Identity-based harm

Being targeted or harmed because of your body size or appearance

Being targeted, excluded, or harmed because of your body size, weight, or physical appearance. The particular cruelty of a culture that treats bodies as moral statements. Medical dismissal, social exclusion, harassment, and the internalized shame that comes from being told your body is wrong.

Being treated as a problem because of your body means absorbing contempt from strangers, systems, and sometimes doctors, often with permission the culture openly grants. The shame that builds from that was imported, not homegrown. Your body was never a moral failing. It was a target the world chose, and the world was wrong to choose it.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

Depression Not just sadness. Shame Not guilt about something you did. People-pleasing Anticipating what others need before they ask. Identity disturbance Not being able to answer simple questions about yourself. Appetite dysregulation Not an eating disorder exactly, but a disrupted relationship with hunger and fullness. Social withdrawal A retreat inward that can feel like protection, and often is. Eating disorder Using food, or the control of food, to manage what cannot otherwise be managed. Loneliness This is different from pulling away.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

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