Feelings

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What do you feel? What is your reaction to this question.

It's great when there is an answer - for example, I feel joy. Either the possible - I'm sad, or at least - they make me angry.

And if not. There is nothing in return.

What I feel? The question that still gives me hang-up conditions. This does not always happen, however, when I am not collected, when I am fiddling with something of my own, when I am not waiting for a question, when I am in the script.

What do you feel? - Sounds like a bolt from the blue. The question stops, you seem to press the brake at speed and you are skidding, flying head over heels and … shock.

What do you feel? The question pulls out sharply. It's like you put your hand forward, and there is a wall.

What do you feel? - a question that I do not hear at all when I am deep. Feel? … I slowly emerge, I feel chilly … I shiver, I really feel chilly on the physical level, because I was pulled out of my thoughts, from my soft and safe abode, as if from a warm bed into a cold windy field.

How do you feel? Is a question that I ask in my work, even when I know it is a “closed door”.

The question raises when there is stagnation. It turns on reaction or thinking, or one by one, switching to other adaptations and opening "doors" that have been closed.

“We teach clients who do not recognize their feelings to think about them” @ Elena Soboleva (TSTA-P).

Thank you, I say mentally to Elena Sergeevna, from the minute I heard the above phrase. It was a permission for me and a confirmation of my understanding of working with the senses, or rather with the prescription "Don't feel."

In my work on myself, I learned to recognize feelings through the body.

When I was studying body therapy, I learned to catch bodily impulses as responses to stimuli, thereby drawing a logical chain for myself. I learned to explain to myself that if my legs are cramping, then this is fear and then I look for danger in order to understand whether it is real or irrational. Sometimes this already happens afterwards, in the analysis of the situation, since at that moment Be Strong blocked all feelings and there was only instinct.

I brought this idea into my work with clients. We build this chain step by step, recognizing where fear, anger, pain, sadness, joy live. Where is the house in the body for every sense.

However, what to do when the body is "cut off"? When there are no sensations, when only a white shroud, fog, stupor, nothing.

Logic chain to help.

A person may not “feel” in his scenario moment, but he knows what may be happening to another or what is the possible logical reaction.

On the one hand, this is a kind of logic, but on the other hand, it is a saving rope that a person can grab onto at the moment when he is shaking and he, slowly holding on to it, begins to make his way forward, in the darkness of his unrecognized feelings and sensations.

As an example of work (fictional story):

"Mom screams and tears out the notebook, hitting her on the head"

- What do you feel?

- I do not know. Nothing.

- What do you think a person can feel when he is attacked on the street? What's going on with him?

On the one hand, we can go into this state of "Nothing" and most likely we will get bogged down there, if the client has not been with us for 2-3 years in therapy. Of course, there is an important part of "nothing" and it is good to return to it later, maybe a year later.

And now, in the here and now, the task is to recognize the feeling, to learn to the client to understand and know it, and, accordingly, to react adequately to the situation.

It is also important that the therapist should not introduce his own logic (reaction, experience, thought) into the answers. If, for example, described above, it is logical for you to be angry, then the client has “his own logic” in this question and his answer, these are his feelings and this is what you are looking for together.

At the same time, it does not mean that the client will accept and believe that this is exactly what he feels. And even if you happily say "Bingo!"

And if it stays, it won't be "playing your games" for a long time.

(continuation of the example)

- What do you think…? - I ask the client.

- What an interesting thought … - I say to him in response.

- You know, what you say is also close to me - I answer further, if it is consonant with my worldview.

- How interesting you are thinking, but I think in a completely different way, share more …

- What can you say about the mother's behavior when she hits the child? Does it sound like an assault?

We are silent. I practically do not breathe, afraid to frighten off at an important moment.

The client froze. Glitter in the eyes. Insight?

No. It went out again.

Do not know. May be.

Exhalation. More mine.

And a very quiet customer.

Let's continue. No, let's not start over. Let's continue.

There was a sparkle and sooner or later it will turn into the energy of rebellion, which will help to throw off the shackles of the prescription, then an impulse of the Free Child's energy will come, which will turn the work in a different direction, give strength and new decisions.

In the meantime, we go as we go. Time after time, building logical chains and step by step opening the door to feelings.

@RoksanaYaschuk, CTA-P.