Why Understanding Emotions Isn’t Enough: How The Body Helps You Heal
For many people on their healing journey, understanding their experience may feel like to goal. Whether it is something that happened to you a long time ago or recently, people assume that finding insight on their experience will be what allows them to heal and sets them free.
Yet, even with years of journaling, talk therapy, self-awareness or reading, the same patterns continue to show up as well as the emotional struggle. And while your mind may know what happened, your body is still holding on to the experience.
Limitations to insight alone
Therapy has traditionally been a space to talk through and understand thoughts, experiences, narratives to make meaning for our emotions. While this can be incredibly insightful and supportive at times of our journey, emotions are physiological experiences.
When we experience something overwhelming or unsafe (especially in early life or chronically), our body needs to adapt in order to keep us feelings safe. This may live in the body as:
feeling numb or disconnected
racing, negative or ruminating thoughts
chronic pain or tension
While we may be able to label and notice these experiences, they cannot be healed by the simple understanding because they don’t live in the mind - they exist in the body.
How Somatic and Creative Approaches Support Healing
Emotions exist in the body as energy in motion - experienced first through the form of sensations before they can be rationalized or understood cognitively. Somatic and creative approaches to healing such as Art Therapy and Somatic Healing invite you to explore your sensations and emotions through mindfulness and the creative process - both of which happen at a subconscious level - taking you out of the mind and into the body.
In using Somatic Healing, you can track sensations in your body with curiosity to notice and assess how you may react to certain triggers. In Art Therapy, you can use art materials to visually express your inner experience - allowing for a gentle release of the things you may be holding on to.
A Gentle Invitation: From Understanding To Integration
When you include your body in the healing work, you may start to notice:
increased capacity to hold and cope with your emotions and sensations
a greater sense of presence and grounding
heightened attunement to the sensations and needs in your body
less reactive
Healing doesn’t require reliving the past or pushing yourself beyond your limits. It begins with slowing down, noticing, and allowing the body to release what it has been holding—at its own pace.
When mind and body work together, true integration becomes possible.
If you’re curious about exploring Somatic Healing or Art Therapy as part of your healing journey and are in Miami or Florida, I offer free consultation calls to those who are interested in exploring working together to help you feel more grounded and connected in your body.
