I spent a lifetime stuck in my head – thinking about, analyzing, and feeling distressed over my past and future. Trauma does this to our minds and bodies, leaving us unable to fully live in each moment. EMDR Therapy has given me my life back. With deep internal healing and embodied self-awareness, I can now welcome every emotion, feeling, and physical sensation. I never imagined this was possible – or knew what I was missing.
Although finding words in therapy for the mess inside of me was helpful, the flooding of distressing sensations continued. It wasn’t simply fear of my buried emotions. I never learned how to let the emotions and the physical sensations, be fully present and felt in the first place. These feelings were suppressed, buried because nobody helped develop this capacity.
Initially, my therapy felt like an untangling of knots by finding words for my memories…and labels for my feelings. My history felt chaotic with little organization. I did not know what age I was in each abuse story…any sequence…or even who was present. My mind obsessed with making sense of the details.
It took years to know that creating an organized narrative with precise accuracy was not an important goal. Piecing my history together with perfect sequence and detail would never release my mind and body from their torment.
Allowing Sensations to Provide Information
I am not implying that finding words and language is not valuable. This part of the process gave me some relief and my memory improved. I began to form a more cohesive narrative. Yet my intense depression, distress, and general fear of life continued.
Fortunately, my therapist knew how to help me listen to my body and discover its innate God-given wisdom. Still, even with the aid of EMDR, this was painfully slow work. When flooded with intense emotions and sensations that made me panic during EMDR processing, she gently helped me to feel it at a pace I could manage. She helped me make new meaning for all of this during each session.
She supported me until all of my feelings, both physical and emotional, could be not just tolerated but welcomed in my body.
Although EMDR sessions were distressing, there was beauty in how this welcoming of sensations gave both of us the information we needed to understand me.
Is Embodied Self-Awareness Available to Anyone?
We are designed for embodied self-awareness as part of our humanity, yet for many of us, it remains out of reach as a skill that was not developed. Melissa Benintendi (2024) relates this to a child born with perfectly healthy eyes, but if kept in the dark for years, her eyesight would not have become stimulated into existence. If one day the child is brought out of her dark prison and into light, her eyes would not immediately know how to see. Her brain could not yet process and make meaning for whatever her eyes took in…until this capacity was developed.
My therapist helped me to stimulate my capacity to feel. This was painful and beautiful. I did not know how to make sense of the multitude of unknown emotions. My brain tried to regain control and excessively analyze all of my feelings, to figure out how to react, how to behave…what to do with these feelings that had little meaning yet attached.
Embodied self-awareness…the ability to be aware of what is happening in every aspect of my being…is a slow process and one I want to grow deeper in for the rest of my life. Having this capacity in the moment remains infrequent, yet I have more of these bodily shifts and deep core experiences than ever before. And I crave more!
I spent a lifetime seeking safety through thought, logic, research, and analysis. Now I know that the deepest healing happens in my body.
My Phase 1 of EMDR: Conceptual Self-Awareness
Early in my EMDR therapy, I started visualizing aspects of myself in a detached way – a self-awareness that was encased within my mind, but not felt. My mind obsessed over all the new pieces of me and my trauma history being uncovered through therapy. I often felt like my world was crashing and I was scared. A part of my brain was desperate for control in this work and would not stop analyzing, thinking, processing, and searching for meaning to grasp onto.
I felt exhausted in every way with all of this thinking and controlling. But the feelings were so incredibly huge, I was sure they must be the problem – not the trauma I had endured. In my mind, I had to find a way to move through therapy to get the feelings to stop.
More Shame…More Weird…
Since my first EMDR therapy session, my mind created a weird subconscious pattern. Whether I was distressed with a current argument with my husband, or processing an abuse memory from decades earlier, my brain tried to work it out by visualizing me telling the story to my closest friend. Not just once in a while, but with every tinge of emotion in my day. Every distressing sensation!
They weren’t mature conversations between adult women playing out in my head. They were desperate intense talks, always sitting on a floor, confiding to her in a dramatic way as if we were teen girls. Who was this version of me!? I am passive and dismissive. I lacked any courage to talk like that in real life! Yet every day I watched these conversations in my head, where my friend was close enough to reach for help should all of this terrifying emotion swallow me whole! In a way, it gave me something to do with the feelings. Even the smallest sensations of emotion felt excessive to my body and I needed something to do with it.
With any intense emotion or intrusive thought, my brain immediately imagined it into an intense discussion with my friend. These imaginary conversations were the closest I could get to knowing how I felt inside. It was not safe to feel these big feelings…but at least I could pretend to talk about them. My brain kept working to learn how I felt.
My imaginary conversations were not just occasional – they were many times every day for years since my EMDR therapy began! Therapy awakened a confusing mix of feelings inside me and my brain scrambled to find a matching label to the distress.
More than a year later I started to be aware of this strange pattern of mine and my heaping mound of shame grew. Why the hell in my 40s am I imagining dramatic fake conversations as if I’m 15!? Why does my brain do so many weird things without my consent? I felt stupid. One more fucking thing about me that I can’t control.
Alan Fogel (2013) describes conceptual self-awareness as the first phase in embodiment work. Fogel explains that we initially embody through our imagination. We begin to visualize or imagine things about ourselves as if we are separate from our body’s lived experience.
Not that I had heard of embodiment at this time, or had the foggiest idea I needed to find shifts in my body to heal, not just my mind. It was years before I read Fogel’s research but once I found it, I began to find self-compassion for my weird approach to get closer to my feelings. This was just one of many tactics rooted in trauma.
My Phase 2 of EMDR: Shifting Between Thinking and Feeling
As time went on my imaginary conversations and continued EMDR therapy opened me up to many difficult emotions. I began crying a ton, something I rarely did my entire life. I felt tinges of grief, anger, envy, disgust, shame, and sometimes excitement, pleasure, joy, and love – all mixed with sensations of nausea, dizziness, burning heat, pressure, tension, and gasping for air.
Although still disturbed by my weirdness, I was also intrigued by the multitude of new sensations and feelings I held inside. I was shocked by what existed inside me! It was overwhelming and confusing for sure, but it made me feel alive!
When I was brave enough to take one of my imaginary conversations out of my head and speak the words out loud to someone, I still could not feel the matching emotions in the moment. Although I may have spent 3 days crying with intense sadness or grief, I would smile or giggle while confiding in my friend. I hated that my body did this! I hated me!
I badly wanted to think and talk and feel and remember all at once…not one at a time. I wanted my feelings to match my story but I had no way to force this to happen!
All my life until now, if I wanted to know how I felt about something, I’d find time to think about it. How else could I know?
Fogel explains that when we are in this in-between stage between conceptual and embodied self-awareness, we begin to feel and experience some of what our body holds, yet our minds still find ways to control it. It is mediated by our mental self. I feel a wave of grief deep in my core, yet to access this sensation I must think and analyze and ruminate. I can’t simply grieve.
I feel the deep hurt of being victimized, something I could never admit to before, but I could not stay in this overwhelming sensation without obsessively thinking about it. Not yet. I would write for days to make it make sense and then sink into depression for weeks.
With intensity, I would swing between feelings of grief, victimization, and hopelessness into analyzing these sensations. Back and forth. Again and again.
Finding My Emotions Through the Mirroring of My Friend
Sometimes I voiced my inner struggles to my friend…and then with fascination, I watched her face and body react with the correct emotion – the feelings I wished to find. If I told her someone hurt me, her face looked angry, like she had a fire inside her to fight. Other times I saw her shoulders collapse with sadness or grow taller with protectiveness.
I was in awe of how she could immediately have the right emotion to match my story. I wanted this! In watching her reactions, and listening to her responses, I began to find meaning for my physical sensations. They slowly lined up with the matching emotions I could barely access (and never in front of anyone).
It was like an education in how to feel by watching and listening to one of the few humans I trusted. How did her face and body align so easily? How did she have this capacity to feel and show anger and rage when I couldn’t find mine? Her body displayed this protectiveness for me that I never saw before.
Fogel (2013) explains that in this layer of development, even in adulthood, we begin to make meaning for our body’s sensations. We are developing and being educated in learning to think about what we are feeling.
3. Embodied Self-Awareness
After years of overthinking and resisting my body’s sensations tied to my emotions – the closing of my throat, the knots in my belly, my shaking hands, the panic and overwhelm in my chest, and the aching in my back, I began to allow them. I even felt grateful for the ways they spoke to me – the information they gave me. I created a loving relationship with the sensations of my body, welcoming the language that once felt terrifying.
Over the past year I noticed I was no longer visualizing the imaginary conversations with my friend. I felt angry during an argument with my husband instead of imagining a discussion about it. I felt sad when I was triggered by a movie with a painful storyline and I allowed myself to be sad. Sometimes my emotional reactions were so strong I did or said something hurtful and had to apologize. But I was feeling things! And I could stay in the feelings with no imaginary teen girl conversations on the floor!
Embodied self-awareness involves allowing all sensations without the urgent need to analyze or cognitively make sense of them. They are just part of me. And they are welcome.
When I feel the knots in my belly before walking into a social group, I no longer need to isolate, withdraw, and hide. The panicky feelings inform me about a part of me that is triggered and scared. I don’t have to overanalyze it and make sense of it to understand myself. I can simply feel the knots in my belly and let them exist. I can be with the part of me that is nervous until my belly feels good again because social settings are hard for me. I have direct access to the meaning of these knots without even finding the labels.
RESTORATIVE EMBODIED SELF-AWARENESS
When I have coffee with my friend and she gives me a pointed look as we talk or playfully hits my leg because she knows precisely what I am feeling without me having to find the words – I am met with a flood of joy and relief. Somebody gets me, sees me, with all of what I only knew as weird, and just loves me.
This is the sort of embodied self-awareness felt in the intimacy of secure relationships – whether with family, friendships, or romantic. Words are insufficient, and you have moments of communication that are felt far deeper than what can be done with words. In these relationships, there is an intimacy that allows each person to know each other’s embodiment without thoughts coming first (Benintendi, 2024).
We simply know each other. For someone who has struggled for decades to even find words, this feels incredibly enlightening – hope filled – and wonderful! I do not have to think about who I am. I can just be.
Fogel (2021) refers to this state as restorative embodied self-awareness, the “inner condition of our bodies”. He describes this as “a state of being that involves a sense of peace, safety, connection, oneness, relief, relaxation, and its power to assist in the healing of mental and physical illnesses” (Fogel, 2021).
We can be in this state of being, allow all of our sensations to be present as they unfold, and be with them without needing to control the process. Without all of the thinking, something beautiful happens in our bodies, so deep it is at the level of our immune systems (Fogel, 2013). Our bodies can use their energy to take better care of us. We are not drained and exhausted from needing to constantly make sense of ourselves. This is a state of deep healing and restoration.
REFERENCES
Benintendi, Melissa. (2024, March 18). Drop In With Beyond: Targeting Body Sensations in EMDR. .
Fogel, A. (2013). Body sense: The science and practice of embodied self-awareness. W. W. Norton & Company.
Fogel, A. (2021, August 30). Restorative Embodied Self-Awareness: An essential ingredient in leading a full life. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/body-sense/202108/restorative-embodied-self-awareness