family man, he was married, he was liked and respected in the community, a regular guy. We chatted for a couple of minutes on the street, and when I left, I remember the way that he looked at me, up and down, with this big smile on his face. And something in me felt deeply uncomfortable, uneasy in a way that I couldn't name. I was 12 years old. Like I didn't have the language for this. I didn't really understand it, nor could I process it. This was someone safe, someone my parents trusted, someone I was supposed to trust. And yet something in my body registered very clearly that the way he was looking at me was not okay. And I didn't have that language, and I couldn't have even told you why it made me feel that way. I was still very much a child, and I wasn't equipped to process what was happening, and nor should I have needed to be. But my nervous system registered it and I filed it away. And I wish that I could say that that was an isolated moment, but when, or that's just a one-off, it doesn't happen, but when I sit with women in sessions and we start to explore certain memories, this is one of the most common things that comes up. That moment, the moment she first noticed that men were looking at her differently. Her body had become something that invite invited a certain kind of attention. And before she was anywhere near ready to understand what that meant or what to do with them, she was still a child and she didn't have the maturity or the language to process what was happening, and nor should she have needed to. But her nervous system registered it completely and the body adjusted. And research shows that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors, this is super interesting, often begin in early adolescence, frequently around the onset of puberty, when the body starts to change and that kind of attention increases. A connection forms not consciously but deeply in the body. When I was smaller, I felt safer. And when my body changed, something about the world changed with it. And for some women, that looks like trying to return to something similar. Our systems are so clever, they adapt and it protects you in the only way it knows how. So when we are trying to return to something smaller, minimizing, restricting, becoming less visible, we're trying to exist in a body that feels less like a target and less like something that draws the wrong kind of eyes. And for others, the body adapts in the opposite direction. For others, the body adapts in the opposite direction. It creates protection through size, a buffer or a barrier. It's a way of putting distance between herself and the world that has felt unsafe to be seen in, becoming less accessible, less approachable, and less available. And neither of these is about willpower or failure. They're intelligent, embodied responses to experiences that felt overwhelming or unsafe at the time. And food sits right at the center of all of this because food can soothe. Control can create a sense of predictability. Restriction can feel like order when everything underneath is overwhelming. These aren't failures of character, they're adaptations, they're survival. So when we approach this purely from behavior by trying to change what you eat or enforce more discipline, or trying to fix a pattern by controlling the surface of it, we miss what's actually driving it. Because underneath the behavior, there is a system that's been carrying a lot. Not just your own experiences, but inherited ones, unspoken ones, generational ones. Patterns that were never questioned because they were never named. And this is where something genuinely begins to shift. Not when you try harder, but when you begin to gently separate what actually belongs to you and what doesn't, what's yours and what you've been carrying for generations of women who adapted to surviving conditions they didn't choose. When that kind of legacy burden is released, and I have witnessed this over and over again in my work, something shifts in a way that's hard to explain, but I feel like something shifts in a way that's hard to explain, but very clear to feel. Women will often pause and say, wow, I feel lighter because they are. This work is not about becoming physically smaller, it's about becoming safer in being seen, safer in having needs, safer in taking up space, in being fully expressed in your body, your voice, and your life without feeling like a threat. If you've spent years trying to fix your relationship with food or your body and it hasn't moved in the way that you hope, it might not be because you're doing it wrong. It might be because what you've been trying to fix was never fully yours to begin with. So before you try to change yourself again, it might be worth asking one question. Whose voice have you been listening to the whole time? No, this podcast is for education and reflection only. It is not a substitute for therapy or healthcare. If this episode brought things up for you and you need support, please reach out to a trained therapy practitioner or health professional in your area. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated, please follow or subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it. You can also connect with me on Instagram at Megan Darnell Therapy. If you share the episode or want to let me know what landed for you, you're always welcome to message or tag me. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time, I'm Megan Darnell, and this is the Self Led Woman.