The Click That Made Me Make Sense: BDD, Chronic Pain, and the Body’s Quiet Corrections

CW: Body dysmorphia, BDD (body dysmorphic disorder), dissociation, chronic pain, EDS/chronic illness, description of perceptual distortion

There are moments when I feel like my face snaps into place. Not metaphorically - literally. One moment, it’s all warped geometry: nose too long, cheek over-inflated. And then something shifts in my neck or spine - a joint realigns - and suddenly, the mirror makes sense. My face reappears.

That’s not poetry. That’s proprioception.

Or trauma. Or both.

For a long time, I understood my relationship with body dysmorphic disorder as purely cognitive: obsessive loops and distorted self-image. It fit. I compulsively checked mirrors and was confused and upset by what I saw - but I wasn’t sure what, exactly, was wrong.

I later learned it wasn’t just BDD. It was BDD shaped by disrupted interoceptive and proprioceptive awareness. It was trauma logic + hEDS (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) + masking fatigue + chronic muscle tension layered into a singular perceptual glitch. My nervous system couldn’t tell where I was in space. My pain wasn’t just pain - it was evidence of misalignment. That misalignment extended to my visual field. When my body couldn’t find its own edges, my reflection warped to match.

The dislocation was physical, and the betrayal was cognitive.

When I say healing has been a spectrum, I mean that literally: my recovery is a gradient of click-points and clarities. Therapy helped. Insight helped. But sometimes, what helps most is a rib sliding home. Suddenly, my face would look like mine.

For someone whose BDD felt like a shame-powered optical illusion - that kind of clarity felt divine.

But it also felt fragile. Because if one anatomical glitch could restore my reflection, didn’t that mean it could be lost again just as easily?

The feedback loop is tight:

→ Pain creates tension.

→ Tension distorts proprioception.

→ Distorted proprioception feeds perceptual dysmorphia.

→ Dysmorphia intensifies stress.

→ Stress amplifies pain.

And when you finally do get a reprieve - when a shoulder resets or a jaw lets go - the mirror becomes a site of reunion with the shape you’d been trying to remember. The one the pain blurred out.

I live in a body where minor structural events have major perceptual consequences. I write this not to suggest that “alignment” is a universal cure for BDD - it’s not. But for some of us, especially those of us with connective tissue disorders or sensory processing differences, there is a somatic component to the distortion that deserves more attention than it gets.

My recovery didn’t start with physical therapy. It started with someone seeing me and staying and with the slow unlearning of shame. But sometimes, healing clicked - in the precise moment my spine did.

We talk about body dysmorphia like it’s all in your head. But heads live in bodies.

I’ve also learned to believe my body when it says: you’re out of place, and that’s part of why you can’t see yourself in a way that makes sense.

Sometimes, healing is a slow process.

Sometimes, it’s a click.