Written By Jason Sugg
One refrain you will hear from somatically-informed therapists over and over again is the question “What are you feeling in your body?” This question is both highly informative for the therapist and often highly confusing for clients. So let’s dig a little into why we ask it.
There is this widespread misconception in European-descended cultures that mind and body are separate things, an idea that goes back almost 500 years to the French philosopher Rene Descartes. I deconstruct this idea in this post, but as a quick summary we now know that mind and body are two aspects of the same thing. We might say that mind is the experience of being a body in the world, not something totally separate and unrelated.
Emotions, in particular, are complex experiences that are the result of the intersection of bodily-based sensations and brain-based rules of emotion and cognition, received fully or in part from the cultural attitudes we grow up around. Take anger, for example – an emotion that involves a sense of danger due to the perception of an infraction on our boundaries. Most of us have plenty of access to the cognitive rationalizations of why this or that thing has made us angry. But anger also inevitably comes with activation in the body – typically some tightness in the chest and/or shoulders, sometimes a buzzing or tingling in the arms or legs, and more, though the specifics may vary.
These somatic markers (“somatic” means “of the body” and somatic therapies are therapies that address what is happening in the body as well as in the mind) aren’t just peripheral to the experience of anger. Rather, anger is the experience of the brain’s attitudes meeting this information coming up from the body. And as long as the body remains in this activated state, you will continue either to experience anger or to dissociate the emotion altogether, which means it’s still present in your body but your brain is no longer registering it.
The emotion doesn’t really go away until you return your body – and in particular your nervous system – to a calm state. Your cognitive story follows the bodily state. So all the thinking you do about it is much ado about nothing – if you don’t deal with the bodily experience in an integrated way then the emotion will just continue to come out sideways. That might look like snapping at your partner or kids, or it might look like a persistent self-attack or low mood that you just can’t seem to make sense of.
Addressing only the thinking part of the equation can, in fact, make things worse, as our thoughts become new perceptions, which in turn entrench the emotional state. I’m sure you’ve noticed this – you get worked up about some issue and there’s a rant going in your thoughts, and the more you internally rant about it the angrier you get. To get out of the loop you have to interrupt the feedback loop between thought and emotion by placing your focus as purely as possible on the actual sensation.
So, as somatically-informed therapists, we are always trying to tie what you are experiencing in the moment back to what is happening in your body, because that is where the loop can most easily be interrupted. Working with these affects and moods at a bodily-level offers a tremendous amount of leverage for taking charge of runaway emotional states, including loops of anxiety and depression.
Jason Sugg
