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?

It Was Handed Down

The beliefs so many women carry about their bodies were absorbed, not chosen. A mother standing in front of the mirror criticising her body. An auntie making a comment about weight at a family gathering. A grandmother equating thinness with worth, with desirability, with discipline.

These women weren't trying to cause harm. They were carrying something too — passing on what they themselves had absorbed without ever being given the chance to question it.

In Internal Family Systems therapy, which is the modality I work from, we call this a legacy burden. These beliefs are held by parts of us that were shaped by families and generations before us. And at some point, they made complete sense. They were adaptations. Strategies for staying safe.

Being Small Was Never Just About Aesthetics

If we zoom out and look at history, this starts to make a different kind of sense. Women being small was never purely about how they looked. It was about safety.

Not ancient history — recent history. Women couldn't own property. Couldn't open their own bank accounts. Couldn't leave marriages without severe consequences. In many places, marital rape wasn't even legally recognised until the 1990s. A woman's legal identity was often absorbed entirely into her husband's.

What kept women safer in those conditions wasn't taking up space. It was compliance. Being agreeable, quiet, non-threatening, digestible, easy. Not having too many needs. Not becoming too much.

Being small — in every sense of that word — was protective.

And your body remembers that, even if your conscious mind has never framed it that way.

Your Nervous System Inherited More Than You Think

Your nervous system — the part of you that decides what's safe and what isn't, 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? When to speak? 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 systems, in our tissue, in our bodies — in the parts of us that respond before our conscious mind has even had the chance to catch up.

You can see it in how people move through the world. Some bodies feel open, grounded, like they're allowed to be where they are. Others feel slightly curled in, contained, taking up only as much space as seems permissible. The body quietly, constantly learning to be smaller.

The Moment the World Started Looking Differently

There's a layer to this that rarely gets spoken about, and I want to share it because I think it matters.

I was about 12 or 13, walking through my small town to visit a friend. I ran into one of my parents' friends — a family man, married, liked and respected in the community. We chatted for a couple of minutes on the street. And when I left, I remember the way he looked at me. Up and down. With this big smile on his face.

Something in me felt deeply uncomfortable. Uneasy in a way I couldn't name. I was 12. I didn't have the language for it. He was someone safe, someone my parents trusted. And yet my body registered, very clearly, that the way he was looking at me was not okay.

I wish I could say that was an isolated moment. But when I sit with women in sessions and we explore certain memories, this is one of the most common things that comes up. The moment she first noticed that men were looking at her differently. Her body had become something that invited a certain kind of attention — before she was anywhere near ready to understand what that meant.

Research shows that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviours 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.

Adaptation, Not Failure

For some women, this looks like trying to return to something smaller — restricting, minimising, becoming less visible. Trying to exist in a body that feels less like a target.

For others, the body adapts in the opposite direction — creating protection through size. A buffer. A barrier. A way of putting distance between herself and a world that hasn't felt safe to be seen in.

Neither of these is about willpower or failure. They are intelligent, embodied responses to experiences that felt overwhelming or unsafe. And food sits right at the centre of all of this — because food can soothe, control can create predictability, and 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 at the level of behaviour — trying to change what you eat, enforce more discipline, fix the pattern by controlling the surface — we miss what's actually driving it. Because underneath the behaviour, there is a system that has been carrying a lot. Not just your own experiences, but inherited ones. Unspoken ones. Generational ones.

Where the Real Shift Happens

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 in my work — something shifts in a way that's hard to explain but very clear to feel. Women will pause and say: 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 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 shifted in the way you hoped, 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?

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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.