When we consider our communication, it’s easy to see that we don’t think much about how our assumptions and our culture influence the stories that take shape in our minds, that ultimately form the words we share, or how we hear words that are shared with us. Consider these phrases:

• “Until this person loses some weight, there’s not much I can do for their joint pain.”

• “If they’d eat better and exercise more, they wouldn’t have this chronic inflammation.”

• “I don’t know what this person expects from me. They’re in a wheelchair.”

• “Of course, they have limited range of motion/swelling/pain. Plastic surgery is violent and totally unnecessary.”

I am deeply grateful to a colleague for calling on me to reconsider the language I used in my March/April 2021 Massage & Bodywork column (“Moving Out of the Fringes,” page 28) describing the cascade of behaviors that can accompany stress. I wrote about “being sedentary,” “habitual eating,” and a variety of other activities in which humans engage. The words I chose exposed my unconscious bias. I used some all-too-common phrases that paint our experience in these bodies of ours as linear threads of direct action and consequence. Presenting health and dis-ease in this way skips around and glosses over the deepest, most challenging issues of public health, which means skipping around and glossing over what it’s like to be a complex, multifaceted, culturally shaped human.

I didn’t mean to simplify the incredibly complex issue of stress. I didn’t mean to blame people who suffer from, and with, stress. But what I meant to do is irrelevant. My intention and my impact are not related in the way I wish they were.

Unfortunately, we all do this. Without noticing, we miss the point and perpetuate harmful systems and ways of thinking every day. When it is pointed out to us, we say, “I didn’t mean it,” and we move on feeling absolved of impact because we did not intend the harm we caused.

The ways people are—the things I labeled in my column last issue as “habits” and “behaviors” that lead our clients to seek out our care—are not the result of free will. We are products of our culture and our privilege (or lack thereof), supersized with a bonus of history, genetics, and public policy.

We find our clients (and ourselves) in pain, discomfort, and disconnected from their bodies. Our ideas, and the so-called choices they inform related to movement, food, or lifestyle, are inaccurately seen as each person’s fault. We dismiss and devalue the people we have chosen to care for. We say that “poor choices” are the problem, and we go on feeling “right,” as we provide insensitive care to people who are “wrong.” These ideas are deeply, insidiously, and harmfully implanted and upheld by the culture in which we live.

We (often unconsciously) use these ideas to support a hierarchy of who “deserves” and will “benefit” from our care. We use them when we think about our clients and what stands between them and the elusive experience of “wellness.” We believe we know what’s necessary to be “healthy,” and we tell stories in our heads about why and how our clients come to find themselves in need of what we do.

We use our “stories” to decide who is worthy and who is going to “get better” because of us and our guidance. And often our clients “tell on themselves” and reinforce their failings to these cultural beliefs. That doesn’t make them true. It just proves how indoctrinated we all are into the false healthy/unhealthy binary.

Awareness is required to dismantle these systems. Turning the mirror on ourselves comes first. Notice, does this make me uncomfortable? Am I justifying my categorization of clients in terms of “likely to benefit” or “not for me”? Please just sit with that.

Awareness is an incredibly powerful start to this work. Perhaps the greatest service we each can offer is to stop telling these wrong, judgment-based, hierarchical stories to ourselves so others can see there are better, more accurate, more compassionate healing stories available.