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Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm: A Somatic Guide to Forgiving and Healing Your Relationship with Your Body
A compassionate guide for women seeking to heal the rift with their bodies, from a somatic psychotherapist. Follow a step-by-step, research-based series of somatic practices to help you forgive, reconnect with, and trust your body.
If you’ve spent years feeling at odds with your body, you are not alone—and you are not to blame. Our culture encourages women to mistrust, judge, and disconnect from their bodies, perpetuating cycles of shame and self-criticism. Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm gently helps you break free from these patterns and begin a new, nurturing relationship with your body.
Each chapter offers gentle guidance, reflective exercises, and trauma-informed somatic practices to help you uncover the roots of disconnection and attune to your body’s wisdom. Thoughtfully structured, your journey begins by establishing a foundation of understanding and compassion, then moves through the tender work of meeting grief, regret, shame, and forgiveness.
Drawing on her clinical expertise and original research, somatic psychotherapist Ann Saffi Biasetti provides a safe and supportive path for women ready to move beyond self-criticism and rediscover a sense of wholeness. With warmth and care, she guides you through each stage of body forgiveness, offering support that helps you feel seen, understood, and empowered to create lasting change.
Whether you struggle with body image disturbance, disordered eating, illness, aging, or simply long to feel at home in your body, this book provides clear guidance and gentle encouragement. It is an invitation to return to yourself, embrace your body with kindness, and experience a more connected, embodied life.
If you’ve spent years feeling at odds with your body, you are not alone—and you are not to blame. Our culture encourages women to mistrust, judge, and disconnect from their bodies, perpetuating cycles of shame and self-criticism. Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm gently helps you break free from these patterns and begin a new, nurturing relationship with your body.
Each chapter offers gentle guidance, reflective exercises, and trauma-informed somatic practices to help you uncover the roots of disconnection and attune to your body’s wisdom. Thoughtfully structured, your journey begins by establishing a foundation of understanding and compassion, then moves through the tender work of meeting grief, regret, shame, and forgiveness.
Drawing on her clinical expertise and original research, somatic psychotherapist Ann Saffi Biasetti provides a safe and supportive path for women ready to move beyond self-criticism and rediscover a sense of wholeness. With warmth and care, she guides you through each stage of body forgiveness, offering support that helps you feel seen, understood, and empowered to create lasting change.
Whether you struggle with body image disturbance, disordered eating, illness, aging, or simply long to feel at home in your body, this book provides clear guidance and gentle encouragement. It is an invitation to return to yourself, embrace your body with kindness, and experience a more connected, embodied life.
- GenresNonfictionSelf Help
288 pages, Paperback
Published July 21, 2026
About the author
Ann Saffi Biasetti
3 books10 followersHi I'm a Transpersonal Psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in somatic psychotherapy and eating disorder recovery.
I'm the creator of Embodied Self-Compassion (ESC) and the Befriending Your Body (BFYB) program, as well as a certified yoga therapist, yoga teacher, and respected trainer in interoceptive awareness and
self-compassion.
I'm the author of Befriending Your Body and Awakening Self-Compassion Cards. She teaches for PESI (Professional Education Systems Institute) and the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, and has led workshops, retreats, and professional trainings in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
I love doing podcasts and am a frequent podcast guest and a featured author in The Handbook of Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy. I maintain a private practice in Saratoga Springs, New York, and am dedicated to fostering self-compassion, embodiment, and community through my writing, teaching, and clinical work.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 30, 2026
I will treasure this wise and profound book and I know I will return to it often. Dr. Ann weaves her inspirational personal story into her writing in a way that models and illuminates the self compassion, forgiveness and embodiment wisdom she is sharing with us.
Every day, as I read more reflected and explored the new practices in each chapter experienced more healing integration and transformation. I am grateful for the gift appealing that I found in these pages.
For those of us who are doing the countercultural work of befriending our bodies, she shows us both the way and helps us see our own path forward. This is a practical book full of detailed instructions for each readers own journey. It is also a book that offers us hope for peace, freedom, and healing as we come home to our bodies more and more.
Every day, as I read more reflected and explored the new practices in each chapter experienced more healing integration and transformation. I am grateful for the gift appealing that I found in these pages.
For those of us who are doing the countercultural work of befriending our bodies, she shows us both the way and helps us see our own path forward. This is a practical book full of detailed instructions for each readers own journey. It is also a book that offers us hope for peace, freedom, and healing as we come home to our bodies more and more.
August 9, 2026
Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm is, without question, the best book I have read on embodiment, body forgiveness, and compassion.
I have worked in the fields of eating disorders and food addiction for many years, and one of the things that struck me so deeply about Ann Saffi Biasetti’s work is that it offers us a profoundly different pathway for healing our relationship with our bodies.
So much traditional body image work still focuses on looking at the body: how we see it, how we think about it, how we evaluate it, and how we might learn to accept its appearance. But embodiment invites us somewhere much deeper. It helps us move away from constantly looking AT the body and begin learning how to actually live IN the body. That distinction is enormous.
Ann beautifully explains how disembodiment happens, why it has become so prevalent in our culture, and how many of us learned to disconnect from our bodies as a way of surviving, coping, belonging, or protecting ourselves. There is so much compassion woven throughout this understanding. Instead of treating the body as the problem, this book helps us recognize that our bodies were never trying to harm us. They have been communicating, protecting, adapting, and carrying us all along.
The reflection exercises throughout the book are exceptional. They do not simply give us more things to think about. They invite us to slow down, become curious, listen inwardly, and begin experiencing ourselves differently.
This is the kind of work I have found transformative both personally and professionally. It has helped me in my own relationship with my body, and I have watched embodiment practices help so many of my clients begin to experience their bodies as places they can inhabit rather than objects they must constantly monitor, control, criticize, or change. For me, this is where healing lives.
Not in finally achieving the "right" body or convincing ourselves to love everything we see in the mirror, but in learning to come home to ourselves. To listen. To feel. To forgive. To reconnect with the wisdom of the body and begin building a relationship with it based on compassion rather than judgment.
Thank you, Ann, for writing what feels like a roadmap home. This book offers a beautiful pathway toward healing our relationship with food, with ourselves, and with our bodies. I will be returning to it often and recommending it for years to come.
I have worked in the fields of eating disorders and food addiction for many years, and one of the things that struck me so deeply about Ann Saffi Biasetti’s work is that it offers us a profoundly different pathway for healing our relationship with our bodies.
So much traditional body image work still focuses on looking at the body: how we see it, how we think about it, how we evaluate it, and how we might learn to accept its appearance. But embodiment invites us somewhere much deeper. It helps us move away from constantly looking AT the body and begin learning how to actually live IN the body. That distinction is enormous.
Ann beautifully explains how disembodiment happens, why it has become so prevalent in our culture, and how many of us learned to disconnect from our bodies as a way of surviving, coping, belonging, or protecting ourselves. There is so much compassion woven throughout this understanding. Instead of treating the body as the problem, this book helps us recognize that our bodies were never trying to harm us. They have been communicating, protecting, adapting, and carrying us all along.
The reflection exercises throughout the book are exceptional. They do not simply give us more things to think about. They invite us to slow down, become curious, listen inwardly, and begin experiencing ourselves differently.
This is the kind of work I have found transformative both personally and professionally. It has helped me in my own relationship with my body, and I have watched embodiment practices help so many of my clients begin to experience their bodies as places they can inhabit rather than objects they must constantly monitor, control, criticize, or change. For me, this is where healing lives.
Not in finally achieving the "right" body or convincing ourselves to love everything we see in the mirror, but in learning to come home to ourselves. To listen. To feel. To forgive. To reconnect with the wisdom of the body and begin building a relationship with it based on compassion rather than judgment.
Thank you, Ann, for writing what feels like a roadmap home. This book offers a beautiful pathway toward healing our relationship with food, with ourselves, and with our bodies. I will be returning to it often and recommending it for years to come.
September 14, 2026
Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm is the book that feels like coming home to yourself. The book to read when you’re having a hard day, a reminder that there is nothing wrong with you. It’s a safe space, a reading to come back to over and over, filled with the kindness and compassion you would offer to a loved one.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews