Discovering feelings in the body

Once I was asked, “How do you feel in your body about that?” To which I responded, “What? Am I supposed to have feelings in my body?”

I was disconnected from my feelings and 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 some other people, but not me.”

But no, my feelings were being suppressed.

Where people tend to feel the sensations associated with emotions in their body. Results according to some study.

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

So I was numb. More precisely: Unconscious information wasn’t propogating across my mind. This was making my life worse in a few ways:

• Value confusion: It’s hard to know “Do I actually care about this?” when I feel numb. This can cause some procrastination.

• Slow empathy: It’s hard to understand how someone else is feeling when you’re not feeling.

• Missed body signals: I’d do things like brush my teeth with too much force, not realizing I was causing damage.

(More examples can be found here and here.)

My first reaction to learning I was numb was to hate being numb. Later I realized my numbness — and also my hating of numbness — was locally optimal. In other words, there were incentives to be numb: numbness was protecting me from certain social outcomes (example: the feeling in my neck; example: general depression) and feelings that were (supposedly) “bad”. Once these incentives were addressed, my numbness dissolved:

Wow. There’s 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!

I also like the book The Power of Focusing for this.