Discovering feelings in the body

Once upon a time someone asked me, “Where do you feel that in your body?” To which I responded, “What? Am I supposed to have feelings in my body?”

I was disconnected from my emotions. For the first few months, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and I don’t have feelings in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people and not me.”

But no, I was suppressing feelings.

Results of a study that surveyed where people feel various emotions in their body. Results are averaged.

Back then, I couldn’t recall ever feeling an “expansiveness in my chest” or “excitement in my fingers”. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach and feel emotions “in my head”, but that was it.

This matters because feelings in the body are one representation of unconscious information.¹ (See Emotions Make Sense by Damon Sasi if this is foreign to you.) If you’re suppressing your feelings, you’re missing a lot of information in your interactions with the world.

Some people are going to read the above and hate on themselves for being numb. No. Like many emotional issues, emotional numbness is often locally optimal. In my case, I felt that my feelings were dangerous, that I’d be harmed if I was aware of my feelings. In the end, my numbness had reasonable incentives. Once the incentives were adequately addressed, however, they dissolved.

These days, wow, there is so much intricacy to the emotional ripples and textures in just my stomach alone. I’ve had strange happinesses in my fingers. And self-loathing there, too. Anxiety in my upper chest. Love at a spot a little inner and a little lower than that… So much I wasn’t tracking before.

The go-to “how to feel your feelings guide” for easy cases is The Power of Focusing. But if you’re really really blocked like I was, you’ll need additional aid to explore the local optimality of your numbness.

Depression was useful?

I created muscle tension to avoid feelings

1. There are many other kinds of “feelings”, too, not necessarily just feelings in the body: excitement and energy levels, where your attention and awareness are, flashes of imagery in your mind, noticing “non-real” visual phenomena.