Trusting Your (Client’s) Gut

Do you trust your gut? Trusting your gut is way of saying we trust a feeling or trusting our intuition. It’s about listening to a sense of what is happening within you in addition to what you are thinking.

In ASR, more than trusting our own gut, we trust the client’s gut. Through attunement, we embody the client’s feeling, then listen and trust it.

Don’t confuse this with trusting the client’s interpretation of their gut. Instead, we let their feeling help us make sense of their words and their actions.

Once you have ensured you are somatically linked to the client’s feeling are the feeling, slowly process through the content and context being explored in the session and notice if the feeling escalates or soothes in intensity or increases in clarity around aspects of the situation.

Be curious why that feeling responds to those aspects in those contexts. Explore what the feeling is looking for or reacting to. What does it need? What is the function of the thoughts and behaviors paired with the feeling? Does it justify it, dismiss it, or soothe it?

Learning to trust your client’s gut will help you better understand what is happening in your clients and provide more data as to why they say and do what they do.