Feeling your Feelings: What does that even mean?!
By Rev. Katherine Sherrill M.A., LCMHC, MT-BC
Many of us know how we are feeling. We learn emotional vocabulary from a very young age. However, it can be confusing when you are starting therapy and you have a therapist ask–where or how are you feeling that emotion? What does that even mean!?
Your therapist is using techniques around Somatic Therapy. These therapeutic techniques work around assisting clients to be able to make the mind/body connections between our emotional lives and our physical ones. It can be vital to helping clients address long term stressors, getting clues into their psychological well-being, and working towards permanent change in their life. However, it can be strange to make that jump from thinking about feelings to actually physically identifying them and their symptoms. For many clients, I start with anger or stress and really dig into “How do you know that feeling is coming? Does your neck get tight, do you feel hot, or are you having trouble sitting on the couch watching a show?” All of these can be insights into early warning signs that something is coming and how we learn to manage them early can make a difference in their impact.
Emotional Intelligence is still one of the key insights that therapy can aid people in building. However, it doesn’t often help individuals with Emotional Regulation—which is often why people seek out treatment. We want to feel in control of our feelings and have tools to reset our system when things are going wrong. Somatic therapy has many forms (IFS, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, Polyvegal, EMDR, and Neuro Effective Model to name a few) and can be an excellent tool especially for individuals that feel like they have the cognitive part down. They know why they are feeling this way but they haven’t been able to tap into their physical self as a means of emotional awareness and regulation.
So maybe next time you have a strong emotion ask yourself….where am I feeling that feeling? Be curious—our minds are incredibly complex and it can give us clues about where to start in making ourselves feel whole again.
