Guest blog by Susan Pelton, PhD., SEP
If you have engaged in any form of somatic therapy, you likely were encouraged to notice your felt sense. But have you ever wondered, “Just what is the felt sense?” A good way to understand the felt sense is by noticing it experientially. Let’s do that through these two examples.
First, imagine that you go back in time – way back – and that you are a sleeping infant. Notice the rhythmic breathing of your infant body, the snuggly warmth of the blanket surrounding you, and the quiet safety all around you. Stay with that image for a few moments. Now, check inside your adult body now. Do you notice a sense of peacefulness?
Second, let’s change things up. This time imagine that you are an infant struggling with colic. Feel your internal upset, your squirming body, your sharp cries, your red face, and notice your distress and pain. You’re miserable and it’s not abating. Again, stay with it for a few moments. Now again check inside yourself. Do you notice a sense of discomfort in your adult body now?
In each scenario, when you allowed yourself to focus on how your body might feel if you were the infant, the experience rendered a felt sense – a whole body feeling – one peaceful, one dysregulated.
Related Reading: 5 Somatic Experiencing Techniques that Anyone Can Use to Stay Grounded
You might be thinking, but that’s just imagination. What difference does the felt sense make to me in the here and now? Well, think about if you met someone new during your workday and that you had an uneasy feeling, as though your body was telling you that this person was not safe. There may not be any recognizable reason that you can point to, but the feeling is there. That’s the felt sense providing a warning to be cautious.
“A felt sense is not a mental experience, but a physical one, a bodily sense of a situation, or a person or an event. It’s an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about some subject. And you sense it all at once, rather than detail by detail.” (Gendlin, Eugene T.. Focusing. United States: Everest House, 1978).
Implicit and Explicit Memory
The felt sense is a gestalt of knowing informed by some explicit memories (the ones you consciously remember) as well as some implicit memories (the ones only your body remembers) and what your body is experiencing in the present. For instance, you walk outside and breathe in the cool air. You might have a felt sense of the season. Yes, you see the leaves are almost all gone from the trees and the temperature has dropped, but it is more than that. You have the memories of past days of late fall included in the gestalt of the felt sense. You may have images associated with those memories and even affective states that for example, may excite you or make you wary of the season.
When I was young, my family would pick a Saturday in the late fall, rake up the leaves, and put them in the ditch. We would then set them on fire, and roast hotdogs and marshmallows over the fire. The whole day was a lot of work, but we had fun and it felt like a nice family activity. On the other hand, in the winter when it snowed, my older brother went from neighbor to neighbor shoveling their driveways. Of course, I wanted to help, but often my gloves or mittens were not warm enough and I would get very cold and just want to go home. These two memories evoke very different felt sense experiences.
The felt sense is sometimes described as a big unclear feeling, and it does not come to you in the form of thoughts, words, or other separate units. Rather, it is a single, often puzzling but very complex, bodily feeling. The felt sense of a problem is how that problem sits in your body, and how it makes you feel and act. My felt sense of not liking being too cold has tempered my enjoyment of activities that some people really enjoy doing. I really don’t like skiing, ice skating, or even caroling around Christmas time. In my mind, I just want to get back inside where it is warm.
Related Reading: What is Somatic Experiencing Therapy?
When people begin therapy, they often feel dysregulated and come in with depression, anxiety, grief, or any number of symptoms. We talk about working with how the body is feeling to help the client begin to recognize the sensations in their body that are related to the feeling states that are troubling to them.
How do you find a felt sense of a situation?
Dr. Eugene Gendlin in his classic 1978 book Focusing stressed that finding a felt sense of a situation requires a type of consciousness that we rarely tap. It’s a kind of bodily awareness. As described in the examples above, a felt sense does not communicate itself in words and it is not often easy to describe in words. It is a deep-down bodily awareness. What does often come up is one aspect of the felt sense. We might feel the cool air and suddenly feel anxious or excited and not understand what is behind the feeling states.
To become aware of a particular felt sense, Gendlin suggests that first clearing current “noise” from your mind and body. Then do the following:
- Take a deep breath and do a slow body scan noticing any tension or softness in your body.
- Then bring an issue into your thoughts but view the issue at a distance – almost like you can walk around and just notice it.
- Just allow yourself to sit with the experience and allow any images, behaviors, sensations to float by and notice if they feel like they are a part of the whole of your issue – the felt sense of the issue.
- If they are not, then let them go. If they are, just put them to the side to notice later. (Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking about – too many parts to think about each one alone.)
- Feel all these things together. Pay attention where you usually feel things in your body. There you can get a sense of what the issue feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that.
- Allow yourself time to do this gently. Gendlin writes that it often takes your body 20 to 30 seconds to notice if something resonates with it. But he also states that this whole process should not be worked on for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time.
- Once you have gathered a few images, behaviors, sensations, or even memories that you feel are part of the whole of the felt sense, then just take a couple more deep breaths and allow yourself to review all that you have gathered.
- As you review the felt sense, you may notice it shift a little. A felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way – with non-judgment and curiosity. The felt sense will change and go through little steps on its way to something new.
When your felt sense of a situation changes physically, you change. And that’s how you can live your life – informed by your felt sense.
Susan Pelton is a Life Care Wellness clinical psychologist who applies Somatic Experiencing ideas as well as polyvagal theory and memory reconsolidation to her work in providing safe spaces and understanding. She works with children and adults and sees clients in the Jefferson Park office and by telehealth.
