Looking at our life from the inside, abandoning our current coping strategies, and calling bologna on our culture’s fragility.

July 2, 2022

By Jennifer Finch, LPC, SEP, NCC

Let’s suppose I went to someone wanting to work with existential shame, shame with the deep-seated psychological root of not feeling good enough despite many accolades and achievements in life. And this person told me that we are going to work on spreading and expanding said shame, so I feel it all throughout my entire body, expanding it, and feeling it in more of my anatomy. That sounds crazy, right? I would feel like I had gone to the wrong person. What do you mean you want me to feel more of something that already feels bad? Something that I already don’t want to feel at all, why would I expand that? I would rather take a Dremel to an aching tooth. I came to this “qualified” person to get rid of this grievous torment of shame, not feel it more intensely.

So, why do I ask my clients to do exactly this?

I will get to that in a moment by giving you a somatic release technique that guides us through this process and why scientifically it matters to expand our emotions, but first let me set some things up with an historical view of why I feel the agency in doing this work now. It feels increasingly important to bring somatic embodiment and emotional regulation techniques to our conscious intention and focus on our current society today.

The 1%-ers

Feeling emotions is difficult work, especially when the emotion feels overwhelmingly bad, like shame or fear. We run from feeling it, hide, deflect, conjure up disinformation, fold into addictions, , stay busy, avoid at all costs collapse into procrastination, go on binging buying sprees…anything to NOT feel even the slightest discomfort that intolerable feelings bring to us in our brain and body physiology.

Many people who come to me are not ready for this cavernous work. It is hard and intense. And is no simple thing. It requires self-examination. A crucible approach of putting ourselves on trial so to speak. Embodying emotions requires a willingness and fierce determination to lean into our actual lives, exactly how they are, which of course includes feeling bad and unwelcomed emotions and learning how to deal with them.

We need to wake up and look at our current situation. Instead of feeling trapped in a paltry life we need to learn how to let go of how we wish our life could be, or expect how it should be, and see it for exactly how it is. This is painful for most all of us, and we can see why a small percentage of us are really addressing this, wanting to work through it and tackling what haunts us most significantly head on. It is a path for the courageous.

So, if we feel we are ready for real change, and are tired of feeling so emotionally dysregulated, numbed out, chronically outraged, overwhelmed, ill-tempered, reactionary, etc., how would one do that? Just imagine, for a moment, what our society might look like if we all did that…even one percent.

My approach for the past two plus decades has been through body dynamic approaches that help us look at our life from the inside.

Embodiment fundamentally opens us up to a profound realization that we are not limited, fragile, reactionary, defensive, small, or insignificant. When we observe our life from the inside, it’s as if daylight itself awakens us physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. This type of transformational change doesn’t come without a cost. The cost is that we must be willing to give up our old coping strategies and be prepared to step into another way of being.

Entirely.

This increasingly becomes clear to me that this is spiritual work, and that there is no distinguishment between working psychologically and working spiritually when we are willing to let go and change our state of being from our foundational core.

It also has become clear that our society is perniciously disembodied. This means we need to enlist the body to do the work to cultivate lasting and meaningful change. This is a somatic process and not an ego thing. The ego has a propensity to “spiritually bypass” (a term used by John Welwood) any slight infraction that feels unexplained, unfamiliar, slightly mystifying or even implausible. It drives us to more disembodiment, and habitual protection from pain, until we become quite literally, “brains on a stick” (a term used by Ken Wilber).

Our ego mind conscripts an automatic mechanism to act out behaviorally, even impulsively to rid our brain-body from feeling adversity or hardship. Its only concern is survival. It doesn’t give a lick about how you feel. It’s beautifully designed and quite magnificent. But it tends to over-react in our current culture—almost all the time. It sees everything as a snake when it is indeed just a rope. Or, depending on its training, it eyes everything in life as rainbows in the clouds when everything is falling apart. There is of course a unique platform in the vast spectrum in between these two, but perhaps you know people living at the ends of the spectrum.

Emotional embodiment is hard work requiring fortitude, courage, and a bit of grit, as no one wants to give up their ways, their ego, their arguments, or their righteousness. Yet, through great determination the payoff of embodiment comes with seeing our lives EXACTLY as how they are. Clearly. This is the eminent wisdom of emotionally strong and resilient people. When we have the capacity to SEE clearly, we dilate our body-mind-spirit which sequentially expands our tolerance for whatever happens and comes forth in our lives, whether it’s good or bad or horrid. We acquire vast capacity for tolerating pain and suffering, which we know already is a given in a human life. When we expand our emotional capacity, we stand strong in the face of adversity without getting toppled over or annihilated.

This is my call to duty, to teach individuals how to become resilient, fully whole, and embodied. Stronger in their actual lives and more tender in their own bodies and intimate relationships. This work feels imperative in our current cultural landscape. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, chronically angry, continually hurt by others, defensive, irritated, and helpless in our lives, we can start cultivating change by examining our own selves, our own lives, our own body-mind-spirits, roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Doing the Hard Work

All of us feel painful emotions. Not one human being gets through life not feeling excruciating emotions from time to time. Many of us feel bad emotions day to day, minute to minute even. There is no promised land of continuous joy, harmonious happiness, and lightness of laughter in every single moment of every single day of our lives. So, we can stop sugar-coating life as if suffering is stunning us and catching us by surprise. Next to death which is an absolute, suffering and pain are perhaps the only known things that are not unexpected in a human life. Denial of our pain and suffering, or cognitive dissonance tactics don’t work. Pretending, wishing, praying, or hoping that whatever is happening to us shouldn’t be, or wasn’t supposed to have happened won’t get us very far either. “I am not supposed to feel this way!” Hogwash. Whatever it was that happened that made us feel bad, did happen. However we are feeling, we ARE feeling. So, now we must wake up to that reality which is REALLY HARD and PAINFUL. Downright uncomfortable. Intolerable even. But what we have been doing, what we just learned above, is that escaping from that pain is extremely difficult. Using cognitive and behavioral strategies only circumvent, but eventually dead-end. The body lets it be known when we start feeling dis-ease.

Quite paradoxically we must feel the pain, we must face the pain, we must lean into our discomfort, to extinguish the pain. And it starts with the realization that pain and suffering exist in the world and in every single human life, and it makes us feel BAD.

Let’s practice one simple technique that will help us become a bit more resilient. This is a body-psychotherapy technique that I learned from my advanced Somatic Experiencing™ instructor, Dr. Raja Selvam. He has just written a fabulous book on this technique that came out this past March 2022 if you would like to learn more about the science and structure of embodying emotions. The Practice of Embodying Emotions:  A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes.

Before we get to the technique let me first clarify “embodiment,” as different researchers understand it varyingly. For many teachers, embodiment means to be able to track an emotion in the body through sensation. We are prompted to witness and watch and sense emotion in the body. This, however, is only one aspect of embodiment. In fact, feeling sensation of an emotion can deter one from feeling the emotion of the emotion. The juice of it. For example, it is much easier to say, “I feel tightness and gripping in my chest,” then it is to FEEL fear, anxiety, or terror in the chest. To work with embodiment of emotions we need to stay with the root ball of the emotion.  Not the nerve endings of sensation. Going into the descriptors of sensation can pull us out of emotion, which is an intellectual move our brain makes to avoid or distract away from our body feeling.

It is noteworthy however that tracking sensation of an unpleasant emotion that causes great states of distress and dysregulation, can help you down regulate your body physiology. In a sense, when we track sensation, we are slightly losing what the emotion is. Tracking sensation is in fact a very good regulating skill if we are needing to take the scenic route.  But this is not what I am directing my attention to here in this posting.

In a much more comprehensive fashion, we can define embodiment through this definition given by Dr. Raja Selvam: “Embodiment of an emotion is inviting emotions to expand the conscious experience of the emotion to as much of the brain and body physiology as possible.”

Again, why on earth would we want to do that? Expand it? Make it MORE conscious?

Emotions, especially the bad ones, feel very uncomfortable. So why would we ask someone to take something that feels bad, and expand it so more parts of their brain-body feel bad?

Even Freud had this right when he developed the “pleasure principle.” The pleasure principle simply states that human beings are wired biologically to seek or move toward pleasure, and to avoid or move away from pain. Yes. That feels correct. Right? Stay away from feeling all emotions that plunge us into the innermost depths of discomfort. I’m with ya!

Except, we have learned today in the scientific literature that even though our brain-body physiology innately knows how to move away from pain and toward pleasure or wellbeing, even on a cellular level, this is a wiring for survival. Not for responding openly to the vividness of life, which includes an orchestra of emotions. It is narrowed in solely on survival. As humans we are deeply motivated intrinsically to strive to increase wellbeing. But I want you to perk your ears (eyes) up on this statement: This gets interpreted in our brain-body physiology as staying away from feeling bad with all the effort we can muster.

So, if we feel something bad, it can at times feel life threatening. Even a slight look of criticism from a face can make us shake and rattle, make us become defensive, or fragile. This current strategy we are using is in fact making us move farther and farther away from resiliency and wellbeing. We can barely tolerate when we see three dots blinking after we text someone, and then those three dots disappear and WE DIDN”T GET A RESPONSE! OMG!

In working with embodying emotions, we must first learn that we are overcoming an innate resistance to lean into pain and suffering. Every ounce of our being will arguably make a claim that in order to survive we must stay on the path that brings pleasure. Don’t stray from what feels good.  This momentarily works, but not for long. We eventually bump up against something else, go through something else hard or tragic, our high ends, or we meet someone else that once again conjures up those bad emotions within us. It is endless. It is futile to try to protect ourselves from everything “out there.” I mean just look at the world we live in. We are setting ourselves up for addictions and inadequate coping strategies, which have short half-lives of making us feel good. We have become constricted junkies who are attempting to go through the entire journey of our lives without feeling torment or harrowing emotions.

Instead, we can cultivate resiliency and safety “in here.” In our own brain-body-spirits.

The Technique

The idea of this embodied release technique is a simple one. Is it easier to carry a heavy bag with one arm or two?

When we recruit more of our body to handle the heavy load of the emotion, it gets easier to experience it. This is quite paradoxical to our brain alone. It will fear this logically. Again, we are working on expanding a feeling that is unpleasant. Our brain innately fights against this. Remember, it seeks pleasure. And it has set up a lifetime of defensive structures to keep you away from feeling pain. So, I’m asking you to take a leap of faith here. Give this expansion technique a try and see for yourself if it works for you; or not.

Practice first with a manageable emotional scenario. Don’t go to a ten on a ten-point scale of conjuring up the emotional torrential trauma that detoured you from your life and begin working there. Start with something simple until you get the hang of it. A bad golf shot. A new recipe you tried that turned out to be horrible and your family made it known. The first step is to think of a situation that made an emotional impact on you.

The next step is to feel in your body where the emotion makes the most impact. Locate it in your body. Do you feel it in your chest? Arms? Neck? Throat? Gut? Wherever you feel it, just keep feeling it. You don’t even need to name the emotion, just note that it feels bad, unpleasant, painful. Then see if you can expand it a little bit. Recruit 1% more of your chest, arms, neck, throat, wherever you are feeling it. Slowly, incrementally, work to increase it. Like water moving through sand. If you lose the emotion, go back to the context and reclaim the emotion of feeling bad. Gently, with expanding titration, spread it to more internal space of your body. You can use self-guided touch to help. Like placing your hand on your heart, or over your gut, or on your back to support the adrenal glands.

As you keep diligently working to expand the emotion outwardly from the initial constricted location in your body, watch for changes in your whole body. Does your breath become more regulated and even? Do you feel warmth? Lightness? Is there less gripping or constriction or tightness? Did you just wiggle your toes? Or move and unwind your neck?

Practice with this technique and see if you notice an increase in your capacity to tolerate difficult emotions.

Why Are We Doing This?

In the scientific literature, it turns out there are many benefits to training in emotional embodiment and expanding even the most disagreeable feeling. The most prominent benefit that comes along is one’s ability to tolerate and stay with even the most abominable, dreadful, and horrid emotion for a longer period of time.

If I expand fear from my gripping chest into more of the whole cavity of my chest and upper torso, my ability to tolerate it increases and I can stay with it longer. The potency of it disperses. It’s like squeezing the strong sourness of a lemon into a teacup of water, versus into a more vast body of water like the Great Lakes. When we can stay with increasing levels of an emotion and for longer periods of time, our brain has more time to process what is going on. That is the clarity we talked about in the beginning of this article. Options can appear. We can see straight. Impulsivity and over-reactions lessen. We can execute with a response that is proportional to the event. Our breath can begin to drop into our abdomen and help regulate us.

According to Dr. Selvam, emotion is nothing more than an assessment of the impact a situation is having on you and your wellbeing. The assessment can be simplified in whether the impact the situation has on you makes you feel better or makes you feel worse. That’s all it comes down to. If it is an impact that is painful, then wouldn’t it be easier to be with that impact and tolerate that impact if it were spread throughout the body or concentrated in once place?

Do you use one hand or two to carry that heavy box full of painful emotions? Obviously using two arms makes it easier. The same principle applies here. When more of the body and the brain physiology are equipped in handling the impact, the emotional impact lessens. And when more space in our brain-body is available for the emotion to travel to, it becomes more tolerable. And we can see clearly. This logic seems simple enough. But you will have to try it and see for yourself.