Covering and Self-Love
In his work Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, legal scholar Kenji Yoshino describes covering as any activity used “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.”
Hi, my name is Daniella Matutes and I am a recovering cover.
In order to survive my childhood, I developed many strategies and skills.
I became an expert at disassociation.
Collapse and faint.
I created worlds of escape. I remember my first somatic therapy session, I found a place in my body – an entire thriving jungle – where my feral, wild child lived.
When we live with monsters and there is no escape, our imagination, intuition, and creativity save our lives.
At this point in my recovery, I can see the gifts that came from this (not the trauma, the creative survival strategies). This is the foundation of much of my work.
One of the skills I honed was covering. In his work Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, legal scholar Kenji Yoshino describes covering as any activity used “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.”
In my work, I expand the definition from “fit in” to “to survive”…
When I investigated my matrilineal line as well as the mother line on my father’s side, we are a family of coverers. SAE and patriarchy depend on covering to thrive.
When we feel like we need to tone down a part of ourselves (or even deny a part of ourselves) to survive for most of our childhoods, our nervous system is biologically wired differently.
In my body, I have a lineage of women covering with an epigenetic activation of the survival need to cover, my wiring is designed towards covering and I choose to spend my day-job career in tech-bro culture.
Self-love and covering have a hard time co-existing in the same space. As I grow my capacity to love all the parts of myself, there have been intense moments of conflict in my body. The parts of me who feel safe by covering yell and scream at the parts of me that stand tall and lead, show up to be seen and heard and share wisdom.
I have a hypothesis that covering is endemic in the female body. It’s in our DNA to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream” – because the water we swim in is not just a pool of patriarchy but an ocean of misogyny. Our bodies feel like covering keeps us alive.
Learning and practicing self-love is brave. Courageous. A challenge to the very fabric of our culture. It can feel intense in our bodies. Unsafe. That makes so much sense.
When we’ve been taught that the entirety of self-love is taking a bubble bath and all of a sudden our internal ecology is crumbling and we feel all the physical sensations of that rebirthing… it feels threatening. Because it is… this is the journey that changes the world. One coverer at a time.
The good news? It’s never too late to start the practice of self-love. We can learn how to love ourselves at any point in our lives. And create a new foundation in our nervous systems where it feels safe to give and receive love to ourselves and others.
For more information on Self-Love Ceremonials go here.