Do We Have a Body, or Does It Have Us?

We often assume that the body is something we possess.

That it belongs to us.

That it obeys us.

That it reflects who we are and responds to what we ask of it.

In everyday life, the body is kept under control—something to improve, train, correct, or repair. Most of the time, this belief holds.

Until it doesn’t.

There are moments when this certainty quietly slips away.

Back pain appearing after a prolonged period of stress.

A persistent tension settling in without a clear reason.

A sudden sense of heaviness or fatigue that rest does not fully resolve.

Disliking our image in a photograph and asking to retake it.

Even the way we speak of taking care of our body, as if it were a separate being.

These moments reveal something subtle. Our relationship to the body is not neutral. It is subjective, singular, and often slightly externalised, as if the body had its own logic, its own language.

Beyond its physical form, the body is also a place where something speaks.

It carries traces of our history. Paths taken, encounters lived, losses endured. In this sense, the body is not merely something we have. It is something that has been lived through.

The body is not fixed. It changes, repairs itself, transforms. At times, it escapes us. At others, we reject it or feel proud of it. These shifts often question us more than we expect.

To speak of repairing the body is not simply to speak of fixing something broken. It is to acknowledge that the body is alive, marked, and subjective. Any attempt at repair begins with listening.

In therapy, the body often speaks before words do.

It holds sensations. It carries memory. It functions as a living network, storing experiences long before they become narratives. Through the body, unresolved material can resurface—moments that could not be processed at the time they occurred.

Rather than pushing sensations away or containing them through effort alone, therapeutic work invites attention to how emotions take shape in the body. Where they settle. How they move. How they transform.

In EMDR, the body is not treated as a passive container.

It is a participant.

Sensations, movements, and bodily responses guide the process. The work does not aim to control the body, but to allow what has been held in isolation to reconnect and integrate.

Sometimes, change happens not because something is understood, but because the body is finally allowed to do what it could not do before.

Perhaps the question is not whether we own a body.

But how we relate to the one we live in.

And whether we are willing to listen when it speaks.