Episode 39: Comparison, Belonging and Coming Home to Yourself | Part 1

This episode and article contain discussions around body image, comparison, mother wounds, therapeutic MDMA, and disordered relationships with food and the body. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

Comparison isn't about vanity. It never was.

It's about belonging. It's about safety. It's about what your nervous system learned was acceptable, what got praised, what got rejected, and what got mirrored back to you when you were too young to question any of it.

And when you understand it that way, something begins to shift.

Belonging Is a Nervous System Need

When you feel like you belong, when you feel accepted and chosen and safe within your group, your nervous system regulates. It stops scanning for threat. It settles.

And when you don't feel like you belong, your nervous system treats that as danger. Not metaphorical danger. Actual danger. Because for most of human history, being cast out of the group meant you didn't survive. Particularly when we lived in tribes.

So the drive to fit in, to be acceptable, to not stand out in the wrong way, that is not weakness. That is biology.

And when we go through puberty as young girls, something happens hormonally that amplifies this even further. Oestrogen rises during puberty and it doesn't just change our bodies. It increases social attunement. It makes you more agreeable. More attuned to how others see you. More sensitive to belonging and rejection.

This is why teenage girls dress exactly like their friends. Same clothes, same slang, same hairstyles. We can write that off as herd mentality or vanity but it isn't. It's a nervous system response. A young woman's biology saying, stay inside the tribe, stay safe, stay chosen.

That is adaptation. That is intelligence.

The problem is that so many women carry this adaptation into adulthood without ever questioning it. Still dressing for belonging. Still eating in ways that might work for someone else. Still trying to fit themselves into boxes that were never designed for them. Still measuring themselves against women whose nervous systems, trauma histories, hormones, support systems, and life circumstances are completely different.

And social media has made this so much worse. Because now it's not just about comparing bodies. It's about comparing morning routines, skin, supplements, healing journeys, productivity, relationships, nervous systems. The more we go into that world, the more women slowly lose touch with themselves trying to become copies of other women they were never meant to be.

Why Two Women Can Eat the Same Thing and Have Completely Different Experiences

A woman carrying chronic stress and unresolved trauma with little to no support is going to have a completely different relationship with food than a woman who feels safe and regulated in her life.

A dysregulated body craves things differently. Metabolises things differently. A body that feels hypervigilant, that is always scanning for danger or bracing for worst case scenarios, will seek quick comfort, quick energy, quick numbing, quick relief, quick regulation. And food is very reliable at doing that. The body will choose whatever works fastest.

So instead of understanding this, women moralize themselves. They say I have no discipline. What is wrong with me. Why can't I just stop.

But the body is just trying to survive. It is doing exactly what it learned to do. And the woman who seems to eat effortlessly and feel fine is not more disciplined or more worthy. She is just operating from a different nervous system baseline. A different history. A different set of circumstances.

Understanding this changes everything about how we approach healing.

What Oestrogen Decline Is Actually Revealing

When oestrogen starts to decline later in life, in perimenopause and menopause, a lot of women describe something that feels like something has been unleashed. Anger. Rage. A sudden intolerance for things they used to manage. A loss of patience that feels almost shocking in its intensity.

And the narrative I hear online is that the hormones are causing the anger.

But I don't think that is quite right.

Oestrogen functions like a veil. It helps women tolerate things they should never have had to tolerate. It keeps you agreeable. It keeps you people pleasing. It makes the boundary crossings manageable. It keeps the peace.

And when that veil lifts, the anger that was always there finally has a voice.

It is not new. It is just finally being heard.

And if you have spent decades abandoning yourself to stay belonging, stay acceptable, stay safe, this is what catching up looks like. This is why the healing work matters so much. Not just for now. For the woman you are becoming.

The MDMA Journey

In 2022 I had a therapeutic MDMA journey. I went in with the intention to forgive my mum. We have always had a very challenging relationship and we don't have a relationship now. And one of my biggest wounds was around my body. My mum was very beautiful and very thin. And there was always this underlying message that I never quite lived up to her expectations.

What I didn't consciously realise until that journey was that underneath everything was a younger part of me that genuinely believed, if I can just become thin enough, beautiful enough, perfect enough, my mum will finally love me.

That was the wound.

And that is what children do. They interpret their parents' limitations as, there must be something wrong with me. Not, my parent has their own unresolved pain. Children think, I am not lovable.

So that journey took me back through every single challenging experience I could remember with another woman. Tiny memories, things I hadn't thought about in years. And I said to every single one of them, I forgive you.

And then it went the other way. It showed me every moment I had judged another woman, compared myself, been unkind, been insecure. And I said to each of them, I am so sorry and I send you love and healing energy.

And then I turned towards myself and said, I am so sorry for every single mean thing I ever said to you or about my body. And I love you and I forgive you.

And then it showed me all these women, from all different cultures, different ages, different lives, all around the world. And every single one of them was carrying a suitcase. Some on their backs, some in their hands, some on their heads, some dragging them behind. And these suitcases were a symbol of their pain. Body shame. Comparison. Mother wounds. The pressure to be beautiful. The pressure to hold everything together.

And I said to all of them, I send you love and healing energy, and you don't have to carry your pain anymore.

It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

The Monday Morning After

I went home after that weekend and on Monday morning I got up to go to the gym like I normally do. I went into the bathroom to get dressed.

And probably since I was at least thirteen years old, I would get up in the morning, stand in front of the mirror, and criticize my body. Tell myself I was disgusting. Saying your stomach is disgusting. Because it was exactly what my mum would say to me. And I had internalised that voice so completely I stopped being able to tell the difference between hers and mine.

That morning I stood in front of the mirror and I cried.

And I said to myself, I love you and I'm so sorry.

And I thought, my body has done nothing but love me and keep me alive.

And that was the end of the war with myself.

I share this not because I think everyone needs to do what I did, or because healing looks the same for everyone. But because I know what it is like to look in the mirror and feel nothing but contempt for the body looking back at you. And I want you to know that it doesn't have to stay that way.

Part two of this episode comes next week. And it's about what actually becomes possible on the other side of all of this.

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