Where do you feel that in your body?
Oh no! Maybe a therapist has asked you this in the past and you have drawn a blank. Many clients come to therapy excited to do psychoanalytic, depth therapy with me, and then we realize together that they struggle to emotionally regulate or feel their feelings at all. When this happens, it’s most useful to do a somatically oriented therapy until you are comfortable feeling and talking about emotions.
Soooo, where do I feel it in my body?!
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple! Most people can’t feel or locate their feelings for a couple of reasons. Most commonly, they have experienced trauma or chronic invalidation that has lead them to dissociate or numb their awareness of their body to cope. Essentially, it’s just not safe enough to feel yet. Your feelings are “offline,” so to speak. Additionally, people conditioned as men or folks with lots of testosterone may have barriers to feeling due to patriarchal social conditioning (“boys don’t cry”) and biology (testosterone is a natural feelings minimizer).
To help you start to feel things “in your body,” we’ll start slow, building safety and helping you learn to notice and identify feelings of safety, pleasure, enjoyment. For example, we might listen to music together, and notice how your mood changes. I might invite you to touch your pet or a piece of fabric you like, and notice how that feels. We start with what’s easy and build from there. Bodily awareness is a skill and a muscle, and together we’ll help you build this muscle over time.
I may also drawn on tools such as:
EMDR
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — a mouthful, I know. In practice, I guide your attention back and forth (through eye movements or taps) while you hold a difficult memory in mind. That back-and-forth, called bilateral stimulation, seems to help the brain do the digesting it couldn't do at the time — to take a memory that's stuck in the present and let it finally move into the past.
If this is too overwhelming, we can focus on building a sense of calm and safety through other EMDR exercises before we move to more difficult material.
Clients are often shocked by how effective this is. “What is this magic!” is a common refrain.
Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)
When your feelings were routinely dismissed, punished, or ignored, big emotions can come to feel dangerous and unmanageable. DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is a practical, skills-based approach that meets this head-on, and for many people it's genuinely life-saving. At its heart is a both/and: that you can accept yourself exactly as you are and work to change the patterns that aren't serving you. I draw on DBT skills to help you ground and settle when emotions run high, get through distress without making it worse, understand and soften intense feelings, and navigate conflict and boundaries in your relationships.
Sensorimotor psychotherapy
Sensorimotor psychotherapy is a body-centered approach to trauma that works from the understanding that trauma doesn't just live in our thoughts and stories — it lives in the body, in posture, gesture, and the nervous system's habits. In my work, I draw on it in small, practical ways. Often that means helping you orient to safety: gently turning your attention to the room around you. And it can mean paying attention to the body itself — noticing how you're holding yourself, and experimenting with small shifts in posture. Trauma often teaches us to make ourselves small; sometimes simply lengthening the spine or letting the shoulders open changes not just how you feel in your body, but how you feel, full stop. We go slowly, and your body always gets to set the pace.