How do you physically feel during and after experiencing another’s reactivity?

How do you emotionally feel about yourself and the individual who was reactive?

Take a moment to call to mind a time when you found yourself able to remain grounded in your responses or choices and explore the following questions:

How do you physically feel during and after this moment of responsiveness?

How do you emotionally feel about yourself and about any others who may be involved in this moment of responsiveness?

Remember, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers; the work to consciously change our conditioned patterns and habits begins with this self-exploration, which can be empowering in and of itself. When we’re able to gain conscious awareness of our conditioned habits, we can begin to make intentional choices within our relationships instead of constantly reacting to and re-creating our old childhood wounds. We can then curiously explore the different ways the roles we’ve played since childhood may not be serving our authentic Selves or our relationships. This work to integrate our conditioned selves helps restore our sense of safety and security, regardless of what’s happening with others in our lives. Creating safety and security for ourselves through our daily choices creates new neural pathways in our brain. Over time and with consistent repetition, these new neural pathways can become permanent and the habits associated with them instinctual.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever repeat conditioned thoughts, feelings, or reactions again or won’t feel instinctively pulled back to your familiar habits. Becoming conscious of your conditioned self or selves means that you will gain access to new choices that will better align you with who you are, who you want to be, and the people and relationship dynamics that will truly fulfill you. And as I imagine you may not be surprised to hear, it is a regulated nervous system that gives you access to these new choices. We’ll begin our journey to regulate your nervous system in the next chapter where we’ll continue to explore the life-changing practice of body consciousness.

5

Harnessing the Wisdom of Your Body

Before we dive deeper into body consciousness, let’s take a few moments for a brief exercise to help you reconnect with your body exactly as it feels right now.

Starting with the top of your head, begin to notice any tension you may be holding in your muscles (jaw, neck, shoulders, lower back, legs, and so on). Breathe slowly and deeply into any areas of tightness or constriction, releasing your jaw and flattening your tongue if it is touching the roof of your mouth, lowering your shoulders and rolling them down your back if they are raised or hunched forward, and releasing any tension in any other muscles. Take another moment or two to notice any shifts or changes in your mental or emotional state after relaxing your body in this way.

Many of you may have probably discovered stress or tension you hadn’t previously noticed. Some of you may have even found it difficult to feel your body at all in this moment. Though this exercise may not seem to have anything to do with solving issues in your relationships, it’s actually a critical piece of the puzzle. As you’ll discover throughout this chapter, true physical and emotional safety and security begins in our body, and until we can feel this safety and security within ourselves, we can’t feel safe and secure with others.

When I was young, I adapted to my stressful environment by disconnecting from my physical body as a survival strategy and ignored the signals it was constantly sending me. I was unaware of when my muscles were tense or my breathing was quick and shallow—a state that continued well into adulthood, preventing me from recognizing what my body needed as well as what I was actually feeling. You see, our physical sensations play an important role in our emotional life, communicating our body’s ongoing assessment of our environment to our brain. But I was too disembodied to feel anything, living most of my life in my head, cut off from my physical self.

Being in my body felt unsafe mainly because it was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. When I was a child, no one modeled for me what it was like to feel safe and secure living in a physical body. Instead, I was exposed to body shaming and insecurity in my home. My mom and sister were always on a diet or adopting other food-restrictive behaviors. They were critical of their own bodies and those of others around them, and my mom often commented on any weight gain or changes in body size of anyone in the family, including herself.

As I got older, uncomfortable in my own skin and growing more intolerant of feeling the sensations in my stressed body, I closed myself off from the physical aspects of my existence. Even though I desperately wanted to feel emotionally connected with others, I wasn’t connected to my physical self to access my emotions in a way that would allow me to bond with another person. The reality was, I had difficulty feeling anything at all.

It took me years to develop a state of body consciousness, or to become aware of my body’s physical sensations so that I could start to regulate my nervous system consciously and intentionally. Because most of us didn’t grow up in safe homes or have safe and secure relationships with others, we continue to live with nervous system dysregulation that keeps us disconnected from both our inner and outer worlds.

WHAT IS BODY CONSCIOUSNESS?

We are all aware that we have a physical body. We use it for almost everything we do and generally know how it feels when we walk, sit, sleep, work out, have sex, hold hands, eat food, drink wine, run in the rain, dance in the snow, or nap in the sun. Many of us are conscious of our body’s basic needs on a fundamental level: we’re usually aware when we’re hungry, thirsty, tired, sick, or injured. Some of us may even be focused on our body’s well-being and try to eat healthfully, exercise, get enough sleep, or adopt other habits that we think can improve how our body looks or feels.

Even those of us who are health minded, though, are rarely body conscious or aware of how safe or unsafe we feel in our physical self. The term body consciousness, as I use it in this book, does not mean a state of self-consciousness about or hyperawareness of how our body looks, whether to ourselves or to others. Instead, it describes our ability to sense what’s happening within our body.

We develop body consciousness when we enhance our ability to witness our physical sensations, then use this sensory input to help regulate our nervous system and our behavioral responses. Learning to identify when our nervous system is stressed creates the opportunity for us to shift ourselves out of a reactive, avoidant, or dissociated state into a more open and receptive one. As we become more attuned to our physical sensations, we can begin to discern not only obvious signs of physical stress, like the rate of our heartbeat or breathing, but more subtle signals, like if our energy is light, heavy, calm, or agitated; if our shoulders are hunched or straight; if we are speaking softly or loudly, quickly or slowly; and if we can maintain eye contact or smile easily.

These sensations may seem unremarkable, but they reflect the state of our nervous system while also communicating information to our brain that helps determine our emotions. When we’re able to consciously perceive these sensory shifts, we can begin to understand the emotional messages they send our brain. With this awareness, we can give ourselves the space to calm down when we know we’re activated and the opportunity to create safety by using the intentional mind-body techniques we’ll talk about later in this chapter.

Maintaining a consistent state of body consciousness isn’t easy. The stress and trauma stored in our body affects our ability to pay attention to our current experiences. Most of the time, our mind is reacting to the stress and tension stored in our body, causing our mind to wander and us to struggle to focus on the present moment and be fully aware of what’s happening in and around us. Because of these stress-induced thought spirals, few of us are truly present in our body during our daily life; instead, we’re in our mind, racing through thoughts about the past or trying to predict the future. While it can be helpful to reflect on the past or imagine the future at times, we need to be immersed in the present moment and connected with our body in order to be truly in our own presence. And if we’re constantly focusing on what someone else is thinking or feeling about or around us, we may never know how we really feel being in their presence.

In addition to the impact of this stored stress in our bodies, some of us have learned body-shaming habits from the cultural and societal messages we have been exposed to. The lack of diversity in skin color, ethnicity, body size, and physical ability in television, media, and movies has deeply impacted our body-based beliefs, sending the subconscious message that there is an ideal version of who is acceptable, attractive, or desirable. If our body’s skin tone, shape, or functioning is different, we may struggle to feel safe and accepted because of our natural physical appearance and our stress response may remain chronically activated.

Physical touch is universally important to all human beings, helping to comfort and soothe our emotional experiences. However, it is our individual experiences with touch (or the lack thereof) that can cause us to have conflicting feelings about physical contact that can lead to confusion, anxiety, and ultimately unmet needs. In order to feel comfortable being physically close with another, we first have to feel comfortable with our own body. To do so, we need to learn how to trust in our ability to stay connected with our own body and safe within our own boundaries as we move physically closer to one another. Knowing that we can stop or slow down whenever we want allows us to expand our ability to be physically soothed, comforted, and even stimulated by another.

If we have a dysregulated nervous system, as most of us do, spending any amount of time noticing our body won’t immediately feel safe to us. Feeling unsafe is why so many of us disconnect from our body in the first place, living inside our head instead. And many of us may notice that we continue to avoid those sensations that are connected to emotional memories that are too deeply uncomfortable to endure.

YOUR EMOTIONS BEGIN IN YOUR BODY

Emotions are part of our shared humanity. They color and give meaning to our life, guide us, and make us feel alive. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions help us interpret our environment so that we can identify threats and stay safe. The more quickly we’re able to register fear or signal the presence of a threat to others, the safer we’ll remain as individuals and groups.

Though the words emotions and feelings are often used interchangeably, they describe two different phenomena. Emotions are our subconscious reactions to our physical sensations, and feelings are our conscious experience of our body’s sensations.

Most people assume that our thoughts create our emotions and our emotions define who we are at any given moment: I think this emotion, and this emotion makes me me. If I tend to think sad or depressing thoughts, I might assume that this makes me a sad or depressed person. Or if I think angry, anxious, or worrying thoughts, it makes me an angry, anxious, or worried person.

Many of us also assume that what’s happening around us or in our immediate external environment causes our emotions: This situation now is causing me to feel X, Y, or Z. We often think that someone else made us feel a certain way: What you’re doing now is making me to feel this way. It’s empowering to realize that these assumptions aren’t true. Emotions aren’t facts or even accurate representations of what’s happening to us. In fact, most of the time, our emotions aren’t even reactions to what’s going on in the present moment.¹⁹

If you’re wondering How can it be that my emotions aren’t a product of the present moment?, you’re not alone. For decades, psychologists believed that our emotions were immediate responses to what we saw, heard, or experienced. In recent years, neuroscientists have overturned that idea, thanks in part to research by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who introduced what’s known as the theory of constructed emotion. According to this ground-breaking theory, emotions begin in the body as physical sensations, which our subconscious then uses to predict how we should feel based on how we’ve felt in the past when we’ve experienced the same sensory state of being.

If our heart is racing, our breath is quick, and our blood is pulsing through our veins, our brain may interpret these sensations as fear or excitement, depending on what we’ve experienced in the past when we felt similarly. So, for instance, if we’re preparing for a big speech and have had unpleasant experiences with public speaking, our subconscious may interpret our sensory state as fear. But if our past experiences with public speaking have been positive, our subconscious may interpret the same sensations as excitement. Our emotions are really just mental concepts created by our body and driven by our past. Or, as Dr. Barrett put it, our emotions are “constructions of the world, not reactions to it.”²⁰

The fact that our emotions are body-brain constructs, not hardwired reactions to our reality or relationships, means that we don’t have to be prisoners to what we feel. The theory of constructed emotion gives us the opportunity to perceive our emotions as self-creations, not reality, and empowers us to change how we feel by shifting certain physical sensations.

In psychology, our ability to sense our inner sensations is known as interoception. Interoception, sometimes called inner sensing, constantly occurs on an unconscious level as our subconscious scans our body’s sensory input to interpret the safety or threat of our environment. We can intentionally enhance our ability to practice interoception by practicing body consciousness to help identify our emotional state by consciously witnessing our body’s sensations.

Accessing this active state of body awareness allows us to intentionally change how we feel in the moment by actively shifting our body’s sensations, soothing ourselves if we’re stressed. Body consciousness is a life-changing practice we can use to help make conscious choices about how we want to feel and show up in our relationships.

MY JOURNEY TO BODY CONSCIOUSNESS

It took me years before I felt safe enough to spend consistent time in my physical body to begin to identify its needs and the emotions stored there. I preferred to live in the safety of the spaceship in my mind, obsessing over my thoughts without ever dropping into my physical experience. I was unaware of and unable to listen to the messages my body was sending me every day, which prevented me from being able to identify or meet my physical needs. As a result, I was often reactive and incapable of regulating my emotions, on many occasions finding myself trapped in cycles of inexplicable and inescapable agitation and discomfort.

For most of us, the process of disconnection begins in early childhood. For me, I believe it started in utero, when I was immersed in the stressed physiology of my mom’s dysregulated nervous system. If your mom didn’t feel safe inside her body, you probably didn’t feel safe inside her body when you were developing, either.

My mom discovered she was pregnant with me at age forty-two, fifteen years after giving birth to my sister. She was at a different stage of her life, not trying or expecting to have another child, and given her chronic anxiety about her health, when she began to experience morning sickness, she assumed that she had stomach cancer. When her doctor told her that she was pregnant, I imagine she was fearful of the diagnosis and could understand if she was feeling overwhelmed by the thought of having a third child whom she’d worry about.

While I was developing inside my mom, I absorbed her stress and apprehension—a normal state for her that was only amplified by her advanced maternal age. Because she was anxious and disconnected from herself, she remained unable to regulate her own emotions or her body’s cortisol levels, and as a result, when I was inside her, I couldn’t, either. My body was so stressed in utero that I was born with a sucking mark on my thumb. Looking back now, I have compassion for myself, who was, I believe, desperately trying to self-soothe before being born. Unable to calm my overwhelmed nervous system, I likely entered the world already dysregulated and feeling unsafe in my body. Research corroborates my experience, showing that elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol in a pregnant woman can cause larger amygdala volume in a developing child, leading to a dysregulated stress response and anxious behaviors.²¹

Growing up, I continued to absorb the unspoken messages from my family that there was little or no space for me to express my separate or different needs, and so I gradually stopped doing so. Like many who grew up with parents from an older generation, there was a Depression-era mentality in my home that as long as there was food on the table and a roof over my head, there was nothing else, including emotional support, that I could possibly need.

As part of an Italian American family, I was modeled highly ritualized eating habits in which my mom used food as a gesture of her love and care. Every night we ate together as a family at “dinnertime,” which in my family happened to be at 5:30 p.m., right after my dad came home from work. My attendance at those nightly mealtimes was a felt obligation or unspoken expectation, regardless of whatever else I had going on. That was especially true on Sundays, when my brother’s family and my two uncles usually came over for a big pot of Italian pasta and sauce (or gravy, as I grew up calling it). Because my mom was deeply insecure in her connections to us all, she used food as a primary way to show her love. She regularly looked to us for validation during those meals, hoping we’d proclaim that her food was delicious or clean our plates as an indication of our approval and reciprocated love. Seeking to please, I would often finish my whole plate and take seconds when my mom urged me to do so, usually after advising me to “eat more now” so I “don’t end up being hungry later.”

Food was one of the main means of consistent connection within my family. During our shared meals I consistently learned that it was important to tend to the expectations and feelings of others, even when my body told me otherwise. I would eat when or what was convenient for those around me even if I wasn’t hungry or disliked the taste to avoid offending anyone. I’d take an extra helping when my mom suggested I do to avoid disappointing or denying her request. I continued those habits as an adult by scheduling my mealtimes and making food choices based on the schedules, needs, or suggestions of those around me.

As a child, I learned to overlook other physical needs, too, like having a consistent sleep schedule and regular physical activity, because neither was prioritized or modeled in my home. I didn’t have a set bedtime and would regularly stay up late watching TV with my family, who also stayed up late. Outside of playing sports (which was motivated by my desire to be seen by my family as successful), I wasn’t encouraged to exercise, and although my dad was active, my mom frequently remained on the couch or in bed in pain.

Other than regular commentary on or criticism of the size and health of their bodies, no one in my family directly spoke about or showed their physical body. I never saw anyone in my household naked, so I assumed it was to be avoided—one reason why I never really felt comfortable showing much skin. My mom and I never discussed anything about puberty or a woman’s menstrual cycle, so I didn’t tell her when I got my period. By that age, I already felt so ashamed about most aspects of my developing body that I couldn’t imagine sharing those kinds of vulnerable experiences with anyone anyway. That deep-rooted shame resulted in a critical, noncompassionate relationship with my body, and I regularly overlooked my basic needs, often rushing through my self-care or treating my body roughly when I did tend to it at all.

My disconnection from my body created my disconnection from my emotions. I didn’t sleep enough or move in healthy ways and ate foods that inflamed and stressed my body. These habits only made it more difficult for me to regulate my overwhelming emotions, which continued to color my perceptions of the world.

Over time, I adopted a cool, apathetic exterior—my family began to call me “Nothing Bothers Me Nicole”—to hide the painful reality of my inner world, which was full of deep-rooted feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and shame. Without the safety and security to be myself, I used my outward attitude to protect against increasing feelings of unworthiness; if I never showed my vulnerabilities, I would never be at risk of having them or myself feel rejected.

To keep myself protected, I became hyperfocused and perfectionistic about my appearance, obsessively looking at and trying to hide the various scars I had been accumulating on my body over time. I ritualistically spot cleaned dirt and other stains off my clothes and shoes in the hope of removing any evidence of wear-and-tear or other imperfections. That obsessive behavior carried over to my physical environment, where I fanatically arranged items in my childhood bedroom in attempts to soothe the increasing feelings of stress and tension I was storing in my body. All of those behaviors seemed to my family just to be part of who I was or my “quirky personality,” as they put it, when, in reality, they were coping strategies to try to regulate my nervous system and manage my overwhelming emotions.

Eventually, I became aware of how disconnected I was from my body and the stress I carried in my physical self. Though I didn’t realize it for a few decades, my body was locked in a stressed state, with my muscles tightening and constricting more with time, especially in my back, neck, and jaw. With increasing physical tension, my body never felt like a truly safe place for me to rest or relax. As I shared in my first book, How to Do the Work, I fainted twice over the course of several months, once at the home of a childhood friend and again after spending a significant amount of time with my family over the holidays.

My body was overwhelmed by nervous system dysregulation, overwhelming emotions, and childhood trauma, and it was starting to shut down. Though I thought I was taking care of my health when I decided to become a vegan in my midtwenties after I learned about industrial animal farming, I still wasn’t listening to my body and its host of unmet physical needs. Like most of us, I operated on autopilot, eating whatever was around me or whatever and whenever others ate, barely exercising, while not prioritizing my sleep or ever really allowing my body to truly rest—all habits I had learned in childhood.