We’ve all been told to “feel our feelings,” but what does that actually mean, and how do you do it? Today on the Being Well Podcast, Forrest talks with trauma therapist Simone Saunders about how to go from knowing your patterns to being able to do something about them when things get intense.
They discuss what your nervous system does when it decides you’re not safe, why the tools you’ve collected go offline in exactly the moments you need them, and how a sense of agency changes that equation. Simone walks through her three-step process for noticing a sensation, working out what it’s asking for, and doing something different with it. They also talk about the functional freeze, what to do when you “don’t feel anything,” and how to relate to shame and grief.
Key Topics
- 00:00: Intro: overthinking, cognitive bypassing, and intellectualizing
- 4:42: What it means to “be in the body”
- 9:46: Bottom-up approaches and trauma
- 18:33: How to recognize disconnection and functional freeze
- 27:31 [Sponsor] Rocket Money
- 28:38: Moving out of a dictatorship and into a partnership with your body
- 34:51: How to actually feel your feelings
- 46:29: The difference between emotions and feelings
- 52:14: Meeting your needs
- 56:21 [Sponsor] MasterClass
- 57:40: The limit of self-understanding, frameworks, and tools
- 1:00:07: Moving into experiments, titration, and when you feel too much or not enough
- 1:17:28: Recap
