Show notes
Today I’m talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster, with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies, and embodiment. She’s the author of two books - ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection through Embodied Living’. She is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia and hosts the podcast Other People’s Problems. Today, we’re speaking about embodiment, healing from trauma and loads of other really cool things!Find out more about Hillary’s work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Order Hillary’s books here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Hillary: We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and a podcaster with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies and embodiment. She's the author of two books: ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are’, and that was published in 2017 and her latest book, ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection Through Embodied Living’ came out in Fall 2021.Hillary is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, and she hosts the podcast, Other People's Problems. Today I'm talking to Hillary about embodiment, healing from trauma, and loads of other really cool things. So stay tuned.Before we get to our conversation with Hillary, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely reader and listener supported. We don't have sponsors or do adverts or anything like that. I don't make money from affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything you don't need. All I ask is that if you value the space and the community that we're building, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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Here's my conversation with Hillary McBride.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Hillary, I'd love it if you could start by telling us who or what you are nourishing right now.Hillary: Well, I am nourishing myself and my toddler, and I am so much more attuned to what that means because, I am breastfeeding and I am always ferociously hungry all the time, and there is something about nourishing and kind of the, the literal transmutation of all the food as it comes into my body, out of my body, into her body, that, uh, shows me how deeply connected those two are, both the nourishing and the being nourished.Laura: Yeah, I haven't thought about it in that way that, I like that word that you use transmutation, um, and also breastfeeding a toddler I can relate to that. And yeah, just having to be really in tune with yourself, but also to a toddler and their needs.Hillary: Yes,Laura: It could be a lot.Hillary: You know, it can be a lot. It's wonderful. And I feel so privileged to, through motherhood, see and experience that connection of how much my attunement and my self care to my body actually literally supports her to thrive and be well. And there's something about that, even just the way you pose the question that highlights for me, the, the interdependence between us as bodies that I think we sometimes forget when we're just mulling about our days, thinking of ourselves as individuals. There's actually this inherent connection between all of us as bodies, and I think parenthood really, really brings that right up close to your face.Laura: Mm, yeah. I think a lot about interdependence in parenting. You know, from the perspective that that capitalism keeps us so sort of separate from one another. And prioritizes independence and, you know, trying to parent under late stage capitalism without family and community around is so fucking hard. So really, really hard that, yeah, like it just really for me has hammered home how interdependent we are.Hillary: Uh-huh. Yeah. You said it. That's exactly it.Laura: So Hillary, this is somewhat related, but your area of expertise is in embodiment, and embodiment is a term I've noticed recently, it's kind of buzzy. I'm seeing it show up everywhere, but I'm wondering if you could tell us how you understand and define embodiment.Hillary: Yes, I would be so privileged. So there's a couple different ways of defining it, and I'll give you a couple different definitions and then I'll, I'll tell you what I think is salient about them, but I really like the Merleau-Ponty definition, which is that embodiment is the perceptual experience of engagement of the body in the world. Or another way of describing it is the lived experience of engaging in the world as a body.Laura: Hm.Hillary: What both of those definitions have in common is that there is both a felt sense, experiential kind of body, you know, as it's known and lived and encountered and understood and sensed by me and a sociopolitical, contextual, cultural piece.It is, you know, how is all of that shaped by the landscape that I'm in, by the people that I'm in, by the stories of power and privilege that I encounter? So there's a dialectic between what felt sense is like in and through me, and then the world that I'm in. You know, it's really interesting to look at it through that lens as having both kind of this material, individual quality and a sociocultural and interpersonal quality, because I think it really breaks down the assumptions that we have, that our bodies are in a way, uniquely ours.We can have autonomy and agency over our bodies, but, but we also are in a world that is constantly saying things to us about what bodies are good and how to be, and how to shape movement and how to feed ourselves and what is desirable in terms of our appearance. And those things really get, you know, lodged inside of us in such a way that sometimes we forget that those stories come from culture and they feel like they're our own thoughts or our own identities.So I love thinking about embodiment as including these two pieces and in, in a way actually being the conversation between them.Laura: I love that, that kind of reciprocal relationship between our bodies and the, the context of our bodies. And I love the quote that you use in your book. I think it's, is it Teresa Silo? Is that how you,Hillary: ah-huh.Laura: Is that how you pronounce her name? Where you quote her as saying, or them as saying the body is not a thing we have, but an experience we are. And I always think there's kind of an irony in talking about and trying to define embodiment because as soon as we kind of put words to it, we're sort of, I don't know, what's the word that I'm looking for? Hillary: Like in an abstraction or we're losing something about the felt sense or the quality of it by trying to talk about it or think aboutLaura: Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly it. We're turning it into this like, academic thing when it's really, like you've said, it's a felt sense, it's an experience, so I just wanted to highlight the sort of, the irony in us talking about embodiment.Hillary: Oh, I'm so glad that you said that because it reminds me of something else that I often say when I'm talking about embodiment, which is to say, you know, instead of me describing it, how about I tell you about, you know, that time 30 minutes ago or two hours ago, when you really knew that you needed a drink of water. And the quality of the sensation and your awareness of that sensation, and then your action to go meet that need to go get yourself a glass of water or not. And all of the stories around you that impacted why you knew what that sensation was like or didn't know and why you did something about it or not.It's like the, you know, sometimes because we get stuck in the academic definitions and we lose the felt sense quality, we actually understand embodiment when we come back to the, the sensory memory, the procedural memory, the qualitative nature of being a body, because that as much, you know, some of us have harder times accessing that, it may actually be a little bit more accessible to us than all of the, you know, the floral or abstracted language that we use to talk about this thing, which is kind of our aliveness and it as it's felt and sensed.Laura: And I love that word that you used, aliveness. And it makes me think of how I think and how I conceptualise embodiment in some of the work that I do around feeding and working with, with children and families is, you know, I think of embodiment a lot about a baby or a toddler who is just so, you know, they're all feeling, they're all in their body. There's no kind of like, they haven't quite internalised messages around shame and, you know, these social scripts that we pick up and, I think of animals as well as, you know, being really, embodied in a very positive way. Obviously, of course, we're all embodied, but you know, as you alluded to our experiences of embodiment can be, can lean more positively or more negatively depending on, again, some of the social scripts that we've been handed, the sociopolitical context that we find ourselves in, but I wondered if it would just, if it was helpful for some of the listeners to, to especially anyone who's parent or been around children or animals to, you know, connect with that idea that, you know, we're born embodied and, and, and we have this really strong sense of, of positive embodiment when, especially when we're little. And then, you know, Niva Piran's research tells us that as we get closer to, um, particularly for girls, as we get closer to puberty, and we start acting on the body instead of being in, you know, acting from the body, that, yeah, that's where the, those ruptures in our embodiment begin.Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: I wonder if you could speak to maybe some of the other ways our experiences of embodiment are shaped both at the individual level, but also from that broader sociopolitical context that we've touched on.Hillary: Well, I think that the most obvious things that we could look at have to do with our isms around power, how power is distributed. So, which bodies are considered desirable, which bodies are forgotten socially, and again, that might seem kind of abstract until, until all of a sudden you're in a wheelchair and you realise that city planning didn't necessarily think about all the ways that people who use mobility aids need to get into buildings.That there's something that's communicated there about which bodies and how bodies move through space that's not really considered by those who have the, the most social power. So we think about like ableism and racism and sizeism, sexism and you know, there's just so many isms that are proliferated in our culture that we don't really even think about, especially if we benefit from them in some way.So there's that quality of it. Of course, there's the way that media and parents and peers are vessels for those messages about what is desirable. That's considered the tripartite model. But looking at these three different streams of influence that disseminate messages about ideal bodies, about good bodies, about what is valuable culturally.And whenever I think about the tripartite model, the, you know what's interesting about it if you were to see it visually, is it places you right, the individual at the centre of these streams of information coming at you, there is these arrows of media. You know, parents or caregivers and peers, colleagues, right? Your friends, they're pointing at you, but you are also in one of those categories, likely, if not more, for another person. And so we are handed this information and then we are handing it to each other. Just based on the ways that we use greetings and how we comment on other people's appearance and what we say about their eating and um, their feeding of themselves and their movement, and the kinds of things that we, we praise and the kinds of things that we are silent about or criticise.So there is this really interesting soup that we're in. But if we follow those arrows back from us to where they come from, we see structures around, you know, hierarchies of body that were created many millennia ago based on who was able to leave or control the body the best. Who is seen as actually having the ability to conquer or subdue the body in terms of its animal nature, it's sensory qualities, it's sensuality. In some ways it’s mystery. And all of it, it seems, stems back to that, could this one group of people conquer their body better than someone else, and then the assumption or the conferring of power based on that, right? That this is somehow superior.Laura: Yeah, I think a lot about it in terms of, you know, the, the cultures of domination that we live in. But I think the way that you're expanding it, there is almost, you know, the, the genesis of all of this was domination over one group's own bodies before then that ripple effect goes out to dominate other bodies and animals and the natural world.Hillary: Yes, and I would argue that that might even come from before, that the domination of the body of the earth, the sense that the earth is a body in its own way. That is in a way kind of our origina…
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