Building Relationship with Sensation
Have you ever spent a day aware of a persistent knot in your throat? Going through the motions with a gripping in your abdomen, or a dense block in your diaphragm? These sensations can quietly shape our behavior - pushing us toward food, substances, endless scrolling, or distraction. Often, it’s not the feeling itself, but our resistance to it that drives the patterns we most want to change.
Approaches like somatic inquiry and parts work offer a pathway to relate to these sensations differently - by bringing awareness to the urge to escape, and gently building a relationship with what is being felt.
But what does it mean to build a relationship with sensation?
‘Parts Work’ is an approach used across a number of modalities, including Internal Family Systems and Emotionally Focused Therapy. In essence, it is a way of working with the felt experience of emotion and sensation in the body, offering a framework for understanding and relating to these experiences in new ways.
Our instinctual response to discomfort in the body is often repression, avoidance, resistance, rejection - or intellectualization. This might sound like: “I wish I wasn’t feeling this way,” “this won’t go away,” or “I shouldn’t feel this.” It might look like difficulty concentrating, compulsive checking of your phone, sleepiness, shutdown, or other forms of escape.
The impulse to avoid discomfort and seek safety within the body - at any cost - is deeply human, and often adaptive. At the same time, what is referred to in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy as low ‘distress tolerance’ can reinforce cycles of avoidance that keep us feeling stuck.
We begin to regulate emotions by first allowing ourselves to feel them.
Though simple in theory, this can be a profound shift. Present and past experiences - especially those involving chronic stress or trauma - can make being in the body feel inherently unsafe. In a recent CPTSD training, Dr. Arielle Schwartz described how dissociation and escape are not failures, but adaptive responses to threat. At times, they may have been essential for survival - ways of containing overwhelming experience while still moving through daily life. Over time, however, these strategies can become burdensome. What once protected us may begin to show up as physical tension, emotional numbness, depression, or strain in relationships.
What might it look like, then, to begin to turn toward the body?
To slow down.
To get curious.
To bring awareness to what is actually happening, without immediately judging or trying to change it.
Instead of evaluating the sensation, you might begin to notice its edges - its shape, texture, weight, or even color. Gently approaching the perimeter of the feeling, rather than pushing it away. In a therapeutic space, this can become a way of relating to the emotional self beyond thought - experiencing feeling not as something to analyze, but as something to witness and explore.
As we begin to feel more fully, the body often offers more information. What is held there may start to take form - a fear, a sadness, a longing, a memory.
In turning toward sensation, we begin to practice presence. Being with the pain, instead of running from it.
Tending to it, instead of repressing it.
Holding tenderness, instead of hardening against it.
This is not easy work. Shame or self-criticism can become especially loud in this process - as we take steps to build non-judgmental awareness of emotion, and, over time, cultivate compassionate awareness of emotional experience. It can feel so difficult to access compassion for what is being felt when self-criticism or self-blame have played such a powerful role in containing and minimizing emotional experience - strategies that perhaps have essentially disconnect us from emotion in order to create a temporary sense of safety.
So where to begin?
We can start by reminding the body that it is safe in small but powerful ways. Orienting to safety involves noticing cues in your external or internal environment, and can be a gentle entry point into this practice. In a space that feels supportive to you, you might begin to notice:
What do you see around you?
What do you hear?
What do you smell?
What textures do you feel—comforting textures, the air on your skin?
What do you notice about taste?
From here, if it feels accessible, you might begin to turn your attention inward - toward sensation in the body - meeting yourself with curiosity and care. If you feel drawn to explore this more, No Bad Parts by Richard Shwartz offers an accessible entry point.
Thank you for reading and exploring this topic with me. I hope it offers a small invitation to pause, notice, and be with your experience.
If this resonates and you’re curious about working together, you’re welcome to be in touch.
With warmth,
Claire
