Written by Jo Porritt, Integrative Somatic Therapist
Jo Porritt is an Integrative Somatic Therapist with a focus on supporting clients who have experienced trauma through a relational approach combined with psycho-education. Her primary objective is creating a safe environment where clients can become aware of and heal from unhelpful core beliefs and patterns of behaviour in the nervous system.
Do you often find yourself stuck in your head, ruminating about something upsetting that triggered intense or overwhelming emotions? Or perhaps you realise lately you’ve been using unhealthy coping mechanisms instead of tending to how you feel? Well you’re in good company, because most of us are habituated to thinking but not really feeling.
If I asked you to name an emotion, let’s say happiness, and then to name where you feel the sensation of that happiness in your body, could you tell me? Probably not! We’re never really taught this skill and it’s an important skill to develop if we want to manage our emotional landscape. If you’re looking to learn how to move from intellectualising your feelings to experiencing them, read on as this piece is designed to help you understand why you do this and how to instigate change.
Why do we intellectualise emotions?
We live in a culture that rewards productivity and doing. Our educational systems and work structures are designed to keep us primarily in our heads. We are rewarded for our intellectual prowess, but not necessarily for our emotional intelligence. So we are already habituated to being in our thinking brain but not our feeling body. We tend to stay stuck here because at some point in our lives, usually childhood, we may have learnt that feeling our feelings was painful.
This can happen when our emotional needs aren’t met by an attuned caregiver or perhaps we hear messages like “Crying is for babies!” so we interpreted having feelings as being somehow less than or weak. We learn quickly as children that hiding these feelings keeps us connected to our caregivers and our brains are hardwired to prioritise this for our survival. Staying connected to “our tribe” is a priority; we learn to choose attachment over expressing our authentic emotional needs very quickly.
What happens when we continue suppressing our feelings as adults?
When we are little, we don’t have the agency or the language to express the pain that is caused by the rejection from our caregivers, so we internalise the core belief that we must be defective in some way. If our emotions are met with disapproval or anger or silence, this is really painful for a child. And in order to not feel this pain again, we develop defences in order to escape the painful reminders. These defences stop us feeling the intensity of our emotions and we often remain stuck in patterns of behaviour that never allow us to truly connect with our needs. We cut ourselves off from the feelings and sensations in our bodies that are generated by emotions and instead stay in our thinking minds. We try to process things with intellectualisation and rationalisation and may find ourselves stuck in obsessive patterns of rumination.
The suppression of emotions sends the message from our bodies to our brains, via the vagus nerve, that we are unsafe. The brain tries to find safety by keeping us stuck in the patterns we created way back when, when we had no other choice. But as adults, we need to learn that we do have agency now and we are, hopefully, safe enough to look at healthier ways to meet ourselves and our emotional needs.
So how do we do this?
Identifying emotional defences
There are many ways that we learn to not feel our feelings, and these clever defences helped us survive emotional stress as children, but as adults, might now be keeping us stuck. These behavioural patterns can get in the way of us connecting with our true needs, our authentic self, and from forging healthy relationships.
In order to start to connect with the underlying emotions that defences protect us from feeling, we need to first learn to cultivate awareness so that we can a) identify and name our defences, and b) create some distance between us and the defensive behaviours in order that we aren’t so consumed and over-identified with them.
Some of the common defences that I see when working with clients might look like:
Rumination
Over-working
Perfectionism
Addictions (food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex)
Controlling tendencies
People pleasing
Aggression
Humour
Downplaying or minimising our needs
This list of defences is by no means exhaustive; we can come up with any number of creative ways to not feel our painful feelings. Start to see if you can observe your own particular defences and notice when and how these might show up for you.
5 tips to move from defending to feeling emotions
1. Become a curious observer
We can’t change anything until we develop awareness. Can you start to bring awareness to how you might be using some of the defences listed above? Start by noticing your behaviour when you are particularly upset or triggered. Notice what comes up for you and see if you can start to develop some curiosity around your defences; don’t make them wrong, just notice and start to name or make a note in your journal of how you stop yourself from feeling.
2. Develop self-compassion
Being gentle with yourself, especially as you start to notice and name your defences, will help your body to learn it is safe to be less armoured. Cultivating self-compassion can help you navigate changes with greater ease. Remember these defences from feeling were once needed and protective; can you start to thank those defences and let them know you are grateful for their protection, but let them know that you now need to move beyond their restriction?
3. Start to notice the sensations in your body
Being able to name some of your body’s basic sensations and get used to responding to these in the present moment is the easiest way to start building that interoceptive awareness. Can you name when your body tells you it is tired? How do you know what that feeling is? What tells you that you feel tired? Name the sensations and feelings that come with that knowledge. This helps us build the skill of tuning into our internal sensations which is how we also know what we are feeling emotionally.
4. Naming specific emotions
Once you start to become more aware of your body’s basic sensations like hunger, thirst, needing to move or sleep and how these feel, you can start to name the sensations that arise as you are naming specific emotions. If you notice that you are starting to feel angry, how does that show up in your body? Maybe you can notice tightness in your jaw or shoulders? Perhaps there are sensations of heat or constriction? Start to really slow down and name to yourself the emotion and the associated sensations in the body.
5. Allowing emotional expression
Now that you can notice specific emotions, can you allow that emotion to be there long enough to feel it and allow it to express itself to completion? This is such an important part of emotional regulation. We are designed to feel our emotions and allow them to express so that the associated physiological changes in our bodies can complete. When we suppress emotion and stay stuck in thinking, we are storing up all of the associated chemical and hormonal responses which in time, can lead to chronic symptoms and long term disease. Try to imagine your body creating more space for that emotion as you name the sensations. This helps the brain to calm down and allow the emotion without the defences being needed.
Come home to yourself
When we begin to move towards noticing our patterns and learning how they feel in our body, it can feel strange and unnatural at first. But know that this is the most natural thing in the world! As humans we are designed to feel our feelings and notice what they want us to do in order to move us towards action or take care of a need. They help guide us towards knowing ourselves and keeping us in touch with where we might need to make adjustments. Knowing how we feel and being able to be with our emotions is a practice, especially if you have been habituated to staying stuck in thinking.
I work with clients in person and online to help them start to develop this somatic awareness. Sometimes this work is really hard to do on your own, so if you feel you need support to help you move closer to yourself, you can book a free Discovery Call with me here.
Related reading: Interoception: The Hidden Sense That Shapes Wellbeing
Read more from Jo Porritt
Jo Porritt, Integrative Somatic Therapist
Jo Porritt blends Somatic Psychology, Compassionate Inquiry and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy to bring clients to an awareness of their maladaptive patterns through the body-mind. Her own journey of living with chornic auto-immune disease and a background of adverse childhood experiences has greatly informed her therapeutic approach and capacity for working with trauma. She believes that working with clients through a combination of understanding their behavioral patterns with processing through the body is the most powerful way to facilitiate health and lasting change. Her mission is to help trauma survivors uncover and connect with the biography held in their bodies and learn how to process this through safe, relational connection.
