It seems obvious that feelings are in the body rather than in the head but you wouldn’t think so to hear people.
‘I feel excluded and that I’m not enough for people. Everyone seems to be getting on with their lives successfully apart from me.’
‘I feel I should be working harder. I keep failing to keep up with my goals and let myself down.’
When we unpick these statements in therapy we often realise that on balance the underlying reality is different to how the person experiences themselves; that in fact they have more friends than they realise, are actually working at over-capacity and need to slow down; that their goals might need readjusting.
So if the truth is different and a person can see that, what are we left with? What is true? The feelings are true. We experience them. It can be very hard to get to that point, however. Often when I talk to people who make these statements, when we strip away the narrative and I ask them ‘what is the feeling’ they don’t know. They actually can’t feel anything. Or maybe they feel a glimpse of something – something painful in their chest, or a stirring in their belly. We give it a little longer and then there’ll be a slight opening: ‘I feel sad and alone’. I ask them where they feel this, they reply: ‘here in my heart space’.
Recently I had to cancel an entire week of work because I was ill. After struggling for a few days, I woke at four in the morning, worrying about how I would say to clients who were themselves struggling with anxiety and challenging feelings; that I couldn’t be there for them. I tried unsuccessfully to calm myself with consoling thoughts such as ‘you can’t help being ill’, and ‘you are only one person’, and ‘things will change. You will get better’. After struggling with this for a while, to no good effect, I finally gave up and found myself also giving in; giving into feeling. And what came up through the whole of my body was an overwhelming feeling of guilt. It was so powerful and I realised that a lot of my own coping strategies in life are about avoiding this incredibly powerful, negative feeling. Once I was able to give not the sense of the feeling in my body, I started to feel a little better: even though it was a deeply uncomfortable feeling, it was moving and I felt less frozen and stuck in my head.
Complex Feelings
One of the difficulties people have when they’re trying to connect with their feelings, is that they are complex: we might be feeling a mix of emotions all at the same time. Work with development in infancy tells us that little children cannot cope with complex feelings. They need an attuned caregiver to be with them, to meet them in this confusing and powerful place, to soothe them so that they know these feelings will pass. The neuroscientist, Allan Schore (Schore 1994) also tells us when we are first born we are at the mercy of the part of the brain called the amygdala which processes base feelings such as fear and a sense that things are not OK. We might postulate that infant’s feelings are not as refined as older children’s and often babies will swing in and out of primary feelings such as love, excitement, fear, grief; later they will learn shame, disappointment and sadness but things generally become more complex.
Guilt is a complex feeling born out of shame. We could perhaps talk about guilt as being shame but with thoughts attached.
We could imagine complex feelings as a box of different coloured woollen threads all tangled up together. I have used this as an exercise – eliciting from a client what perhaps they feel in their body at a given moment, and then asking them to choose a colour and to try to disentangle a thread from the others. What are they feeling? As they draw the thread away from the others, they often experience the said feeling moving through their bodies. And then…and then, another feeling emerges. We do the same process again and another feeling emerges. So we may move from anger to sadness to disappointment – all present in the body. The client notices how these feelings move: we generally say in body psychotherapy that feelings begin as stirrings in the belly, move upwards to be amplified in the chest (heart space), and get expressed through the eyes or mouth. In this exercise the client notices that this can happen all by itself without them having to ‘do’ anything.
Reaching a feeling
When people realise that it’s the feeling, not the story that matters in starting to feel better they can often become frustrated (another feeling!). What can I do with this feeling? How can I stay in touch with it, rather than going into my head and writing another narrative? Or rushing back into life to repeat the same old avoidance strategies I always get into? When they do start to actually ‘feel’ their feelings they realise they are huge. Often the sense of the feeling extends out from their bodies and fills the space around them. Containing the feeling in the body can seem initially impossible.
The answer is time. It takes time to slow down, notice what you’re feeling in your body and use the breath to regulate the cycle of the feeling. We also need another person – at least to begin with. If early on we realise no-one is there to support us in this we’ll learn strategies to inhibit and control our emotions.
It takes time and the help of others to learn to do things differently.