We use the language of “feeling” emotions, but have you ever stopped to think about how exactly an emotion feels in your body? When you feel sad, what does your chest feel like? Your face and throat? Your shoulders, arms, legs, and belly? Compare it to what it feels like to feel angry. Way different right? Sad feels heavy, cold, slow. Angry is hot, tense, agitated.

This is because emotions are primarily a messaging system – they are the language our body uses to communicate with our brain. And our body takes that job VERY seriously. To the point that if we try to ignore these messages, the body finds some pretty creative ways to get the message through. Maybe it ramps up the sensations to an extreme (hi, panic attack before a barely-important presentation!) Maybe it decides you aren’t good at understanding a certain feeling, so it throws another one on top of it to get your attention (have you ever felt SUPER MAD about something that really was scary, or sad, or embarrassing?)

Learning to tune back into this messaging system and start to allow some of the sensations through is, in my opinion, the key to decreasing emotional distress. I’m going to be honest, I don’t like that this is true any more than you probably do. But I will meet you where you are at in this process to help you feel safe while re-learning how to connect with some of these body messages.

Relationships are the stuff of life - we are constantly relating to others, ourselves, and our environment. HOW we relate to those things is largely dependent on our personal wiring mixed with our past experiences. Sometimes this works for us - we relate to dark, unfamiliar woods with hesitation, anxiety, and fear, because we have learned they may be dangerous. Sometimes, however, these learned relationships don’t serve us well. For example, if we enter into a new partnership with intense jealousy and suspicion because of a past hurt, we may jeopardize making a connection with that person. The magic of therapy, however, is that we can essentially use the therapeutic relationship to “relearn” some of those scripts. This allows us to re-relate to our environment and loved ones in a way that better serves us now.

My initial background is in the biological sciences. I therefore LOVE to learn how the mechanics of the brain and body interact with how we experience the world. Trauma is a huge component of this interaction. What we are learning is that essentially, traumatic experiences overwhelm our brain’s ability to process them, so they get stored wherever there is room (which is sometimes in kind of weird, confusing places.) The memories associated with these experiences therefore never truly get sorted, and so in some sense we are always living in that traumatic moment in time. How extremely painful!

We therefore develop all SORTS of tools to help us cope with this ongoing discomfort. The problem is that sometimes these tools, while helping us short-term, can cause their own problems. For example, using eating disorder behaviors or substances to “numb out” helps us cope with the pain of unresolved trauma, but affects our health and leaves us numb to all the rest of our lives as well.

Viewing things through this lens can be incredibly helpful. You are able to go from “why do I keep doing this thing that I hate that I am doing?,” to “what purpose might this behavior be serving?” We can then work together to take that information and look to get that need met in other ways.