Episode 40: Comparison, Belonging and Coming Home to Yourself | Part 2

This episode and article contain discussions around body image, comparison, 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.

If you haven't listened to episode 39 yet, start there. This one picks up where that one left off.

Last week I talked about comparison as a nervous system response. About belonging as a biological need. About what oestrogen actually does to teenage girls and why dressing exactly like your friends was never shallow. And I shared one of the most profound experiences of my life and what happened the Monday morning after that changed something in me I don't think will ever go back.

This week I want to talk about what's actually on the other side of all of that. What it looks like when you stop trying to become someone else and start coming home to yourself.

The Grandma's Bathroom Memory

When I was about ten years old I was at my grandma's house and I found one of those little makeup powder compacts in the bathroom. And I started putting it on my face and looking at myself in the mirror and just thinking, yes. Sign me up to this. I am absolutely in.

I love makeup. I love clothes. I love the self expression that comes with all of it. And I still do.

What I love about that memory is that it had nothing to do with perfection or changing things to meet some external ideal. It was about play. Creativity. The pure joy of being a woman. Beauty felt like something I could explore, not something to correct.

And somewhere along the way, for so many women, this flips.

When Getting Dressed Becomes Corrective

Beauty stops being about expression and starts being about performance. And this is really a shift from the feminine to the masculine. Expression and creativity are so feminine. Performance is so masculine.

Getting dressed stops being creative and starts being corrective.

You stop asking, what do I love, what feels like me, what brings me joy. And you start asking, does this make me look smaller, does this hide the right parts, will I get away with this today.

And sometimes you are doing it four times before you leave the house and still walking out the door feeling like nothing actually worked.

Some of that is the healing work. The relationship with your body, the patterns underneath, the parts of you still carrying old pain. That matters and it is absolutely worth going there.

But some of it is that you are also trying to dress like someone else entirely. You are buying the dress because it is fashionable or because it looked incredible on the model on the website. And then wondering why it doesn't feel right on your body. You are forcing yourself into things that were never really going to honour you and your beautiful uniqueness in the first place.

Dressing for Your Actual Body Is a Regulation Practice

When something doesn't fit right, when your clothes are working against you instead of with you, your nervous system feels that. And this is not a small thing.

Because comfort is not just about wearing your tracksuit pants around the house. Comfort is fabric that feels good on your skin. Clothing that moves with your body. The weight of it, the texture of it, the way it sits on your shoulders. Your nervous system is responding to all of that all day long.

We all know what it is like to wear a pair of jeans that are a size too small. You are not present. You are not comfortable. You just cannot wait to get home and take them off. That is not just physical discomfort. That is your nervous system in a low grade state of tension for the entire day.

And if you are already dysregulated, already stressed, already using food or other things to cope, adding physical discomfort on top of that is just more for your system to manage.

Dressing for your actual body, in things that genuinely feel good, is a regulation practice. And I mean that.

So I went on a bit of a deep dive with this. I got my colours assessed and learned I am a true winter. High contrast, structured clothing, a full face of makeup. Everything I had already gravitated towards for years suddenly made complete sense. Of course I like these things. They suit me.

And I went even further. I created a ChatGPT styling thread with my colour palette, my height, and my body shape. Now whenever I am considering buying something I screenshot it and drop it into that thread. It will tell me exactly why something works, exactly why it doesn't, whether it is a full yes or whether the high waist is going to cut me in half. It has made my shopping so much more intentional and so specific to me and my uniqueness.

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You Forgot That Being a Woman Is Meant to Be Fun

Approaching 40, a part of me kept coming up that was quite concerned about aging. So I did an IFS session on it.

And it took me back to that memory of being in my grandma's bathroom. And the wisdom that came through from that part was so simple and so clear.

You forgot that it is meant to be fun!

Being a woman is fun. You get to experience the joy of this. It is not about doing it for someone else's approval or fitting yourself into a box. It is about you remembering this gets to be yours. The creativity. The self expression. The joy of finding what actually suits you and wearing it just because you love it.

Men don't get to experience the joy of all of this. And there is nothing more magnetic than a woman who has remembered that.

What It Means to Be Self Led

In IFS we talk about the concept of self. And that is why this podcast is called The Self Led Woman. Self is who you really are underneath all your protective patterns, your trauma, your conditioning. She is calm, compassionate, curious. She has clarity. She is creative. She makes choices from a grounded place that feel genuinely aligned.

Self is not the part of you that criticizes your body. That is a protective part doing its best to keep you safe from something that happened a long time ago.

Self is not the part that impulsively shops or emotionally eats or scrolls for two hours trying to regulate something she doesn't have words for. Those are all protective parts. And if you did the work on them you would understand exactly why they are doing what they are doing.

But when those parts don't have to work so hard, something shifts. You start making what I can only describe as self led decisions. They don't come from shame or urgency or I need to fix this about myself. They come from clarity. From congruence. From this is actually mine and this feels true for me.

The same question applies to everything. Your food. Your body. How you dress. How you show up. Does this honour me?

Not, I want to look like her. Not, I should be more grateful. Not, I need to be more disciplined.

Just, does this honour me?

That is what returning to yourself feels like. That is what it feels like to be self led. Not someone else's approval. Not becoming someone else. Not being more optimised.

A coming home to yourself.

And when we do the healing work, we are actually able to do that.

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