#8: where do you feel that in your body?
An essay about embodiment that I tried to have a robot write for me.
Hello. Happy new year and welcome to the first emotional labor issue of 2023, where I am once again joining you after an unparalleled procrastination effort, having gotten all of my inboxes down to zero unread emails, thoroughly edited multiple Spotify playlists, deleted and then re-downloaded instagram, and even experimented with having ChatGPT write this newsletter for me. It appears to finally be time to put it out in the world.
So.
One of my closest therapist friends says that the only question she can’t tolerate being asked in therapy is “where do you feel that in your body?”
“I’m like, it’s in my elbow,” she’ll say. “Can I continue my story now, please?”
I think about this all the time. She’s a narrative therapist, keen on specificity of language, with a firm belief in the power of being witnessed and having your experience reflected back to you as a catalyst for change. And she makes a good point. It is, if nothing else, an overused question. The kind of question you’d write into a screenplay in a therapy scene, a close second to “how does that make you feel?”
When you stop a client in the middle of a story to ask them where they feel whatever they are describing in their body, you can unwittingly seem like you aren’t interested in the content of what they have to say, distract them from their train of thought, or worse, invite shame. Maybe they don’t know where they feel it in their body. Or maybe the question just de-rails something else productive that was going on.
I’ve been dwelling on the use of this question quite a bit as I settle into my fourth year of being a therapist. Lately, I am reticent to say or do anything unintentional in therapy, becoming more and more opposed to the idea of poking around in a client’s life without direction or reason. So, what am I hoping to accomplish when I ask clients where they feel things in their bodies? Is it a fair game therapy question if you don’t know what to do with the answer?
First, let’s look at the theoretical underpinning of the question: the idea of embodiment and how it relates to mental health.
The American Psychological Association defines embodiment as “the thesis that the human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems) and its interactions with the physical environment. This concept emerged from work in late 20th century linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.”
To back up a bit: many seminal philosophers conceived of the mind and body as separate entities. (To massively oversimplify: In Descartes’ Meditations, the body is conceived of as a machine that works according to its own laws of operation, with the mind as a (crucially) separate control center, independent of the physical laws of nature, which essentially pulls levers to operate the machinery of the body, in order to influence bodily actions.) Theories of embodiment arose across multiple disciplines in response to these dualistic paradigms, and have greatly expanded the ways we think about how people operate in and relate to the world around us.
One of the most thought-provoking ways of understanding embodiment in the therapeutic context (imo) is Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy, developed by Ruella Frank. Frank proposes that the physical movement patterns that emerge between parents/caregivers and infants inform the basis for how we orient to the world as adults.
“Using a sequence of yielding, pushing, reaching, grasping, pulling, and releasing movements, a baby communicates what he wants and needs from his parents and expresses how he reacts to what his parents want and need from him. Through these macro-and micro-movement fundamentals, baby and parents co-construct and convey desires, feelings, and intentions. From the first adjustments of a baby yielding and pushing while on his belly in the first weeks of life to aid his digestion to the greater complexity of the older infant walking toward a parent to receive comfort, these movements become part of the baby’s efforts to self-regulate and regulate interpersonal relationships. They are essential to character development in that they become the preferred and routine ways we dynamically adjust, making them simultaneously psychological and physical by nature.” - Ruella Frank (quote pulled from this video)
In her workshops, Frank describes lying in the fetal position on the floor facing a client for multiple sessions, just… giving the therapy on the ground. “Making contact is easier once you have laid more ground,” she explains. Because the earliest state of being for infants is lying on the ground, her choice to meet the client in this early developmental position has the potential to serve as a reparative experience, especially if the client’s early experience with caregivers resulted in some unmet need.
Similarly, she experiments with standing side by side with a workshop participant, then turns face to face. The participant takes a few steps back, needing more space. “But when we go back here,” Frank says, turning sideways.
“I can be closer to you,” the participant replies.
Being face-to-face diminishes the participant’s potential to fully be together and present, so Frank uses the side-by-side posture to titrate or modulate their contact, allowing for significantly more closeness, while also bringing awareness to the participant of her own heightened sensitivity to front-facing contact.
“You have to know I’m with you in a particular way, and not to have that confrontation,” Frank says “but to know I’m here and it’s not too much.”
Inspired as I am by these ideas, the difficulty in my own work has always been: how? How do we get from “where do you feel that in your body?” to a desired end goal?
Yes, trauma lives in the body. Yes, the body keeps the score. I’ve read the literature; rarely does it provide a specific path forward. In actual therapy, the step-by-step manual gets throw out the window pretty fast. Also, how hard should I be working to increase a client’s capacity for embodied cognition when we consider the potential for invalidation and shame that inviting the body into the room can bring, the limited access to the body that zoom therapy offers, the inherently cognitive process that most people sign up for and perceive therapy to be?
I am certainly not lying on the floor with my clients in our zoom sessions. My therapist once invited me to lay on the floor and bang my fists against the ground (read: throw a tantrum) and I straight up laughed at her. So when we first started talking about the body in my foundational training year at The Relational Center, I always had the same question: “So what do we ask the client after we ask where they feel something in their body?
The answers I received were wholly unsatisfying: “depends what they say,” or “get curious about it,” and even sometimes “I don’t know.” I don’t know?!?!? You’re telling me to interrupt someone’s story to ask them “where do you feel that in your body,” and then when they answer… have no clue what to say next?
Slowly and not at all surely, I’ve begun to cultivate my own, very imperfect, very work-in-progress way to approach the greater line of inquiry this question attempts to answer.
First, allow me one more little tangential aside before we continue, to clarify the ways that embodiment is cultivated through the body’s three sensory feedback systems, and provide some practical examples of what that might look like:
Exteroception refers to the sensing of one’s external environment through the body/senses (see (eyes), hear (ears), taste (tongue), smell (nose), and touch (skin)). A basic grounding exercise like: “name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste” is one example of engaging exteroception to increase embodiment.
Proprioception, on the other hand, is the perception of the body’s relationship to gravity and the earth. As in, where are you in space? Are you standing up straight? Can you balance? Do you have spatial awareness of your body in your environment? Proprioceptive sensory information is accessed mostly through the joints and inner ear, then sent to the brain. Doing a downward dog, feeling your feet on the floor beneath you, or swaying back and forth are examples of utilizing proprioception to become more embodied.
Finally, interoception refers to the internal sensory experience of the body, think: hunger, satiation, alertness, fatigue, pain, temperature, etc. Interoceptive sensory information comes to the brain via muscles and organs, as well as connective tissue (fascia). Stretching, taking a drink of water, savoring a bite to eat, or taking a cold shower all utilize interoception to access one’s present-moment embodied experience.
Based on these three ways of processing, “where do you feel that in your body?” (interoceptive) is not the only way to access embodied knowledge. So, for clients who don’t know how to answer that, trying “what are you noticing in your environment right now?” Or “do you feel any impulses, urges, or sensations you can name as you talk about this?” might be more accessible ways to explore the same idea.
So, I start there. I see if the client makes any meaning of what comes up, check in with their interpretations before adding my own.
Then, I name that the nervous system has access to almost all of our internal organs, and is constantly working to regulate through the body by sending us signals that we are either safe or in danger. Many of these signals are physical, though we live in a society that tends to encourage us to numb our physical sensations and privileges thought as the primary mechanism for creating change. But there is a neurobiology to feeling safe that the body knows and senses, even when we aren’t conscious that it’s happening. When we don’t feel safe, our brains mobilize resources away from the thinking, values-aligned, logical brain (pre-frontal cortex) to use them for more urgent matters: fight, flight, and freeze responses meant to protect us from whatever threats we are sensing in our environment. To develop a better, more honest relationship with these responses (and the anxiety they produce), we must turn to the body.
This means that when we do begin to feel more embodied, the first things we start to un-numb from and notice are usually signs of danger, and therefore often uncomfortable. When you start asking yourself “where do you feel that in your body?” you will find the unpleasant comes before the pleasant: itchiness, restlessness, tingling, chest pain, nausea, headache, heartache, a pit in your stomach.
“Respectfully,” a client once said to me after I gave this little spiel, “why would I want to feel any of that?”
Again, a good point.
I didn’t say that to the client, though. Instead, I said something cliche about a light at the end of a tunnel and probably also weaved in the words “aliveness” and “joy.” At the time, I couldn’t personally vouch for a more embodied life. I was just following directions, trying to do my job.
But now.
Now I look at my future and see massive change. As I finish up my hours for MFT licensure and round first base on my 30s, every fancy cocktail I sip, sexy dress I wear, and spontaneous weeknight out feels like it could be my last, the final bite of dessert at the end of my youth. Imperative that I savor it! But also, melting in the spoon already.
Historically, dessert has always been a difficult part of the meal for me to enjoy. By dessert, everyone’s time and capacity are running out. People are mostly full, just taking in a few last bites, lingering in the experience of the meal. But the future looms: How soon will the check come? Are we splitting it? Where did everyone park? What are we doing after we leave the restaurant? Is anyone going to want to keep hanging out?
OK, end of dessert metaphor. The point is: I’m trying to relate to time differently, to choose to savor the present moment rather than count my gray hairs and watch the clock. And checking in with my body, listening to its urges, sensations, and impulses, creates fast-track access to the present moment. My memories of the best moments of being in my body are clear and sharp: skiing downhill too fast with my cheeks exposed to the wind, dancing around my kitchen, walking home from a cold night out and warming up along the way, remaining *precisely* on the beat for the entirety of “Music for A Sushi Restaurant” in a spin class. The small moments feel profoundly memorable too: a deep breath, a cold shower, a big stretch, a thorough cry.
Now, I have somehow made the journey back into my own body, and my “efforts to self-regulate” are exactly as Ruella Frank describes — “convey[ing] desires, feelings, and intentions,” “essential to character development,” “simultaneously psychological and physical by nature.”
I am sure I have not experienced this much physical sensation since childhood, or whenever it was I learned to feel less in order to better belong in the world. It is deeply grounding to feel so real, so sure of my body’s signals. It’s also totally overwhelming, learning that my body has been withholding all of this information for so long, that I’ve left it undiscovered until now.
I can’t speak for my clients. I can’t say: this journey is worth it! Embodiment: a must-do! I don’t know what it will feel like for anyone else. What I can say is: I feel like I have come home to myself, slipped back into my own skin, and I intend to stay here. I can also say, after two years of asking, that I have discovered one satisfactory (to me) answer to the question: where do you feel that in your body?
Everywhere.
Finally.
What a relief.
Thanks for reading! I am skipping the content recommendation section for this issue but welcome your feedback if you find yourself missing that. Back in your inbox in two weeks (hopefully on an actual Sunday this time).
Really loved this post -- it took a pretty heady concept and made it really accessible. It makes me wonder what parts of my own bodily experience I am ignoring or numbing myself to. Thank you for sharing your insight!