If you’ve ever been in therapy, odds are you’ve been on the receiving end of questions such as “how does that make you feel?” or “where do you feel that in your body?”. While this line of inquiry can make people uncomfortable at times, it’s imperative that some attention is brought to feelings and bodily sensations in the therapy room. If we acknowledge that the mind and body are irrevocably connected and existing in tandem at any given moment, it starts to make sense why the body cannot be left behind while we speak purely of thoughts and expect to see great change. We would miss out on a major part of the big picture. In fact, the desire to keep therapy restricted to the intellectual level can keep people stuck for longer than necessary.

Why we leave the body

This is not to say that feeling disconnected from our internal experience or what we feel in the body is a bad thing. For any number of reasons, it is possible that this disconnection helped us survive overwhelming situations in the past. When the mind suspects that we are in such a difficult position that it will be impossible to feel everything and still get to the other side, it brings our attention out of the body and into the mind to create a relative feeling of safety. When this pattern repeats over time, we get the message that feelings are unsafe and it would be better to stay in the mind. This can be the reason why people can talk and write and ruminate endlessly over what they are going through without ever reaching an end to their thoughts. The problem is that we expect our thinking organ to do the job of feeling, when the feeling can only be done by the body.

Feelings move like waves

Getting out of this pattern requires having a bit of faith in our own ability to do hard things, and some knowledge of how the body actually processes feelings and internal sensations. The underlying principle is that of homeostasis: the body will always attempt to return to a healthy baseline. We notice this principle in action when we start to sweat on a hot summer day or shiver when it’s cold out. Through the sweating mechanism, our body temperature falls and through shivering, it rises. In both cases, our bodies are designed to do whatever is needed to return back to a normal temperature so that we do not suffer any ill effects. The same is true for feelings as well. While we can think that truly feeling our anxiety will keep us in a heightened state of stress for a long time, the truth is the opposite:

The raw feelings associated with anxiety, if we can commit to making space for them, will rise and then fall like a wave — often lasting under two minutes.

This completes the disrupted feeling cycle by taking us out of our minds and back into the body.

Another important aspect of feeling your feelings is practicing non-judgment. Judging yourself for having a feeling also disrupts the feeling cycle because it carries the message that our current internal reality is not acceptable, that it is negative or shameful in some way and should quickly be changed. Getting stuck in “I should not be feeling this way” or “I hate that I always get so anxious when other people are fine” only serves to prolong the suffering. In order to feel a feeling, we first have to accept that it exists and only then we can expect to move through it.

A word of caution

Feeling your feelings is not always a straightforward process, and should be attempted with caution. If we are not adequately prepared and attempt to process too much too quickly, this can cause flooding and lead to an even greater fear of feeling. Therapists try to stay closely attuned to how much a client can handle at any given moment and tread these lines carefully. Sometimes people have felt so much pain and fear in their bodies that the idea of feeling anything at all has become unpleasant to behold. However, when we numb pain, fear and other negative feelings, we also inevitably numb ourselves to sensations of pleasure and joy. In order to open ourselves back to the full spectrum of the human experience, learning how to feel your feelings (perhaps under the guidance of a professional) can be a worthwhile endeavour.