We’ve got five senses. They’re how we perceive the external material world. I hope by this point in your life, that doesn’t require a spoiler warning. This is pretty established by now. Let’s dive into something that may be more weird, because nothing is written for no purpose. Today, I want to talk about another way of sensing: interoception.
Seeing signs, sensing symptoms
When we talk of signs and symptoms, it’s worth noting that signs are something that someone else can see, symptoms are something that someone else can only know if you tell them. Their five senses miss a significant portion of your lived experience. And in my clinical training and experience across the past ten years, so do you and I. We miss a lot about our own experience. Interoception is the word we use to talk about all our internal senses and signals. The world of interoception and symptoms is an uncomfortable place to explore when so much of our reality is built upon “what can be empirically seen, measured, and tested.”
Symptoms are messy. They’re open to so many different layers of confusion and noise. They depend on
- Paying attention to our inner experience.
- Having vocabulary to accurately describe our inner experience, while still paying attention.
- When observing our inner experience, we don’t unduly influence it and alter our experience.
- The person we’re describing our symptoms to to have the same inner experiences associated with the vocabulary we use, or we’re quickly not talking about the same thing.
Messy. We have–and are influenced by–our internal world sensations at all points in our life. Whether we’re aware of it at any moment is another question. Much of the time, we can afford not to be aware of our inner sensations because our life is going essentially how we want it to, and we’re in control enough. When we are no longer satisfied with our experience, or sensing enough control, this internal world becomes suddenly much more important to address. This is my special area of interest and practice. This is the broad domain of being a “somatic psychotherapist.”
Separating feeling from sensing
Let’s make a quick, important distinction: feeling versus sensing. Not everyone divides these two in this way, but I find it incredibly useful to create more clarity in our thinking and speaking:
A) A feeling is best considered to be an emotion, something that produces chemical and physiological change in our body, an impulse to move, and often comes with thoughts and images. Joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, shame, and sexuality/sensuality show up in our bodies as emotions by this definition.
B) A sensation is not as complex or coherent as an emotion. Itching is not an emotion. Temperature is not (of itself) an emotion. Flow, stuckness, pressure, numbness, dizzyness, nausea, tension, fatigue, pain, hunger, and the like are also not emotions, rather, sensations. This list is far less inclusive than the pretty reliable list of seven embodied emotions above.
In the Bodynamic system, there are seven emotions and countless sensations. These emotions are embodied experiences. We can have multiple emotions present in our chemistry, not just one. We can have multiple sensations in our nervous system, in multiple parts of our body, all at once. Our attention has limits for how much it can hold. Consider attention like a roving search-light, focused within a narrow range, but not covering the whole searchable area all at once with great detail. The more focused the searchlight, the more powerful like a laser it can be; the less focused the searchlight, the fuzzier the light is.
Sensing and perceiving
Emotions are typically stirred up by something we perceive. This is normally below our level of awareness, in a part of our nervous system that always pays attention but isn’t directly your stream of thoughts or focus. This can be something external, internal, present, past, or anticipated. Perception is flexible and open to suggestion in all forms. After all, our nervous system would rather be ready and wrong than unprepared and dead. You can sense the different parts of an emotion in your body. You can have all seven emotions present in your body, even for different reasons. Each thing we sense is more data about how we are in the world.
Alongside our context, our defenses, our mood, and our sentiments, we are actively shaped by our emotions and sensations long before we begin actively thinking about what to do with all this energy and impulse our body gives (or takes from) us at any moment. By actively paying attention to both our emotions and our sensations, we increase our awareness of powerful factors that move us towards certain decisions and away from others. By paying attention, we slow down and are better able to choose our choices. We are less likely to get caught in runaway scenarios where bad becomes worse. By knowing both our outer and inner worlds, we have more information to make informed choices with.
Sensing through noticing change
We typically only sense what we perceive changing. It’s hard to sense something that “just is” without change.
An important consideration for the following exercise: Sensing can be disruptive.
Sensing your internal world can be unsettling in a more significant way for a portion of the population, and I encourage you to know and consider your limits here. If you have a history of trauma in your body, reconnecting with your body can be very unsettling or even triggering. The body keeps the score. While sensing is an incredibly powerful tool in working through trauma, it is most beneficial to have someone experienced in pacing, regulating, and responding to your experience while learning to sense. For another portion of the population, sensing your body without an experienced support can seem impossible and pointless. I’ve seen it all in my office.
Start slowly at first to dip your toes into this mode of knowing to learn more about how your nervous system responds, in a measured way. Stop at any time, and if you’re in therapy, this is excellent information to bring to your therapist. Triggers will happen in many places in life whether you sense yourself or not, and good support for getting through triggers is something worth pursuing for greater quality of life.
With this disclaimer in mind, if you choose to follow through with the exercise, one final consideration. For the first few tries, do not close your eyes, as removing external cues can make the process move much faster and deeper in ways you may not be familiar with regulating. Keeping your eyes open can slow the pace down and keep it within manageable parameters.
An exercise in sensing
Let’s make this practical: where you are, sit or stand comfortably.
- Take a moment to notice your breathing, it’s relative depth and pace. Take a few breaths to get a sense for this. Breathing is the easiest embodied change to perceive, it’s less subtle than the others.
- Then, with that established, take a moment to try to find your center of gravity. Your body works quite hard to keep your flesh and bones upright at any given moment, and different parts of your body tend to work harder than others. By aligning your body more with your center of gravity, no one part has to work significantly harder than another. The muscles meant to do their job are now doing their job. This alignment can help you feel, uncoincidentally, more centered and balanced.
- Find and sense your spine from your tailbone to the top of your neck. Lightly stretch it and rotate it, and notice how it moves along with your shoulders on each breath you take.
- Flex and release your toes a few times, seeing if you can notice how the muscles from your toes up through your legs, into your hips, and even your core get engaged in that active action. See if you can track the pathway of flexing and releasing.
- Settle into a comfortable, self-supported position and get curious about any sensation that emerges from the noise as you pay attention to your body. What commands your attention? What patterns do you notice? What emotion(s) come to your awareness? How tired, or scared, or hungry, or sad are you in this moment? How does it compare to what you expected before you started this exercise?
Sensing deepens our relationship with ourselves and our embodied story
Interoception is how we befriend our body that carries us, usually thanklessly or even begrudged, through our life. It’s how we debug things that we stopped paying attention to. Interoception is also how we begin to perceive ourselves as present. Accessing our internal senses and signals is how we can take ownership of what is ours. This is also how we begin to discern what we are carrying that doesn’t belong to us. Empathy functions by producing sensations in us that we perceive to be happening in someone else. We don’t sense what they sense, but we can have a reasonable approximation through empathy powered by our mirror neurons.
Embodied sensing is an ongoing skill to learn, one that offers many surprising insights. It is a skill that can quickly change our quality of life in noticeable ways. We enrich our awareness of ourselves and our ability to take charge of our mental health this way. We begin to better perceive early, quiet signals from our defenses. This lets us intervene by choice before we’re overwhelmed into our instincts. We can begin to take less for granted as we cultivate an active, quiet curiosity.
Sensing deepens our mental health
Embodied sensing is perhaps the most profound toolset I can offer every client I meet. It is a profound way to accelerate any behavioral change. Sensing is a profound way to promote lasting integration in your nervous system. I consider it an essential part of supporting mental health. It is like the power drill to a tradesman, the chef’s knife of the kitchen, the scalpel for the surgeon, or the pen for the author. Many other tools are needed and useful, but certain tools get more showtime than any other in your craft of choice. This is embodied sensing to the somatic therapist, a tool that makes us more present to the lives we live. Honing it daily continues to deepen the rewards.
If you found this interesting, challenging, or meaningful, I welcome you to follow up with me and book a session. We can collaborate to learn more personalized strategies. My license as a Psychologist only permits me to work with people who are physically in Alberta at the time of each session. My physical practice is based in Edmonton.