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, relational space where clients can become aware of and begin to shift unhelpful core beliefs and patterns of behaviour.
For decades, traditional psychotherapeutic approaches have ignored the body. That is to say, it is dominated by talk therapy. The therapist and client approach the issues that the client has had trouble with together, and they focus on the situation and the surrounding thoughts and feelings that might arise as a result.
This of course still has many benefits, not least the ability for the client to acknowledge the problems she feels she can’t manage and for the therapist to appear as the attuned witness, validating the experience and the feelings of the client.
However, whilst this way of processing through talk therapy is happening, other very important responses are being overlooked.
The latest science around how we think, process emotion and then behave is increasingly establishing that cognition, emotion and behaviour are dependent on both the brain and the body and our environment.
“Findings from research on the physiology of emotions shows that an emotional response, especially a difficult one, potentially involves the entirety of the brain and body physiology. This is because an emotional response to a situation is an assessment of the impact of that situation on the wellbeing of the whole organism.” – Dr Raja Selvam, Integral Somatic Psychology
Ignoring the involvement of the body in any of these interrelated functions can impact all three areas and, overall, reduce our emotional and physical health.
The practice of body psychotherapy established that when we can’t tolerate emotional experiments and the accompanying sensations in our bodies, physiological defences are created in the form of things like muscular tension, constriction and changes in multiple body systems. We go on to form defensive patterns around feeling our feelings.
Why do we need to learn to tolerate our emotions?
When we make the body available for the full expression and sensation of our emotions, it enhances overall well-being. In it’s most basic format, we might be able to recognise that we move from “feeling bad” to “feeling good.”
The more we practice emotional embodiment, the more we have the capacity to understand why we feel the way we do, how to work with it when it surfaces and then develop the awareness to notice how this has improved how we feel.
If we stay stuck in the cognitive process of thinking about our emotions and not learning to actually feel them and tolerate them in the body, we interrupt and cut short the vital cues the body is sending about things we need to respond to. By learning how to identify and acknowledge a varied range of emotional responses and how these make us feel, we build up a tolerance.
Instead of constricting around an emotional response and interrupting the process of emotional regulation, we reinforce the belief in the brain and the body that feeling our feelings has negative connotations.
We further reinforce this by then identifying with the thinking that forms around these experiences. We begin to label and see anything remotely unfamiliar or uncomfortable within our emotional range as “bad”; when the reality is simply our bodies are responding to sensation that we haven’t allowed to come into our full experience.
The more we move away from the sensations and feelings, the more constriction the body creates in order to “hold down” the discomfort. The irony is that we need to learn how to move towards, not away, from these sensations. Long term suppression and constriction in the physical body against feeling can change body systems on many levels; everything from shortening breath and the impact this has on the brain/body to creating lasting changes in our posture which can negatively effect vital bodily processes.
Once we learn to tolerate emotional sensations in the brain and the body, we develop a greater capacity for processing not just our traumatic pasts but for being able to meet life from a place of deep health. We understand that whilst we cannot control what happens “out there”, we have a great deal of agency around how we respond to life’s challenges.
The analogy of picking up a heavy bag
If we try lifting up a really heavy bag with just one finger from one hand, it’s going to feel very difficult. We’re going to find it stressful and likely, painful. We might not even be able to do it.
Now think about picking up the bag but using the whole body.
Use the legs, knees, and back to bend properly in order to support your weight so that you can then use both arms and hands to lift the bag.
When we do this, we spread the discomfort or stress of the experience through the body. We allow the body to create the environment to lift the heavy bag with little discomfort.
We then realise when we step back to notice the difference between these two approaches that bringing in more of our body to support us felt easier.
Repeating this approach then wires the brain and body to respond positively to future situations and heavy bags, not to feel fear or worry, because we know we have the ability to tolerate the required stress to complete the action!
The positives of learning to feel our emotions using the integration of both the brain and the body
In addition to the “heavy bag” analogy above becoming a positive or neutral one, the more we develop our capacity for tolerating emotions, the more our bodies learn that they don’t need to become stressed or defended in the face of uncomfortable feelings.
We realise:
Over time, we suffer less physical and/or psychosomatic symptoms. This is especially important when we live with chronic health symptoms. By the time symptom patterns have become chronic, the body has learnt to create a more defended “armour” against feeling. So in contrast, when we learn how to tolerate uncomfortable emotions in the body, we begin to let the body and brain know they can start to process both past and future. That we can tolerate discomfort and in doing so things feel better
We realise our inter-personal relationships improve. Because when we learn to understand and respond to our own emotional responses in healthy ways, we can regulate ourselves better in relation to others.
We are likely to be able to choose healthier paths for ourselves in life. When we can tolerate embodied emotion, we increase our ability to think and behave too. Because as outlined above, thinking, feeling and behaviour are all deeply inter-woven. When we compromise in one area, we impact the others.
We are more open to the benevolence of outside forces, both in our community and the broader collective. We have more of a sense of ourselves and our boundaries and feel able to foster important and healthy connection in arenas that we might not have had the confidence to approach before.
By learning to feel the impact of our emotions on our thinking, our choices, and our relationship with ourselves and our wider environment, we open ourselves up to the goodness of so much more positive energy.
We realise that we aren’t stuck and over time, our health improves, we foster a sense of resilience and agency over how we feel and we aren’t afraid to feel or face the discomfort of life.
For further reading about this approach, you can find out more by reading The Practice of Embodying Emotions by Dr Raja Selvam here.
If you find yourself struggling with feeling your emotions, or if you’ve been suffering from chronic health symptoms and you’d like some support, I offer a free 20-minute Discovery Call. Book online here.
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.
