Are You "Feeling Your Feelings"? Or Just Spinning Your Wheels? A Case for Somatic Therapy

Why understanding your emotions isn't the same as actually feeling them—and what to do instead.

You've replayed the event in your head a thousand times. You've talked about it in

therapy and finally understand it. You've cried in cycles for years.

But the pain never really resolves. Sometimes it doesn't even diminish.

That's because you think you're feeling your feelings. But you're not.

After 30 years of working with people in somatic therapy, I've discovered something most people don't realize: thinking about emotions and actually feeling them are completely different experiences. And most of us were never taught the difference.

What We Were Actually Taught

Our culture didn't teach us to feel. We learned to ignore what we're feeling, to distract ourselves from discomfort, to divert our attention to something more "productive." We learned to pretend we're fine—especially in corporate environments where you have to be a "plain brown paper bag," neutral and inoffensive and uncomplicated.

We absorbed the message that emotions are unprofessional, that vulnerability is weakness, that feelings should be controlled, managed, and kept private. We learned that "getting emotional" is a problem to be solved, not a signal to be listened to.

So when we finally hear "feel your feelings," we don't actually know what that means. We've never been taught. We've been taught the opposite for decades.

What We Do Instead

Here's what usually happens when we try to "feel the feelings": We sit down. We think about the emotion. We analyze it.

Why am I feeling this way? Where did this come from? Is it because of what happened in childhood? What's the root cause?

We ruminate. We regret. We lament. We wish things were different. We create elaborate mental narratives about the emotion, its origins, its meaning, its implications. And all of this happens upstairs. In our heads. In our thoughts.

This is intellectualizing. It's thinking about the emotion while staying completely disconnected from the actual feeling.

And here's the thing: intellectualizing never actually resolves the emotion.

You can understand your anger perfectly—know exactly where it came from, why it makes sense, what triggered it—and still carry it in your body for years. You can have deep insight into your grief, trace it back to childhood, connect all the dots—and still never actually grieve.

Understanding is valuable. But it's not the same as feeling. And understanding alone won't set you free.

Let's Clarify the Language

Part of the confusion comes from how we talk about emotions. Let me propose a shift in language for clarity.

Emotions are the names we give to experiences—anger, sadness, joy, fear. Think of

them like labels on the wheel of emotions. They're cerebral, staying upstairs in the executive suite of your brain. In the corporate world, this is where emotions live—as concepts to be discussed, analyzed, managed. The executive that sits in your brain lives high above the messiness of the actual experience.

These emotions center around stories that are meaningful to us. They arise out of these storylines. Many people access the emotion of ANGER by remembering a storyline from the past—replaying the scene, rehearsing what they should have said, analyzing what went wrong.

But when that emotion is expressed or experienced in the body, it becomes sensation. The lump in your throat. The rising heat in your chest. The clenched muscles in your face, the tightness in your belly, the shallow breathing. These sensations—these ARE the emotions themselves

Talk therapy helps you understand what happened.

Somatic therapy helps you sense your emotions to completion and free yourself from your past.

How Somatic Therapy Works

People arrive at very different starting points. Here are two common patterns I see:

Some people are cut off from their bodies

Everything happens in their heads—thoughts, analysis, understanding—but there's no felt-sense below the neck. They can talk about emotions but can't sense them physically.

I design movement and breathwork practices to help them sense their bodies again. The work is tailored to their nervous system—calming or energizing as needed. As awareness grows, the limiting beliefs that have kept them stuck begin to emerge. We work with all of it!

Others are overwhelmed by their emotions

Some clients feel intensely—maybe too intensely. They've cried, processed, and catharted until they're exhausted, yet nothing resolves. They might feel like they're drowning in a sea of emotion with no way to shore.

In these situations, I almost always begin by teaching nervous system regulation skills. We use polyvagal techniques, prescriptive breath coaching, and movement to help them find what Internal Family Systems calls "Self Energy"—a grounded, centered place where they can observe their emotions without being swept away by them.

When the client is centered, we use somatic techniques to locate where emotions live physically: the tightness in the throat, the pressure in the chest, the knot in the belly. The sense-feel.

I teach them to be with sensation the way you'd sit beside a frightened animal—calm, patient, present. Not trying to fix or change it, just keeping it company. When you can be with a feeling this way:

• with curiosity and compassion instead of fear and avoidance

• with breath instead of resistance

something shifts. The energy starts to move. It softens, releases, completes. The e-motion becomes energy-in-motion once again. They might experience - and some for the first time - what it means to live in flow.

Other Ways We Access Emotions

Body mapping: Sometimes we draw emotions on an outline of the human body—marking where anger sits, where grief lives, where anxiety buzzes. Some clients use color, texture, directional lines, and shapes. Other clients might mark the spot with an X, like a treasure map. Then we work with those areas of the body through conversational, exploratory movement and breath. When this practice is complete, clients will observe that the sensation has shifted significantly. It has diminished, expanded, or vanished.

This simple before-and-after gives people a tangible sense that they can influence their own experience.

Jungian Tarot: Occasionally I'll have clients pull a tarot card—not for fortune-telling, but

because we are meaning-seeking creatures. Something on that card will catch their attention: an image, a color, a symbol. Whatever jumps out becomes our starting point for exploration. We don't look in the Tarot book for a predetermined meaning; We are discovering what their psyche is ready to work with through archetype and symbol.

Unpacking iceburg emotions: When someone says "I'm sad," we don't stop there. Sadness is often a catch-all for a complex mix of feelings, each connected to different stories and memories. We break it down and map out the kaleidoscope of distinct emotions that make up the part of the iceburg that's under the surface of the water. Beneath sadness might be shame, abandonment, or grief. Working with these components one at a time—gently, slowly—we reduce the overall charge of sadness while building compassion for the different parts of yourself carrying these feelings.

Integrating Trauma (Not "Healing" It)

I want to be very clear about language here too: this isn't HEALING. You are not going to return to some pristine pre-trauma state. That's not how this works. You're not erasing what happened or becoming who you would have been without it.

So let's toss out the word "heal," and instead, use the new catch-word "integrate".

This work will help you integrate the traumatic experience into your life in a way that makes you and your story more whole, more meaningful. The trauma becomes part of your narrative—but it stops running your nervous system. The past stops hijacking your present. The memory doesn't disappear, but it loses its charge. You can hold what happened with more spaciousness and more self-compassion.

This is how sensation becomes a doorway—not to erasing the past, but to making peace with it. (Read more about somatic therapy as time travel here)

Try This: Accessing Buried Emotions Through Breath

Here's a practice nearly anyone can do. It only requires you to lie on your stomach and breathe.

The Practice:

• Lie face down on a comfortable surface

• You can put a pillow under your belly for increased sensation and pressure

• Make a pillow out of your forearms for your head

• Be comfortable

• Breathe slowly into your belly so it balloons onto the pillow or surface

• Hold your breath in your belly for 3-4 seconds

• Be present to the "contents" of your belly during that pause—fullness, emptiness, movement, any tightness

• Then exhale—let exhales become longer and longer

The medicine is the pause. That's where awareness blooms. Think of it as holding

space open for images, sensations, or memories to rise and be known.

And if you don't connect with that concept, just know this: breathing into your belly while on your belly is deeply relaxing and restorative. It's diaphragmatic breathing on steroids.

Read more on accessing the deep self through breath.

What Your Body Has Been Waiting For

Your body has been waiting—sometimes for years, sometimes for decades—for you to finally feel what it's been carrying. And when you do, miracles happen. The tension you've carried for 20 years releases. The grief you've been avoiding finally gets to move. The anger that turned into depression transforms into joy. The numbness gives way to aliveness.

This Is the Work

This is what somatic therapy is. This is what I do with clients every day.

We don't just talk about emotions. We find them in the body. We stay with them. We let them speak to us and through us. We allow them to move. And person by person, emotion by emotion, we undo years of training to ignore, distract, and pretend.

An Invitation

If you've been stuck in your head—thinking about your emotions, analyzing them, understanding them, but never quite feeling different—this might be what's missing.

Not more insight. Not more understanding. More feeling. More body. More permission to actually be with what's there.

It's uncomfortable at first. Unfamiliar. Maybe even scary.

But on the other side of avoiding your feelings is something you've been searching for: the actual experience of being alive.

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Samantha is a member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, a Noom Certified Health Coach, and the founder of Davidson Yoga Therapy and Health Coaching.

She has held complementary healthcare positions at The Blanchard Institute, Atrium

Hospital, Levine Cancer Institute, Sanger Heart Clinic, and Davidson College. She has presented for Fortune 500 companies and major Universities, both public and professional audiences, on this thing called yoga therapy and what it can do when it is unpeeled, revealed, and adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the person doing it. 

She leverages her three decades of yoga therapy and health coaching experience with the following therapeutic models:

• Breathing Technology

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

• Jungian Psychology

• Jungian Dream Interpretation

• Somatic Cognition

• Internal Family Systems

• Interfaith Perspectives

• Spiritual Technologies

• Trauma Healing

• Polyvagal Somatics

• Ayurvedic Lifestyle Coaching

• Compassionate Inquiry

• Pain Reprocessing Therapy

• The Neurosequential Model

All this is to say, there are many doorways to use on the path to healing and self-discovery, and Samantha’s breadth of experience allows for vast creativity on which approach is right for you!