The Felt Sense
Feeling isn't thinking—but the difference can be hard for some of us.
When I started going to therapy, a lot of the concepts were new to me.
I especially struggled in learning to feel as opposed to just thinking.
The first therapist I saw kept asking me to describe how I felt at different times.
I would answer, and she'd say, “Okay, but that's not a feeling."
I was always thinking with my head instead of feeling with my body.
Then, even after I finally understood the difference, my vocabulary was limited. I'd say things like "Oh, that felt good" or “It was bad." Pretty basic!
At one point my therapist started to get frustrated, at least as much as a therapist is supposed to show such an emotion.
"Aren't you a writer?” she asked. “Surely you can come up with more descriptive terms.”
I knew she was right—but it was difficult. Learning to pay attention to the felt sense wasn’t something I’d ever learned.
I had to learn—slowly, and over time—how to pay more attention to how something actually FEELS.
If you've never tried it, this can change your life.
Pause and Feel: Several times a day, pause for a moment. Ask yourself, "What am I feeling right now?" Notice any sensations in your body, like tightness or warmth, without trying to change them. It’s about observing, not judging.
“Very Simple Journaling”: Every day (or, let’s be real, every day that you remember to do it), write down your feelings in as specific terms as possible. Instead of "I'm happy" or "I'm sad," describe the physical sensations. Is your happiness a lightness in your chest? Is sadness a heaviness in your shoulders? This helps you understand your emotions more clearly.
Focused Relaxation: Take a few minutes to lie down and relax. Start at your feet and move up to your head, noticing how each part of your body feels. Again, this isn't about changing anything, just feeling and acknowledging. This practice can help you link physical sensations to emotions.
None of these processes come naturally to me. Even after years of thinking differently, I still mostly think rather than feel, at least in terms of what I can pinpoint.
Still, the goal isn't to perfect these practices but to integrate them into your life in a way that feels true to you. That’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s been helpful. 💚
How about you—are you able to understand the difference between a thought and a feeling?
Being able to feel instead of think is the holy grail of mental health! Thanks for this great post!
In IFS (Internal Family Systems) terms, we have parts of us who carry very painful feelings and beliefs, like “I’m not good enough,“ or “I’m not lovable” or “It’s my fault this bad thing happened” etc. Those parts & their erroneous beliefs are so painful to feel, that we exile them from consciousness – hence, they are called exiles.
In order to keep the exiles exiled from consciousness, we need parts to protect us from their bad feelings.
What’s the most effective way to be protected from feelings? Thinking.
Therefore, we have manager parts who think think think think think think think. Oh my God so much thinking! Most people grow up thinking so much, they think that the part of them who does the thinking is who they really are. That is not true, though — we are something larger than our thoughts. Our true Self is more spacious and contains more than just our thoughts.
In some of the first phases of IFS work, finding out that “I am not the thinker“ is really shocking! Finding out there is something beyond or outside of the part of me who thinks….what?!! That is not who I really am? It can be an identity crisis to find out that I am not the one who thinks all the time to protect me from my deeper feelings. And, that I can develop the skill to be with my feelings, so that I don’t always have to be in my head, so that I can actually have a more full experience of being a human on this planet!
It’s incredibly difficult to move from the head to the heart, from the mind to the body, from thinking to feeling. Maybe it’s a lifelong journey for all of us.
What I love about IFS is that it’s a technology that gives people granular details about how precisely to do this, by separating the manager “thinking” parts out from the Self, the exiles, and the other parts. We need thinking, but when it gets out of control, like it is for so many people in the modern world, it’s incredibly deadening to our larger humanity.
It’s such a beautiful vision to work towards liberating ourselves from our mind, and coming back into our body, our feelings and the larger flow of life. Thanks for this generous reminder of the importance of this re-training/re-orientation, Chris.
There is a term for this for some cases: alexithymia. It is the abundant lack of feelings, or the inability to describe them or even acknowledge them at times. Even though I haven't been diagonsed (and never self-diagnose, kids), the way to treat it is what always intrigued me.
From Healthline: "One possible step towards emotional recognition is to start being mindful of your own physiological responses. Some research has suggested the importance of beginning with your heart rate."
In other words, being present and aware can help the thinking mind overcome the need to reason the thought away. You get more comfortable in it if you just acknowledge it and accept it.
Also (again, not a therapist, but I do deal with my own trauma): this can be a hallmark of traumatic events. The need to protect ourselves from emotion (either from somoene we once trusted or our own) is an amazing survival technique but rarely served once the trauma is over.
A lot of things to consider today. Thank you for posting!