Just this morning, I caught my youngest son swearing.
I’ve heard him swear before, but this one wasn’t even a word I knew he had in his vocabulary.
I was feeling tired. My patience already worn thin, and I had three different reactions fighting it out in my head.
Do I go all bad-cop on him? Take away something he loves? Sit him down and have a gentle chat? I genuinely didn’t know which one was right.
And for a second, I thought about asking ChatGPT what to do. I’m not even joking. I had my phone in my hand.
Then I caught myself and thought, what are you doing? You know this kid. You know what’s actually going on for him today. You know what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You don’t need a script. You need to trust what you already know.
So I put the phone down, and I dealt with it the way my gut, and nine years of knowing this particular child, told me to.
It went well. He understood. (He also now knows what the word actually means 😬). He apologised to his brother. His brother apologised back. End of story.
But it got me thinking about how often we do this. Not with parenting, with our bodies.
As women, a lot of us have learned to outsource our bodies. To trust someone else’s read on what’s happening in there over our own instinct, even when that instinct is telling us something useful.
At its mildest, I’ve seen this look like a woman wanting hard and fast rules. Exactly which exercises are allowed, exactly which ones to avoid, so there’s no risk of getting it wrong.
At its most extreme, I’ve seen it look like a woman who stopped turning her head completely, because a professional once told her it was “bone on bone” and any movement would cause more damage 😳.
Just to be clear, this isn’t about ignoring expertise, or deciding you don’t need support. You absolutely can lean on someone who knows anatomy and injury well. That’s not the problem.
The problem is when that knowledge becomes a replacement for your own, instead of an addition to it. When you stop checking in with your body altogether and just wait to be told what’s allowed.
Because the goal isn’t to never ask for help. It’s to take what someone else knows about bodies in general, and use it to understand your body specifically. Your experience, your sensations, your version of what’s safe and what’s not.