Learning to Attend to the Feelings in the Body: the Path to Emotional Health

© 1996, Michael Bernet

This paper was presented by Michael Bernet, Ph.D. at the 1st U.S National Conference on Body Oriented Psychotherapy/4th International Congress of Psycho-Corporal Therapies, in Beverly, MA, on June 14, 1996. It gives an overview of the development of SIPOAS, and the basic Somats research study and its outcome, and is the most "accessible" of Dr. Bernet’s papers for the non-professional reader. The earlier term "BITWOF" (Being In Touch With One’s Feelings) has been replaced on this page with the more specific "Somat Aware" or "Somat Awareness

Abstract

In developing SIPOAS, a measure of style in perceiving feelings, high correlations were found between mental health and contentment, and the BB style of effortless, integrated awareness of the fine nuances of body feelings that precede or accompany the awareness of emotion. The BB style showed high correlations with experience in therapies in general; the combination of physical and spiritual modalities with psychotherapy had a synergistic effect. It is suggested that therapies are effective insofar as they impart skills in the rapid and precise perception of feelings, thus ensuring optimal behavioral response.

What is the goal of psychotherapy? What makes it effective? How can we make it more effective?

For our purpose we’ll define psychotherapy as a learning (or teaching) process that leads to effortless, rapid and appropriate responses to the stimuli and prompts of life. Emotional dis-ease can then be defined as deficits in the ability to respond appropriately, rapidly and effortlessly to these prompts.

Mediating between the prompts and our response lies the limbic system, a remarkable part of the brain, almost instantaneous in operation but not highly accurate. The limbic system evaluates the sensory input and when it senses a significant event it initiates responses: changes in the body’s flow and rhythm, preparation for action, or action itself. The minute, fleeting changes in our bodies are our feelings. Our feelings can act as new prompts stimulating new memories, associations or feelings. Our highly developed neocortex, which does not swing into action until later, allows us to do some very precise and very intricate thinking, evaluation and planning—but, compared to the "limbic brain," it is painfully slow.

If we are rapidly aware of the changing feelings in the body that are prompted by the limbic system, and interpret them accurately, and respond to them appropriately, we’ll probably do what’s best for us, we’ll respond optimally. If we suppress our feelings or misinterpret them or take too much time determining an appropriate response, we’ll build up an agglomeration of misperceptions and inappropriate actions. The improperly interpreted feelings, and the additional stimuli, memories and associations can create an endless chain, building in power and momentum, far removed from the original stimulus, eventually evoking a totally inappropriate response.

How do we attain mental health? Simple: we learn to be in touch with our feelings. We learn not to fear our feelings but to accept them as guides. Our animal friends lack our keen power for analytic thinking, their cortex is poorly developed, but they have great skill at picking minute clues from the environment and responding to them, usually with great wisdom. A human infant is even more "neocortically disadvantaged" yet it can tell at the very first interaction with its mother whether it is desired or rejected (Spitz, 1965), it can find the nipple with little effort, it can communicate its discomforts, it can even tell when its parents are beginning to contemplate sexual activity in the next room—and conveniently interrupt them. The animal and the infant are in touch with their feelings.

Slowly, as we course through life, we are taught not to feel because our feelings impose stress or obligations on our elders. "It doesn’t hurt ... don’t pay attention and it will go away ... calm down and don’t annoy me with your excitement ... don’t make me feel scared, embarrassed, sad or too happy." In school, in the home and by the media, we are taught to sharpen our perceptions and our thinking and at the same time we learn to downplay or ignore our feelings.

Being In Touch With One’s Feelings

It isn’t long before we no longer know how to feel or what we feel. We look around us, or try to look inside us with an outsider’s perspective, to try and figure out what we feel by figuring out what we think we should be feeling. Or we use our intellect to help us suppress those pesky feelings and figure out, with neocortical reasoning, what might be a desirable response. By the above definition, "Being in Touch with One’s Feelings" (a construct, formerly known by its acronym " BITWOF," now replaced with the phrase "Somat Awareness") equates with mental health. Hence, by definition, psychotherapy equates with learning to get in touch with our feelings. Major revelation! Isn’t that what we’ve always been told, always believed?

Yes, indeed, but there were four major problems: We couldn’t define Somat Awareness, we couldn’t measure it, we couldn’t prove that it was "good," and we couldn’t demonstrate how Somat Awareness can be acquired.

The answer to the first was relatively easy; it’s based on a long line of psychological concepts, starting from the question (or definition) "What is an emotion?" posed 112 years ago by William James, father of American Psychology, to current research on the limbic system especially the work of J. E. LeDoux. For the purpose of our study, Somat Awareness (i.e., Somat Awareness) is defined as the ability to integrate a rapid and accurate awareness of the (often fleeting, often barely perceptible) bodily feelings into a rapid response that is optimal and appropriate to the circumstances.

The answers to the other three questions emerge from the SIPOAS studies. SIPOAS ("Style in Perception of Affect Scale") is a pencil-and-paper measure comprising 93 items. SIPOAS indicates individual preference among three styles of perceiving—and responding to—those fleeting, often imperceptible feelings:

BB (Based on Body)—essentially Somat Awareness—reflects an effortless, integrated awareness of the fine nuances of body feelings that precede or accompany the awareness of emotion.

EE (Emphasis on Evaluation) reflects a style in which great effort is made to understand what is happening to oneself, often from the viewpoint of an outside observer, or in terms of imagined ideals or expectations.

LL (Looking to Logic) interposes logic between feelings and response, to control or avoid the potential discomfort or ambiguity of emotions.

All three styles are combined in each individual. To assess personality, we measure the dominant preference for each style.

The SIPOAS Research

A total of over one thousand individuals participated in the final development of SIPOAS, which was validated through correlations with 31 measures and scale factors. (Some of these correlations are shown in tables 1 and 2.)

Our various analyses show that BB correlates highly with mental health, with awareness of small bodily changes, with social skills, contentment and creativity, and with reported past experience in therapies. EE correlates highly with neuroticism and its components, and with self-doubt and discontent. LL does not correlate with mental health but correlates with social reserve, and with emphasis on the intellect over the emotion. High-LL people have usually had little, if any, therapy.

It appears that Being in Touch with our Feelings (Somat Awareness) is "good" for us!

We also learned, without much surprise, that members of Mensa—the society for those scoring among the top two percent in IQ—scored highest on LL and near the bottom on BB and EE; those from the mail lists of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and of the International Primal Association, scored highest in BB and near the bottom on EE and LL; and those who obtained their questionnaires in a therapist’s waiting room, or through postings on the Internet via bulletin boards dedicated to "problems in daily living," scored highest on EE: i.e. they were unhappy, anxious or uncomfortable and were looking for others to help them respond to their feelings.

Women, on average, scored only somewhat lower on LL than men; they tended to be slightly higher than men in BB and in EE—which most of us would have predicted.

What did cause surprise is that those under 25 scored a full 66 percent higher on EE than those aged 66 and above. The decrease with age was quite steady. We looked into that and found that when there was no therapy, increasing maturity led to increasing LL, i.e. increasing ability to use logic and reasoning to cope with feelings. When there had been therapy—psychotherapy, spiritual therapy or physical therapy—the subjects gained in BB, i.e. they became more in touch with their feelings, as they aged. (BB, EE and LL appear to be among the few known personality styles that continue to change substantially after the age of 30 or so. Our results call into question the relevance of research that is based on the responses of college freshmen.)

Gaining Somat Awareness

How do we gain Somat Awareness? How do we increase BB? Do our data bear out our definition of psychotherapy? We would have liked to take five thousand subjects, allocate them randomly to "intervention" groups, each group subjected for two years to one of thirty or forty therapeutic modalities (equal frequency and intensity for each subject), and measure their BB and their mental health at the outset, and at the end of the therapy. Obviously that was not practical. Instead, we had our thousand subjects report (on a scale of 0 to 9) how important for their lives had been their experiences in spiritual, physical and psycho- therapies and also to estimate the personal importance of experience in each of a list of more than thirty modalities of therapy.

We hypothesized that the more important the therapeutic experience, the higher the BB score. Our data confirmed this. This doesn’t prove that therapeutic experience leads to higher BB. It is almost certainly true that those who are thoroughly comfortable with their feelings will be drawn to experiences that enhance these feelings; those who are puzzled by their feelings are likely to seek therapies that answer their questions (if possible, perhaps, without stirring up feelings); and those who use intellect to find answers and to suppress feelings are unlikely to seek any type of therapy unless they’re in deep, deep trouble. Nonetheless, there are many indicators that support our conjecture that therapies cause enhanced BB.

Physical, Spiritual, And Psycho- Therapies

We found that those who had experienced psychotherapy and physical modalities and spiritual disciplines had a mean BB score that was a full 50 percent higher than those who reported little or no therapeutic experience of any kind; what was surprising was that the mean for those who had only psychotherapy experience was just 7 percent higher than for those who had no or only limited experience in any modality (see table 3). As we add physical and spiritual modalities, the mean BB score increases dramatically. There was an equally impressive decrease in the mean LL score; psychotherapy alone, or in combination with physical or spiritual modalities, all showed a decrease in LL; all three together showed by far the lowest LL mean score.

What about individual therapeutic modalities? Some modalities appear to have an especially high relationship with BB. The body-related abreactive therapies—bioenergetics analysis, primal therapy, and Reichian—scored highest. Not far behind were meditation, tai-chi, gestalt, and Jungian therapies. Also highly related with mean BB scores were psychodrama, encounter groups, existential, dance, massage and person-centered therapies, and yoga.

Why are these specific therapies effective (if we are right in our conjecture that therapy leads to higher BB scores)? On the basis of our initial definition, we would say it is because these therapies cause greater awareness of feelings in the body and rely least on "being in the head." In meditation we learn to seek and recognize fine nuances within the body; the abreactive therapies deliberately work on the events being experienced in the body, massage literally touches, dance expresses the feelings of the body in motion, and so on.

Therapies that encourage awareness of the fine nuances of body feelings (such as bioenergetics analysis, gestalt therapy and encounter groups), or combination of psychotherapy with physical and spiritual modalities, appear to be the most effective in helping us become more aware of our feelings, and thus of attaining optimal mental health. They are much more effective than therapies that address only the mind or the behavior.

The more a therapy enhances an awareness of the nuances of feelings and of the changes of feelings within the body, the more likely that it will enhance the skills of Somat Awareness—and the more likely that it will enhance mental health. Indeed, an analysis of the data that we are currently conducting suggests that the combination of various components—such as altered states of consciousness, physical enactment of emotional states, and focused attention to body sensations—is likely to be the factor that is most effective in enhancing BB and emotional health.

References

James, W. (1884) What is an emotion? Mind, 9, 188-205.

LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.

SIPOAS: (1995). Available from Michael Bernet, Institute for Somat Awareness. www.somats.com, research@somats.com

Spitz, R .A. (1965). The First Year of Life. New York: International Universities.