The changing rooms

It begins as a conversation around self-care. He describes his early-morning routine: waking up before it's light, jogging to the gym, lifting weights that exercise different muscle groups to failure for ninety minutes before the run back, arriving home in time to wake his daughter up for school. He has done this for as long as he can remember, five days a week, whatever the weather.

Now in his fifties, he is beginning to notice plateaus in his progress, limits in how much weight he can lift and how much more prone to injury his body seems to have become. He describes how, when injured, missing a day in the gym can derail him – his work, his relationships, his self-confidence, and even how he looks in the mirror after only one missed session. What began as a discussion about his self-care seems to have shifted to one about compulsion and preservation.

In our first session, Simon talks about his sense of being behind in life. He describes an embodied sense of anxiety around a feeling of having to catch up and watching people around him, colleagues and friends, navigate life with an ease not available to him. He describes how an anticipation of judgment has curtailed his ambitions: "What would they think if I fell short?" A part of him knows that by most measures, he is reasonably successful, but what he has achieved and how he feels about himself do not align, and that gap has been there for as long as he can remember.

How childhood shapes our sense of self

Simon remembers being at school at about nine years old. He vividly recalls the changing rooms before and after PE. He describes noticing how effortlessly other boys changed into clean and fitting PE kits and how nothing ever seemed to be forgotten. They would put on their kits, go out, come back and then change back into uniforms they had been able to fold and hang, all seamless and unremarkable.

For Simon, it was anything but: his PE kit, part or all of it, was often forgotten; it was often unwashed; his uniform didn't seem to fold in the same way as the other boys', and he would leave the changing rooms feeling conspicuously unkempt. Simon remembers watching the others, their ease with their bodies, their unconscious competence, and wondering whether whatever they had was something that could be learned, or whether he was simply, somehow, innately less.

In a later session, Simon reflects on very early memories, ones that seem on the cusp of the darkness of infancy. He recalls a perspective of things happening in his home that didn't seem to be happening in other homes. His father was chronically unwell in ways that were frightening, unpredictable and inexplicable. He remembers the shouting and the smashing of plates as his parents' marriage disintegrated.

As he talks, I am struck by his embodied reaction to his memories and by how, as a young child, he wouldn't have been able to name any of this; rather, he would have felt it, the tension, the unpredictability that seemed infused into the walls of his home, into himself, which made ordinary life seem effortful in ways it didn't seem for his young peers. This was absorbed before he had the language for it or any say in the matter, before he could discern that what he was feeling was because of what was happening around him and not because of who he was.

One of the quieter casualties of a difficult childhood is the distinction between something that happened to you and something true about you. Young Simon lacked the framework to differentiate, and his circumstances became who he was. His troubled home became evidence for a person who didn't fit, didn't quite work, and who seemed to struggle when others moved through life with comparative ease, in the school changing rooms, at work or in his relationships. In Transactional Analysis, this is known as the I'm Not OK position, a settled sense that there is something wrong with you, formed before you had any say in the matter, a sense that quietly affects everything that follows.

It shaped what Simon did with his body. The ease he noticed in other boys with their bodies became, in a way, a standard for him to meet. He pushed his body to its limit and sometimes dangerously beyond, becoming a serious athlete. From the outside, this looked like commitment and discipline, yet for Simon it felt more complicated: a Sisyphean attempt through physical effort to address deeply held psychological beliefs that he had about himself.

When he didn't exercise, or more recently, when noticing his older body's growing limitations, a familiar depression took hold, the I'm Not OK position surfacing without the exhausting, physical answer his body had been providing. His exercise had never been about fitness; it had been about managing a verdict.

A different experience through counselling

In the counselling room, Simon has been able to examine this verdict, the I'm Not OK position, as opposed to simply living inside it. He has been able to look at the tendrils from his past that have caused and sustained it, including his early family life and the school changing rooms, and something has begun to shift. His compulsive exercise isn't changing overnight, but as the sessions pass, he is starting to see that the standard he has been painfully chasing was never really about his body. This awareness in itself is not a cure, but it is, perhaps for the first time, the beginning of a different conversation with himself.

Please note: this is a composite account drawn from clinical experience. All identifying details have been changed and drawn from multiple sources. It does not represent any single individual.