Why Is It Hard To Feel My Body?

The core offering of somatic bodywork and coaching is to help people become reacquainted with their sensations, their energy, their body. The more we feel our sensations, the more we feel when we are fearful, relaxed, present. It is worth remembering that we are sensate beings; the body is designed to feel. If you watch a two-year-old it is immediately obvious they are attuned to what they see, hear, taste, and so on. We all start off in this world with an intimate and visceral experience of our body sensations and our aliveness.

We become disconnected from our bodies

It’s common that by the time we reach adulthood it takes more stimulus to feel the breadth our aliveness. Most people live in their heads and forget their bodies. For many people, feeling their body (feeling temperature, tingling, pressure, spaciousnes, etc.) is fraught with anxiety, fear, or dread. Often this is because those sensations are associated with a history in which it was not safe to feel the aliveness in their body. 

For instance, if you grew up in an environment where your sense of safety or belonging was threatened if you were excited, angry, or just generally enlivened, it makes sense that feeling lots of energy would be uncomfortable because of your history. For some, it is deeply terrifying. Energy by itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, but it is our history and past experiences and traumas that give it meaning. Our history shapes our capacity to feel our bodies in the present moment.

Bodywork and our aliveness

I recently was working with a client who started to feel a lot of tingling vibration in her limbs while she was on the bodywork table. She expressed that she felt like something bad was going to happen. After asking a bit about her history, I learned she grew up with parents who would scold her when she would get “too excited” (read “too alive”). What made the session so powerful is that she began to see that her aliveness was associated with her history; simply feeling energy in her body meant that she thought something bad was going to happen. She knew this wasn’t true in the present moment, but her mind retained the old narrative of, “if I let myself feel, I will be punished”. 

Trauma

We see similar ways in which people learn to shut down the sensations in their body in cases of trauma. In cases of assault where the victim could not run without risking further injury, it is likely they would have shut down and numbed themselves to the sensations in their legs to keep themselves safe (or safer). This is the remarkable intelligence of the human nervous system: the ability to tighten our tissues to cut off sensations to numb ourselves in order to get through a terrible experience. The fallout, however, can mean that the person “learns” that it is safer not to feel their legs. Because this is so often done unconsciously and at levels not detected by the strategizing mind, it can take time to come back into a feeling, sensing body.

Many of my clients have a hard time being with a lot of sensation and energy in their body. We all have ways in which we learned to tighten around it, shut it down, numb ourselves to it. The irony is that the more soft and relaxed we are in our body, the more energy can move and the more we can allow ourselves to be with and feel without being “overtaken” by our feelings.

Education and therapy

Most aspects of our culture add to this numbing and shutting down of our sensory experience in life. The education system in particular, with the emphasis on thinking and strategizing, forces us into our heads and out of our bodies. Culturally, the body is reduced to a vehicle to transport our brains, and the more your brain can accomplish, the more you are rewarded. Although this is thankfully changing as the field of somatics expands, even traditional therapy often keeps us in our heads and disconnected from our internal, sensate experience. There is nothing wrong with using our brains to explore, discover and learn, however there is a huge cost to constantly prioritizing the strategizing mind over the sensing body. This prioritizing of the thinking mind over the body is, at least in part, responsible for the breakdown of our capacity as humans to feel our needs, our desires, and our care for ourselves and for others. 

Somatic bodywork is a path of accessing the wisdom of our bodies - our entire nervous system, not just our brains. It is an opportunity to reconnect with our felt sense of aliveness in the world. Schedule a free consultation with me to ask any questions you have about how somatic bodywork can support you in creating the life you want.