When Clients Can’t Feel

Inevitably we get clients who struggle to connect to their feelings. Feelings are happening, they are just disconnected from the client’s awareness. Perhaps they even arrive with a diagnosis of alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing emotions) or anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure).

Research shows that while clients reporting an inability to feel, physiological arousal still occurs despite their lack of interoceptive awareness that such internal changes are occurring (Alexithymia - PMC).  The emotional machinery is functioning at a physiological level, but the connection to conscious awareness is disrupted.

Research has also demonstrated that depressed participants with high levels of anhedonia, higher cortisol levels was significantly associated with higher reward-seeking behavior, suggesting stress and reward systems are functioning even when conscious pleasure is diminished (ScienceDirectPubMed).

ASR has several interventions to help clients who struggle to connect to their felt experience.

1. Catch a feeling when it is present

Some clients miss the cues of emotions within them. Within your attunement, watch for the presence of a feeling and ask about it the instant it is still active in the body. This may even require you to interrupt the client. “What’s that feeling?” Then direct them to notice what sensations are occurring in the moment.

2. Focus on somatic sensation

It is easier for us to be aware of a somatic sensation than an emotional one. Because physical and emotional feelings both travel the Vagus Nerve and are processed by the same part of the brain, they nearly always co-occur. Identifying the physiological sensation of a feeling and translating that sensation to emotion language can help clients connect to their felt experience.

3. Skip the Self

Despite the Self’s unawareness, a feeling’s are active within the body. Through attunement, we can identify the felt experience of a client despite their lack of awareness. Providing language within an attuned posture can heighten that feeling to increase its interoceptive “visibility”, causing the feeling to “move” within the client.

The client then may be able to identify the movement. I’ve had many clients tell me “I don’t know why I’m crying right now!” This is because the feeling was moving despite the disconnection of the Self.

4. Move Left to Right

There are times you can help a client connect to their felt experience (right brain) through logic (left brain). “Who likes betrayal?” you ask. No one. “Why?”  Well, it’s wrong. “But how do you know it’s wrong? Why don’t you just shrug and say oh well?”  Each question leads the client to a feeling answer.

Cognitively exploring the logic of a felt experience and inexorably moving towards the somatic sensation can help build awareness and awaken dissociated aspects of Self. Then expand their awareness of the felt experience.