When done properly, bodywork is known to bring up lots of ‘stuff’. It would probably be wrong for a therapist to say that it often ‘rips open old wounds’ but let’s just go with that for now. Treatments can take you back to the events that caused or contributed to the origins of certain feelings, even if these occurred decades earlier.

That emotions and therefore feelings arise during sessions isn’t just a by-product of bodywork – it is in fact an objective.

Feelings and emotions

Before we continue it’s perhaps good to take a step back to ascertain what feelings and emotions actually are. Keeping this very broad and rather superficial, we feel emotions as sensations. Once we notice these sensations, we develop feelings about them. Then there are also moods, which we will discuss later.

Emotions

First, let’s put our lens on emotions. In short, they are controlled by the chemicals our brains release in response to what’s happening around us. Emotions are therefore associated with our awareness of our place within our surroundings, and of the actual or expected behaviours of these surroundings. Once released, these chemicals travel through our body, forming two-way connections between our body and brain, which then results in the sensations we call emotions.

Emotions occur as responses to external stimuli and usually have a limited lifespan. They become recognisable in us through typical facial expressions and body language.

Feelings

Feelings come from how we interpret our emotions. They are formed by how we come to understand their characteristics and nature.

It is important to understand that we can use the word ‘feeling’ to describe our physical and emotional states. We can feel tired, distant, and irritated, which can reflect how we feel our body or experience our emotions.

Feelings don’t need to be factual or logical. In fact, they seldom are. They are typically tainted by our own narratives – the things we tell ourselves either consciously or unconsciously to make some sense out of what we’re experiencing throughout life. Believing that are feelings are reliable reflections of life can therefore distort our relationship with reality.

Moods

Moods are the third player in this game. They are typically described as a state of mind that can influence what you think, how you behave, and the actions you take – or not. Compared to emotions, moods are usually less intense. Unlike emotions, our mood do not necessarily be triggered by events. They usually are more enduring than emotions, which means that they can affect our feelings over longer periods. They are also harder to recognise in others because they do not come with specific or corresponding facial expressions or body languages. However, it is often possible to detect a mood in people we know well by their behaviours, words, and actions.

How what we feel makes us feel

To have feelings is intrinsically human. Feelings make us who we are. Being in touch with them, meaning being able to stay open and connected to them, not only helps us function throughout life but also to explore our potentials for developing healthy relationships with ourselves and others. Yet, we continue to develop and maintain cultures, societies, and institutions that actively suppress the display of emotions and feelings. Data matters, no matter how it makes us feel. In a world that prioritises economic success there’s little room for anything that cannot be monetised, less likely so if it cannot be substantiated by facts and figures.

Feelings and emotions have become mere obstacles to the rationality that’s needed to maintain the control, power, and status we require to function properly as good economic units.

So, what then does it mean to be in touch with our feelings? How about being in touch with our emotions?

Although the words emotions and feelings are often synonymized they are, as we saw above, two different but interrelated phenomena. Emotions originate as sensations in the body. Feelings are influenced by our emotions but are generated from our mental thoughts.

Imagine noticing a police car behind you when driving to work, which may prompt instantly a rather nauseating reaction in you. You notice an emotion. Your heart rate increases while you check your speed and whether you are wearing your seat belt. You quickly put two hands on the wheel, and continue to check the movements of the car behind you in your rear vision mirrors. Then, at the next traffic lights, the officers turn into another direction. Nothing happened. What did happen was that your body reacted to the mere idea of being followed by police officers. Your mind responded to this by labelling the event as threatening, which caused you to panic. Additionally, you may also experienced guilt and shame, perhaps you knew that you did exceed the speed limit at some points of your journey. In other words, you responded to the feelings that were caused by the initial nauseating emotion.

Other people may react very different. In a same situation, an off-duty police officer may actually recognise the car and appreciate seeing it. Another person may be comforted by seeing a police presence in her neighbourhood. An uncaught criminal may be overcome by anxiety, which may turn into an anger and rage against the unsuspecting officers.

Emotions, feelings, and healing

As we saw, emotions and feelings are interrelated. However, feelings need emotions, whereas emotions do not necessarily need feelings. Therefore, being dependent on emotions, being ‘attuned’ or ‘in touch’ with our feelings is only one way to understand ourselves.

The trouble is that feelings are often distorted by our biased perspectives, the things we would like to believe, and the stories we tell ourselves. Listening to our feelings alone doesn’t always result in clear views on what’s actually going on around us. In fact, it can actually warp our sense of reality in unhealthy and unconstructive ways. They can keep us stuck to incorrect, outdated, and over-inflated imagery that does not serve us in any way.

Because they are reactions to the present reality, emotions can help us analyse events, situations, and our interactions more clearly and objectively. Listening to them, rather than to our feelings, gives us usually a more accurate diagnosis of how we’re doing in the moment. By developing better emotional listening skills, and by learning how to better use our sense of perception, we can become better connected to the reality of our present experiences. This, in turn, is foundational to the development of our decision-making skills, competencies, and capabilities. But many of us prefer not to follow this road.

It is very likely that most of us know that we can become stuck to our mental stories, and that these mental stories may not be truthful and therefore reliable. Yet, because it’s easier and more comfortable to tinker with what’s in our heads than what’s going on in our body, we prefer to simply chop and change our thoughts about our emotions – or, in other words, our feelings – rather than to explore the true origins of these thoughts, which are our emotions.

To state it bluntly, healing doesn’t come from understanding our feelings alone. Because we can change these simply by changing our thoughts – which we can do whenever we want, and at our own volition – mustering our feeling world is the easy part by far. Things become trickier when we ask ourselves how our feelings reflect reality truthfully, based on the signals that we receive from within our body.

It is here where we may discover that much of what we feel about our world isn’t actually all that reliable, which can be immensely confrontive. It can be immensely painful to acknowledge that the thoughts and perceptions that governed so much of our life may be far from perfect – and even downright fictitious. It can be difficult to finally set eyes on the behaviours we adopted around our mental constructs, whether these might be true or false.

Those who find the courage to re-assess themselves critically and ground-up usually go through periods of intense shame, guilt, anger, and sadness, all in the name of true self-healing and self-development.

And this is precisely where bodywork becomes meaningful, relevant, and valuable.

Bodywork – reclaiming self-agency

One of the most important things we can do for you is helping you reclaim your self-agency. Self-agency, or personal-agency, refers to the degree by which you can control yourself and your life. Regaining high agency means becoming more assertive and responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. While your thoughts may be influenced by others, you ultimately control all that’s going on in your head.

Any form of healing requires a degree of self-agency. It you are consciously on such a path it is essential for you to regain control over your life so that balanced and self-driven decisions about the future can be made. It is also important for you to regain the powers that are needed to see your self-healing and self-development processes through, irrespective how hard these might become. It is then paramount that you become empowered to constantly align your thoughts and actions. To achieve this, deep-dives into your emotional worlds must be made to rediscover how your mind-body connections are actually wired.

Bodywork can play a formidable facilitating role here. First, by working with an experienced, reputable, and trustworthy therapist, it offers the safety that you need to progressively rediscover the very source of your emotions which, of course, is your body. As you progress through your personalised treatment plan, three connections can be redeveloped – that between body and emotions, emotions and feelings, and finally feelings and behaviours.

Unfortunately, there is no blueprint for that – no standard manual that can be followed from A to Z to make it ‘so’. We can read self-help books all we like but in the end it’s just up to do it.

Once these connections become better understood, you become more empowered to control and manage them. Once you become familiar with what your emotions are actually telling you, unconstructive thoughts (feelings) can be progressively dismantled and discarded.

Bodywork can help you respond better to your emotions, thereby providing clear, well-managed, and safe pathways toward true self-agency. Along your ways are likely to develop higher levels of emotional intelligence, which helps you to come back into the present moment by grounding yourself back into your body. You might become better able to reassess your own needs, to manage your reactions to life more truthfully, and to engage more thoughtfully in decision-making processes.

To be truly able to show up as the best versions of ourselves we must learn to listen less to our feelings, and more to our emotions. This cannot be achieved by just toggling a virtual switch. Although it could be helpful to learn more about Emotional Intelligence this, too, will not do the job either. If we want to relearn how to interact with life, others, and ourselves more fruitfully, more benevolently, and more lovingly, we first must come to understand not just how we feel about things – but more so about where these feelings actually come from.

The answer is, rather obviously, that they come from emotions – which, in turn, stem from our body.

Emotions are, in essence, your body’s language. Feelings are mere interpretations of what it speaks of, known to be often incorrect, vague, incomplete, and frequently misleading. Bodywork can help you reconnect to the source of these articulations.