Chapter summary: shows different ways to support others in accessing their emotions and staying with them so they can embody their emotions.
In the first step in the process of embodying emotions, we saw how important the details of a situation are for the formation of an emotional response. However, the details of the situation alone are not enough to evoke the emotional response. We know this from our everyday experience of people who have an adequate grasp of the details of the situations they find themselves in, but who, at the same time, report no emotional responses. There can be many possible reasons for this condition. For example, some people might have unhelpful attitudes toward emotions; others might not know how to label or express their emotional experiences. Let us look at the different ways we can support others so they can overcome these and other blocks in the way of their emotions, to help them access their emotions and stay with them so the emotions can be embodied.
In general, people who have had support for their emotional experiences while growing up are more likely to experience and report emotional experiences to others. Research has shown that the most important determinant of the capacity for emotions observed in children is the capacity for a range of emotions in their parents.1 Children internalize (introject) their important caregivers’ attitudes toward emotions as their own. As a result, they can have supportive or nonsupportive attitudes toward attending to and reporting their emotional experiences. In addition, no matter how supportive their internal attitudes toward emotions are, people in general have difficulty attending to and reporting their emotional experiences if there is inadequate support for their emotions in the people immediately around them. Therefore, for people to allow themselves to experience and express emotions, supportive attitudes toward emotions from those around them are just as important as having their own supportive attitudes toward emotions.
In order to work with emotional responses in clients, therapists have to explore the situation so as to guide them to the details that are most likely to evoke the emotional responses, providing whatever external support clients need for experiencing and expressing their emotions. Emotional support can take so many different forms, but the most important ingredient in supporting other people emotionally is the caring we are able to bring to the impact a situation is having on them. That is, we have to communicate to the other person that we care about the impact the situation is having on that person. We communicate that we care by bringing sympathy and empathy to the suffering of others.
With sympathy, we communicate that we care that someone is suffering by making statements such as “It must be really hard emotionally to go through what you are going through,” “I cannot imagine how much you have suffered in this situation,” “I feel bad when I see you suffer,” “I wish you did not have to suffer so much,” and so on. Sympathy is showing compassion for the suffering of another and caring for the other.
With empathy, we show that we care even more by finding a way to experience the suffering of others in ourselves. Peter Fonagy, a significant contributor to attachment theory, calls the ability to experience the emotions of others in our bodies “embodied attunement.”2 According to Fonagy, mothers who can experience the emotions of their children in their bodies are better at regulating their children emotionally. When we share another person’s emotional experiences in our own bodies when we are with them, we provide them the best possible support for their emotional experiences. Through empathy, we can also help others articulate what their emotional experiences are by experiencing and articulating their emotional experiences in ourselves first. This can help people feel really understood. We will see in chapter 14 on interpersonal resonance all the ways we can experience the emotions of others in ourselves.
Here is a list of practical ways we can support emotions, including examples of statements we can make that provide each type of support:
“Emotions give us important information on how situations affect our well-being.”
“People often avoid emotions because they have heard that emotions are irrational. Emotions can indeed lead to irrational cognition, like ‘no one loves me,’ or irrational behavior, like the impulse to hurt the person who abandoned me, when I cannot tolerate the vulnerable emotions from being abandoned. However, if I can develop the capacity to tolerate emotions by embodying them, my cognitive and behavioral responses to being abandoned are more likely to be rational.”
“Adults often tell children it is not okay for boys to cry or for girls to be angry. That is not correct. That is probably what they heard from adults when they were children too. Sadness and anger are both valid emotional responses for boys, girls, men, and women.”
“Of course anyone in your situation would feel what you are feeling. I would too.”
“I hear that you are very sad.”
“I hear that the situation with your children is very difficult for you now.”
“When people think of emotions, they often only look for basic universal emotions such as happiness and sadness. There are so many emotions that we miss because they are not generally recognized as emotions. Did you know that just feeling bad about a situation is a legitimate emotional response to that situation?”
“Does your shame feel like your inside has become rotten?”
“Does your hurt from the breakup feel like your heart has splinters of glass in it?”
“Does the betrayal feel like the person stabbed you in the heart?”
“When I work with people who have gone through early losses, I often run into shock, hurt, sadness, grief, despair, resignation, and anger. I also know these emotions from processing my own losses.”
“As I listen to you describe what you went through, as I assume the expression on your face and your body posture, I am overcome with profound grief.”
“I also experience shame. At times, I feel like I am the least worthy person in the whole world.”
“When I see you suffer, my heart feels like crying.”
“Please open your eyes and orient to the present.”
“Do you notice whether your emotional experience changes when you understand the situation differently?”
“Do you observe any change in your emotional reaction when you think of this different way to handle the situation?”
“Expanding the emotional experience to as much of the body as possible can help us not only in regulating our emotions by making them more tolerable but also in improving our cognition and behavior in the situation.”
Human beings are averse to pain and attracted to pleasure, as Freud noted in describing his pleasure principle. Unpleasant emotional experiences are painful by their very nature because they are generated from stress and dysregulation in the physiology. Unpleasant emotional experiences are opposed to an organism’s health, well-being, and survival. Therefore, we all have an innate psychophysiological tendency to avoid them. We can call this a psychophysiological tendency because it is in part physiological and in part psychological. Knowing this is the case will not eliminate this innate tendency, which is part of our makeup throughout our lives. We just need to accept it and work around it when we need to process painful emotional experiences.
This innate tendency to avoid suffering is hardwired in all of us and is a constant presence in every moment of our lives, like our very shadows. When I wake up from a bad dream, the dream itself has often disappeared from my awareness, leaving behind only the unpleasant emotional experience associated with it. I get up, check my phone for email, read the latest news, all in order to suppress the lingering unpleasant emotional turmoil in my system and drive the dream content back deeper into the unconscious. At times, I remember that the development of capacity for an unpleasant emotional experience can lead to cognitive and behavioral clarity. And then I reluctantly turn my attention to the unpleasant experience to embrace it and embody it, to have fragments of the forgotten come back into my awareness.
Emotions are more often predictions of what situations mean for our well-being than they are assessments of the actual outcomes. Either way, they are important sources of information for our well-being and survival. Predictions and actual experiences of unpleasant emotions are all the more important information for us to learn from, to improve our chances of well-being and survival for the present as well as the future. We have seen that when emotions are more embodied, they can help us be more regulated as well as improve our cognitions and behaviors in the situation. This enhances our ability to cope with the situation in the present as well as in the future when we run into the same emotions in different situations. Therefore, emotions in general and unpleasant emotions in particular have important adaptive value for our well-being and survival.
Clients usually come to us because they are suffering and want an end to their suffering. Most of them think going deeper into the suffering by embodying it makes no sense and runs counter to their innate resistance to suffering. Unless clients are informed about the tremendous benefits of embodying their unpleasant emotions, they are not going to understand why they need to overcome what feels like a natural resistance to suffering of any kind.
Sometimes we are able to reduce their suffering through cognitive and behavioral changes that do not entail much suffering. We know this is possible because we learned in chapter 6 that cognition, emotion, and behavior are inseparable if not intertwined aspects of a singular life experience. Therefore, we can potentially operate on one of the elements to change the other two elements. At times, we are able to help clients reduce their suffering through regulating their brain or body physiology, taking medication, or engaging in somatic practices.
When physiological, cognitive, and behavioral strategies do not reduce their suffering or are taking too long to make a difference, that is a good time to introduce them to the idea of emotional embodiment and to educate them about its various short-term and long-term benefits. This is also a good time to educate them about the innate resistance we all have to unpleasant experiences, and the need to override that resistance so we are more open to embodying difficult emotions, not only to resolve current symptoms efficiently but also to be more resilient to them on future occasions. The more often they can do that, the easier it would be for them to override their innate resistance to suffering to embody unpleasant emotions in the future.
Educating clients as well as therapists about the innate resistance to suffering in all of us and the need to face and work with unpleasant emotions is an important, if not the most important, aspect of helping clients to embody unpleasant emotions. It is also important for getting therapists past their own innate resistance to work with unpleasant emotions in their clients.
Emotions, especially unpleasant ones, can be painful. In general, we do not want to experience the suffering of unpleasant emotions; nor do we want those we care about to experience them. In relationships, we might try to minimize our awareness of the negative impact we have on each other, in order to not feel guilt or shame or to maintain the perception that relationships are better than they actually are. People can also have difficulty embracing pleasant emotions. There can be familial or social prohibitions on the experience and expression of emotions such as pride, joy, love, and sexuality.
Since its beginnings, psychology has been studying and cataloging the different methods or defenses we use to push away unbearable or unacceptable experiences, not only of emotion but also of cognition and behavior. It is important to remember that all psychological defenses are coping mechanisms that are employed to keep unbearable or unacceptable experiences at bay, and that we might continue to use them out of habit even when we no longer need them. To help others access emotions and embody them, it is important that we know how to recognize a psychological defense, interpret it for the client or educate them about it, and work with some of the more common defenses.
Following is a list of common psychological defenses against emotions, including explanations of how each one works:
Repression: When we repress our emotions, we prevent them from even entering our conscious awareness in the first place. They are pushed out of awareness unconsciously. Not being able to recall that one has ever been angry with one’s mother is a clear example of repression.
Suppression: When we suppress our emotions, we consciously try to push them away from our awareness. As soon as one remembers an instance of being angry with one’s mother, consciously pushing the memory away by trying not to think about it or to forget it in another way, such as thinking about something else, is an example of suppression.
Denial: Imagine that someone is talking about their mother with an angry tone of voice or facial or body expression. If you were to ask that person whether they were angry and they denied it, that would be an example of the coping mechanism of denial. Please note that just because another person can see signs of anger in me, that does not mean I am aware of it myself. I can deny it because I am not aware of it, or I can deny it even though I am aware of it because I do not want to focus on it or express it, because it feels unsafe for me to admit to it.
Displacement: When we’re angry at our boss but we direct that anger toward our spouse at home, this is an example of the defense of displacement.
Projection: When someone describing a scary event perceives the fear only on the faces of those listening, this is an example of projection.
Reaction formation: When you are angry with someone and force yourself to be nice to that person instead, this is an example of reaction formation. When one has lost a love object, being angry all the time without feeling the love or feeling the love all the time without being angry are common examples of reaction formation.
Sublimation: When one chooses exercise to get rid of one’s anger at a superior at work on a regular basis, it is an example of sublimation. One burying oneself in one’s work in order not to feel the emptiness of a personal life without meaningful relationships is another example of sublimation. In sublimation, one does something that is neither damaging to oneself nor to others, as a way of not feeling unpleasant emotions.
Rationalization: When someone you are attracted to turns you down, and to avoid the pain of rejection you use the logic that you were not really all that attracted them, this is an example of rationalization.
Intellectualization: When people focus on thinking about a situation rather than on how they feel about it, as when people focus on psychologically analyzing those who have rejected them to avoid feeling their feelings about the rejection, this is an example of intellectualization. This example shows how multiple defenses can be used in the same situation to push away unpleasant emotions. When people convince themselves there is something wrong with the person who rejected them so they can arrive at the logic that there is nothing wrong with them, thus preventing them from feeling the shame or inadequacy that people often experience when they are rejected, this is an example of rationalization. In that they are focusing so much on the intellectual pursuit of analyzing the other person rather than feeling what they feel about being rejected, they are also using the strategy of intellectualization. Another way in which they could use intellectualization in order not to feel their emotions around rejection is by using spiritual statements, such as “God loves everybody all the time. Therefore, nobody is ever rejected at any time. God is love. I am one with God. Therefore, I am love.”
Compartmentalization: When people feel compassion for one group of people in a situation and not for other groups of people in the same situation, they are using the strategy of compartmentalization. Here they could be using logic, such as the notion that other groups do not believe in the same God, to rationalize why other groups of people do not deserve compassion. Slave owners rationalized that enslaved people were not really humans in order not to feel compassion toward them. Another example of compartmentalization is when people block having feelings about what happens to them at work but allow themselves to feel what happens to them at home. Compartmentalization is also happening when people allow themselves to feel feelings about one person in a situation but not about another in the same situation, as when a child is angry at the father who physically abused the child but not at the mother who was present but did not help the child, with the rationalization that the mother was too afraid to intervene.
Conversion: This is when uncomfortable feelings are turned into physical symptoms such as pain. Physical conversion symptoms can mimic serious medical symptoms, such as paralysis. Psychophysiological symptoms are physical symptoms that form when a person is not able to handle psychological experiences, such as emotions. When psychophysiological symptoms form, it is not always the case that they are formed in order to avoid experiencing difficult emotions in the situation. It could just be that the person’s physiology is not able to handle the overall stress from the situation, and that alone can lead to the formation of psychophysiological symptoms. In addition, it is possible for psychophysiological symptoms to form from the physiological and energetic defenses people use to cope with unpleasant or unacceptable emotions in a situation, as we saw in chapter 7 on physiological defenses against emotions. For example, when a child constricts their breathing muscles on a regular basis to avoid feeling anger at their abusive father, this can lead to the development of a serious breathing difficulty for which medical help proves ineffective. An example from my own childhood!
The concept of conversion defense can also be applied to situations where one emotion is used defensively to cope with another emotion that is more intolerable or unacceptable. The energy of the more unbearable or unacceptable emotion is also channeled into the defensive emotion. The use of anger to guard against vulnerable emotions such as hurt and shame is a good example. The use of sadness instead of anger, especially in women, is another example of emotional conversion as a defense. Because one emotion is substituted for another, this defense strategy could also be called substitution defense. The difference between conversion or substitution and displacement is that in displacement, the emotion meant to be directed at one person is directed at another person, whereas in emotional conversion or substitution an emotion is changed into another emotion within the same person. The conversion can also be from feeling an emotion to expressing it, as when a person cries for relief when sad or angry. When the energy behind one emotion is converted into its opposite emotion, as when hate is turned into love, this is also an instance of reaction formation.
Regression: Imagine an adult who experienced severe abandonment as a child that they have not really worked through and come to terms with. Whenever that adult experiences a loss, the experience of emotions associated with the current loss is simply too much. The triggering of the unresolved emotions of loss from childhood drops the person down into a child ego state, where it is even more difficult to tolerate the emotions from the current loss in adulthood. In this state, one might find relief by crying or curling up, as when a child used to sucking its thumb for comfort goes back to sucking its thumb after a traumatic experience. This way of coping with unbearable or unacceptable emotions is called the regression defense.
Deflection: A less-known defense from gestalt therapy, deflection is when people distance themselves from their emotions through humor, generalizing, theorizing, debating, asking questions, and other distractions.
Confluence: Also from gestalt therapy, confluence is when children identify with their parents’ emotional states and are unable to differentiate their emotions from those of their parents in order to avoid conflict and unpleasantness. They might as adults be unable to come into their emotions and differentiate them from those of their partners, as in couples therapy, for fear of conflict and unpleasantness.
Dissociation: Dissociation is another defense that is used to cope with overwhelming emotional experiences. Three types of dissociation have been identified in psychiatry.3 In primary dissociation, cognitive elements such as visuals of the trauma are screened out of awareness in order to manage the emotional overwhelm they can trigger, as when visual memories of childhood sexual abuse are repressed. Secondary dissociation disconnects a person’s awareness from the unbearable emotions of the trauma, as when a person feels numb or has out-of-body experiences during sexual abuse. Often mediated by internal chemicals such as analgesics and opioids secreted during times of stress to help manage difficult experiences, secondary dissociation can include altered states such as feeling paradoxically euphoric while being injured. In tertiary dissociation, traumatic experience is compartmentalized as in dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), where one or more compartmentalized parts of the personality carry the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral memories of the trauma and other parts remain apparently unaware of them or are aware but unaffected by them.
The various psychological coping mechanisms or defenses against unpleasant or unacceptable emotions are not separate watertight categories. One or more defenses might be used in the service of another. For example, repression of an emotional experience might be supported through sublimation, deflection, rationalization, or intellectualization. Rationalization, the use of logic to defend against emotion, can be thought of as a special instance of intellectualization, the use of one’s intellectual capacity to keep an emotion at a distance. Compartmentalization of experience is involved in tertiary dissociation within dissociative identity disorder. Also, a person might use multiple defenses in the same situation to cope with the enormity of the unbearable suffering. For example, a person might use intellectualization as well as projection to cope with a difficult experience, as when a person says there is no reason why everyone should have the existential fear of dying during a pandemic at the thought of contracting the coronavirus, but they can see why some people might not be able to avoid it.
In addition to psychological defenses against emotions, people use physiological as well as energetic defenses against emotions. Physiological defenses against emotions and how to work with them will be covered in the next step of the emotional embodiment process, the expansion, in the next chapter. For now, there are some important things to keep in mind about the relationships among psychological, physiological, and energetic defenses.
Physiological and energetic defenses are often, if not always, the underlying mechanisms of support for what are called psychological defenses. For example, secondary dissociation experiences of numbing out or out-of-body experiences are often driven by defensive biochemical surges in the physiology. It is easier to work with simple physiological defenses—such as holding one’s breath, which is used to reduce the intensity of an unpleasant emotion—by just becoming aware of the holding and letting it go. For different reasons, it is harder to work with more complex physiological defenses, such as constriction. Just becoming aware of them with the intention to change them is often not enough to shift them. They might require more active interventions, such as stretching, self-touch, therapist’s touch, yoga, bodywork, energy work, or even medication, to shift. Physiological defenses are also often unconscious for both clients and therapists, as opposed to psychological defenses such as denial and displacement, which are easier to observe in clients’ behavior.
It is also good to keep in mind that, at times, one might have to work first with complex physiological and energetic defenses to loosen them up before working with emotions, because strong physiological and energetic defenses can make undoing psychological defenses and accessing emotions extremely difficult. That is, one might have to work with the third step, the expansion, first or at the same time as the second step, the emotion, in the emotional embodiment process. Working with more complex physiological defenses to expand the emotional experience in the brain and body physiology is part of the next step, the expansion, the subject matter of chapter 12.
There are many ways of working with psychological as well as physiological defenses. However, the most effective way to work with these defenses is to provide the necessary emotional support to clients to help them access and regulate their emotional experiences so there is no need to defend against them. While providing the necessary emotional support in all the ways we have seen above, we can also point out and work with the specific psychological and physiological defenses as they emerge in the process; educate clients about how the defenses are coming in to protect them from the suffering; and continue to address, support, and regulate the vulnerabilities that are triggering the defenses. This way, clients can become increasingly aware of their defenses so they can even see through them when they are on their own. Different therapy modalities approach working with psychological defenses in different ways, some more complex than others. Specialized information on such complex strategies for working with psychological defenses is beyond the scope of this book.
Some readers who are not mental health professionals might have found the information presented so far on how to find a situation and work with the emotion a bit too theoretical. So, here are some questions you can ask yourself to identify a situation and support an emotion:
If working with the situation in step 1 and working with the emotion in step 2 yield an emotion to work with, we can go on to the next step of expanding the emotional experience to as much of the brain and body physiology as possible. What if we come up short? Then we can look at the possibility that the situation chosen for the work might not be sufficiently relevant, emotionally charged, or concrete, and try to mend that. We can also look at the possibility that more emotional support and more work on innate and psychological defenses might be needed to get there.
There are also other possibilities. For instance, the physiological defenses against emotions may be too strong for the emotion to come through. In this case, one might have to work with physiological defenses to expand the brain and body physiology, either before or at the same time as working with the emotion.
Another possibility is that there are severe deficits in the person’s affect development, limiting their ability to generate, differentiate, identify, or express emotional experiences. In this case, we can proceed as follows: One, educate the person about the different kinds of emotions possible in the situation, especially the simple sensorimotor emotions of just feeling bad or uncomfortable. Two, have the person imagine themselves or another person actually expressing the emotion of feeling bad or awful in the brain or the body physiology through vocalization and facial expression. If necessary, have the person actually do the vocalization and facial expression. Three, proceed to embody the simple sensorimotor emotion of feeling distressed or painful to as much of the brain and body physiology as possible. Four, mirror the person’s expressions, resonate with the person’s experience, and look for simple, basic, universal emotions such as fear or sadness, and then go from there.
This often works, for two reasons. First, when clients approach us for help, it is because they are suffering, and they can at least identify “feeling bad” in the brain or body physiology. Second, expressing simple sensorimotor emotions through vocalization and facial expression almost always helps in differentiating emotional experiences into basic emotions, because of the multiple roles played by the face and throat physiology in emotional experiences, as seen in earlier chapters.
In chapter 10, we saw how to work with the details of the situation to bring up the relevant emotions. In this chapter, we saw how to support clients’ emotions in various ways and how to work with their innate and psychological defenses to help them access their emotions. In the next chapter, we will look at how to work with physiological and energetic defenses against emotions to expand and regulate the brain and body physiology, to expand the experience of emotion to as much of it as possible. The chapter after that will discuss how to manage the intensity of the emotional experience during the expansion process and how to exploit the increased capacity for emotional experience to expedite symptom resolution.