Why Don’t I Know What I’m Feeling?
Tips on how to build the muscle of embodied awareness.
3 min read | Illustration by Mayara Lista
“How does that make you feel?” is a therapy trope many people dread being asked. Some even avoid getting started in therapy precisely because they don’t know how to answer it. It can be difficult to know what we’re feeling. In the 1970’s, psychologists even coined the term “alexithymia” to describe the experience of not knowing what you’re feeling.
But the truth is that many of us are able to feel our feelings, we just don’t take the time to feel them. Subtle feelings and sensations simply fly under the radar, and it is only when we slow down enough that we are able to notice them.
Attachment theory teaches that we are all born deeply alive with physical sensations, some of which we eventually learn to label as feelings. Some of us grow up learning to dampen these feelings because the environment told us it wasn’t safe to express them. Others have learned to protect ourselves from pain by wearing an armor so sophisticated that we mistake it for who we really are.
Many of us become so habituated to disowning our feelings that we lose the skills to access them. While we learn how to read and write in school, most of us have no formal education on how to go about the business of feeling. We have been taught to worship verbal ‘insight’ over the felt sense of what is true.
If you have difficulties identifying what you feel, there are some simple ways to build embodied awareness on your own. One way to begin this somatic process is to take a scan of your body. Start with your forehead and go down, passing through each body part. Pause at each body part and notice if the sensations feel pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
“While we learn how to read and write in school, most of us have no formal education on how to go about the business of feeling.”
You might start to notice all kinds of sensations you were previously unaware of. For example, you might feel pleasant tingly sensations in your fingertips or you might feel unpleasant tension in your lower back. Attending to these physical sensations will help you to improve the awareness of your felt experience.
You can also engage in a body scan where you focus on images based on what you feel. For example, if you go inside your chest, does it feel like a sunny day or a block of ice? The goal of a body scan is not to take an inventory of the body but rather to explore the aliveness of your felt experience.
Exploring movement and gesture with a somatic therapist can also help you more quickly access deeper-rooted feelings. At Downtown Somatic Therapy, we practice a variety of somatic modalities that help you notice your feelings in your body. AEDP, EFT, Gestalt and others all take the time to help patients slow down and notice their emotions.
Melanie Berkowitz, a senior therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy, says, “Sometimes I ask some patients to show me with their hands what they’re feeling, as these gestures often bring to the surface unconscious feelings that words can't.” Other times, a therapist might mirror a patients’ movements or gestures back to them to support their exploration of deep-rooted feelings.
“When you slow down, you start to notice all kinds of sensations you were previously unaware of.”
For example, Melanie recently worked with a patient who would start talking loudly and passionately about something only to soon trail off with clenched hands before finishing his thought.
“I pointed out this pattern to him and as we slowed down and explored his movements together, my patient got in touch with the sense that it felt safer to diminish his own excitement than to risk me witnessing his excitement and dismissing it as foolish.”
This is the kind of millisecond exchange that normally gets ignored when the body isn’t included in therapy. And recognizing this brought to the surface less-explored feelings of grief over how as a child his desires were not taken seriously.
The art of feeling is a worthy endeavor. With some simple tools and by attending to your sensations and movements curiously, you can begin to let yourself feel the aliveness that has been there all along.