Do No Harm
DMs, microagressions, and body shaming...
The class was Society & the Individual, a course in my Masters program designed to scaffold awareness around white supremacy, minority injustice, and the trauma those systems perpetuate. As clinicians, it is imperative that we cultivate awareness around these systems. Our first rule is undoubtedly: do no harm.
Swimming in white waters and breathing white air may feel natural to a white woman like me. But to the BIPOC community? Not so much.
Our professor — a PhD, Black woman, skilled clinician — was sharing about microaggressions. She gave an example:
It was the first day of school and a white woman walked into class and said to her,
“Oh, your hair isn’t straight anymore. It looked better straight, like in your pictures.”
Inherently racist.
Straight hair is not genetically natural for many Black women. The implication is clear: you would look better with white features. Living in a white world, that can masquerade as “just a preference.”
It’s not.
The message underneath is: Don’t be so Black.
What the actual fuck?
Now — I want to pivot gently.
In high school I gained about 15 pounds. I was at boarding school. It was my first time away from home. I had gone from dancing three hours a day in California to barely dancing at all as a musical theatre major at Interlochen Arts Academy. I was homesick. I was eating chocolate bars and no-bakes because they were comforting. It wasn’t clinically significant. It was human.
And I loved my body then.
As I love my body now.
It is different now. I am older. I am mindful. I nourish myself. And especially given my history with my body and food, I treat it with respect.
Recently, I received a DM from someone I haven’t spoken to in almost 25 years telling me I look unwell. That I looked better in high school. That some women are meant to be skinny, but I am not one of them.
I’m sure it was meant to be helpful. Maybe even complimentary.
But commenting on someone’s body is not the move.
Again — what the actual fuck?
Now let me be clinically precise:
I am not equating microaggressions and racism with body shaming. Not one fucking bit. The systemic weight and historical trauma of racism is in a category of its own.
But the psychological mechanism beneath both incidents?
That’s worth examining.
Projection.
When we project, we take our internal discomfort, our standards, our fears, our “shoulds,” and we place them onto someone else.
You should look like this.
You should straighten your hair.
You should be thinner.
You should not be so Black.
You should be more like me.
Projection is an unconscious attempt to regulate the self by controlling the other. It’s also a power move. And it often hides behind the language of preference, concern, or advice. But here’s the thing: every time we “should” someone, we reveal ourselves.
We reveal:
Our internalized standards
Our unexamined bias
Our unresolved wounds
Our allegiance to a system we may not even realize we’re protecting
As clinicians — and as humans — our work is not to shift others into our comfort zone, it is to become aware of where we are projecting. Even onto ourselves.
Before you comment on someone’s body.
Before you critique someone’s hair.
Before you correct someone’s existence.
Pause and ask:
What part of me is uncomfortable right now?
What am I trying to control?
Whose standard am I enforcing?
And why?
Because “should” is rarely about the other person, it’s about our own anxiety. And if we are serious about doing no harm as humans, the work begins internally.
Not in someone else’s inbox.