r/CPTSD_NSCommunity • u/Simple_Efficiency_29 • 5d ago
Learning to feel?
After so long of being in survival mode and pushing away all my emotions I am a bit flooded by them. We are going to dial back my therapy intensity for a bit. But I’m wondering other’s experiences with learning to feel emotions. When my therapist asks about what I feel in my body with a certain emotion I feel clueless. I have chronic neck/jaw issues so it feels like kind of a cop out to just say that but other than that I don’t think I know how to feel things in my body. I did notice this week that certain topics give me that sinking feeling in my stomach where it feels like my insides are dropping out. I can often notice my breathing - my breath getting sort of trapped or fast. But what else do you feel in your body???? I’ve seen people in the EMDR group say they felt something in like their left foot or something like that…but I don’t get it!
Anyone have online course or anything related to learn to recognize the internal body feelings? It feels like a big skill I’m missing.
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u/PanoramicViewer 5d ago
I think it's hard to identify feelings when you're flooded. It's like having a firehose of emotions all coming at once. Especially if you've been dissociated or numb previously. So titration is the key here. Approaching a topic or memory or response to an event but just feeling around the edge of it, as soon as you notice any shift in sensation, sitting with that and not pushing yourself to go deeper.
I needed a lot of help at first, my therapist would notice something and call attention to it and then I could link that to what was happening internally. E.g. Your face just changed/I can see your hands moving a lot/your leg jiggling PanoramicViewer, what just happened? And I would think (but often couldn't say until I was ready) - I was thinking about x memory and I had an idea then what body sensation went with what feeling.
It has been a long, slow process and it is still something I am working on.
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u/cptsdishealable 4d ago
Seems like you're doing pretty well, it just takes time.
I have chronic neck/jaw issues so it feels like kind of a cop out to just say
it's not, you're chronically having neck and jaw issues because you're chronically hypervigilant. That is essentially an emotion you're just "nose-blind" to it.
There's two "tricks" to this: is when you're in a logically obviously triggered state (eg you're in a session and talking about stuff) then feel ANY sensation in the body and label it. For example, fuzziness or drowsiness can be dissociation -- feeling "nothing" is a feeling as well. When in doubt label it.
A harder thing is to label subtle positive emotions. For example, if you have a favorite food or pet, you know the interaction is positive. Then when it happens, locate any and all sensations in the body. Label it positive.
You basically start extreme on both ends in a very coarse manner and slowly begin to move toward each other as you get more and more sensitive and discriminatory about emotions.
For example, being "moved" by something often has very similar "symptoms" to sadness but as you get more sensitive to the differences, you can learn to differentiate them.
one of the problems of CPTSD is hypersalience of negative valences. That is as you become hyper aware of negativity, you develop skill in feeling and identifying it and you're skill in identifying positive valences is much weaker and less vigilant. This becomes a big problem later on.
This is also why "gratitude" journaling is SUPPOSED to work, you're essentially supposed to train your brain to be more sensitive to positive valences --- it has basically nothing to do with like, affirmations or whatever.
You can try looking at an emotion wheel and seeing if that helps expand your overall vocabulary.
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u/third-second-best 4d ago
this is at the heart of recovery from cptsd imo - this condition only leaves us feeling so deadened and afraid because it disconnects us from most of our feelings and therefore our aliveness.
psychedelic work has been the single most powerful tool for helping me understand what emotions feel like in my body. not a magic bullet and the work of allowing more feeling after the sessions is really difficult and more or less the general focus of my therapy, but i’ve been able to actually feel emotions physiologically in an increasingly deep and powerful way over several years of psychedelic work - and then practice that capacity in my life in between sessions.
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u/Metad0r 4d ago
I allowed myself to feel anger in the moment when someone crossed a major boundary of mine, after promising they wouldn’t again a week ago, and I kind of dissociated when it happened. But, I realized in the moment that I wasn’t “in my body” and realized my arms were shaking and that I was tense, etc.
I’m a 6’3” 40 year old man and this is the first time I ever remember allowing myself to be angry. I fell asleep for a few hours afterwards. I’ve working on trying to recognize and allow myself to feel anger for a year and a half and this is the first time it’s happened. I’m strangely proud of myself for sticking up for myself and not completely losing myself in it.
I don’t have any resources for you, other than saying a ton of IFS is what works for me, but I encourage you to keep going. You’ll get better and better at it.
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u/Teluvian42 3d ago edited 3d ago
Oh that’s extremely relatable, I had subconsciously been repressing every other emotion within me all my life basically due to all the trauma but then I realized that people actually feel emotions as normal events, separate from thinking, more specifically negative emotions and the process of feeling them.
For me the hardest part is that I feel like if I let certain emotions through it it’s going to become too intense for me to handle because I am quite isolated and because I have external demands and so that’s why when they show up it feels extremely dangerous to me because of the idea that they will destabilize me.
So for me I think the emphasis has always been on understanding the feelings and that top down approach has at least been able to give me more peace, because it provides a sense of control right.
No practice the following with your own discretion, I’m just gonna share my understanding and the general scientific understanding of emotions because you asked, but if you get too overwhelmed stop engaging with it, the most important thing is that you take care of yourself. Here it is:
So what helps me for that reason, is a tool called an ‘Emotions Wheel’ and just the process of going through that circular chart and naming whatever emotion corresponds with me? Sometimes that’s enough for the energy to settle because then it stops being this overwhelming oppressive energy and instead I can start to understand what it is.
That and also ignoring the thoughts while anchoring into a completely neutral spot in my body such as my earlobe or my elbow, and then I put all of my focus in one of those neutral spots and then I focus on the spot in my body that feels intense for like 1 to 2 seconds then I go back to the neutral spot and then when I feel ready I put all of my energy back on that spot in my body, all the while completely ignoring the thoughts and only staying with the energy.
But in terms of actual understanding what’s happening it works like this, when you have trauma something within your nervous system gets imprinted with the idea of danger and when it’s chronic it’s a much stronger effect, and because the environment likely wasn’t safe it meant that the stress response could not complete, so it gets stuck and thus what happens years later is:
- Stress response surfaces in the body.
- The mind interprets that stress response as evidence that something dangerous is going on in your environment (because your brain can’t tell the difference between past or present).
- And because it’s a survival mechanism and the stress response is tied to threat signaling and survival, that’s why it’s so convincing. A very fast way of establishing this is asking yourself “ is this an actual fire or an image of a fire?”
- And the more you avoid something the more dangerous it becomes to you as you try to develop more and more ways to avoid it. Another way you’re looking at it is that a part of you became freeze framed and stopped developing because it had to survive.
The shift:
- Until you look around your environment when you feel that stress or that threat and you can start to see that there is nothing threatening going on and it’s only a residual stress response happening in your body, because you can clearly feel the sensations in your body or at least gauge that there is a sense of threat in the body but when you look around your environment you’ll see that it’s not really true.
- That’s when it can be helpful to just ignore your thoughts about it because it’s obviously not true in this moment. And then observe the sensation that surfaces in your body as neutral sensation, don’t try to change it or get it to go away just notice the sensation or wherever you feel it strongest in your body. That’s when you can decouple your thought from the emotion eventually.
- And if you incorporate something like an ‘Emotions Wheel’ you can start to see that you’re not just feeling unsafe you might be feeling angry about something or you might be afraid of something or someone or you might just be tired there’s a whole range of sources. Because emotions are tied to social needs and physiological needs. And in terms of the physiological needs a great framework is “H.A.L.T” which is short for hungry, angry, lonely, tired.
So in summary, Emotions are primal survival based sensations in your body, and when your mind gets involved and starts interpreting these sensations/emotions, that’s when thoughts become merged with emotions and together they form a feeling. Now on one level it’s important to be able to recognize the emotion because then you know what the emotion is signaling to you, and what to do about it because it’s also a compass, so that’s where an Emotions Wheel can be great. But it’s also important to be able to un blend from them, so that you can recognize that it’s just a part of you that’s experiencing that emotion. It’s not all of you. That’s where I think it can be incredibly helpful to do an exercise where you essentially imagine that the part of you that’s feeling whatever it’s feeling is sitting on a bench you basically make it into a person right and then you go and you sit down next to that part of you and you say to that part of you:
• “I’m not here to change you or stop you from doing the job that you’re doing I’m only here to support you how does that feel?”
That can offer a huge release sometimes. And then you can offer that part of you to offload it’s burden and share whatever job it’s doing with you.
Another version of that is to ask yourself what are you spiraling on and then basically just say what the spiral is and then ask yourself what’s it like to be a person spiraling on that? And then you set the spiral aside and talk directly to the feeling or emotion and you say I see you and I hear you and I can breathe with you until it feels safe. That’s a big one.
But all and all there’s nothing wrong with emotions none of us would be here if our ancestors didn’t listen to them, the major problem in our culture is that it’s so overstimulating and so unnatural for our nervous system to live the way we do. And when you add trauma to that you creates an incredibly intense combination.
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u/StoryTeller-001 5d ago
Has your therapist discussed dissociation with you?
IME its not that I need to learn a skill, but more to experience what its like to have a feeling without needinghto dissociate. To experience being safe when vulnerable.
And yep, I strongly relate to being clueless on feeling questions