Listening to Your Body and Heart
Have you ever been in a session with a client and felt something in your body or had an unexpected emotion? Maybe your stomach squeezed a little or you furrowed your brow unintentionally. Or perhaps you experienced a vague and dull sense of dread. If this ever happens, listen to it. Your body is trying to tell you something.
In general, we listen with our minds to learn content and to observe nonverbal and relational process. However, we listen with more than our cognitive minds. Beyond what you can observe cognitively, you may detect something with your body or with your emotions before detecting it with your mind. Your body is listening with more than its ears.
When you do feel something with your body or something emotionally in session, it probably means something, though not necessarily. Since it could mean something, it is best not to ignore the experience. Instead, it is better to explore what your body is trying to tell you and what your emotions are trying to tell you.
Here are a few questions to help you explore what your emotions and body might be trying to tell you:
1. Whose feelings am I feeling?
This is an important question because sometimes your efforts at empathy can result in more than just locating, observing, and articulating a client’s emotional state. You may actually begin to feel the client’s feelings. Of course it is not an exact shared experience as you are different people, but it may indicate that the emotional boundary between therapist and client is to ambiguous and may need some better clarification. There is a substantial difference between excellent empathy and emotional enmeshment. It is important to distinguish the difference and evaluate whose feelings you were feeling and explore why.
2. Am I mirroring the client?
Slightly different than feeling the client’s feelings is mirroring the client’s feelings. There are times when the therapist serves as a reflection of the client or the therapeutic relationship serves as a mirror to the way client’s interact with other people. In mirroring the client, emotions or sensations in the body may emerge. Mirroring the client may help the therapist have great insight and empathy for the client, but mirroring must be intentional and be used for building therapeutic alliance, doing assessment, or intervening (or all of these) and not merely as a uncritical response to the client.
3. Is there something wrong?
Sometimes your body can sense danger or threat that cannot be cognitively detected. Usually it is not the case that there is danger, but it is worth asking the question of your emotions and body. It could be that there is nothing wrong with the client or threat from the client, but instead, interacting with the client has in some manner uncovered something of great important or urgency in your own life. Sometimes it is an unspoken client issue. Perhaps the client has some unspoken level of desperation or fear that was not present in previous sessions, perhaps a new bout of suicidal ideation that is unspoken but expressed in almost imperceptible non-verbal nuance. Sometimes it might be worth investigating with the client.
4. Has the client shown me something I have seen before?
This question has to do more the therapist’s family of origin and non-clinical experiences. It could be an indicator of therapist past trauma, negative experiences, or persistent and unresolved family of origin issues. The interactions with the client may have touched some muscle memory or emotional memory that has nothing to do with the client at all, but instead connects to the therapist’s past.
When we listen in therapy, we must listen with all of our senses and we must listen with our body and our emotions. When we listen as a whole person, we can so much more. And when we hear more, we increase the care we are able to provide for ourselves and our clients.