Can I get rid of body sensations?

I recently started with a new client. They shared that the impression they’ve gotten from past therapists is that once we notice, feel and label our body sensations we then move to coping skills to get rid of them.

Whoa.

I’m going to guess the therapist my client was talking about did not intend to give this message.

I paused when I heard this and scanned my memory, have I ever given this impression??

I haven’t had a client lay out this issue so clearly. I see versions of this all the time. Even though the word “coping” is in the phrase “coping mechanism”, my clients are often striving not to cope but to get rid of a feeling or a felt experience. Sometimes they know they’re doing it, sometimes they don’t. Whether felt more as a body sensation or an emotional experience, a suffering person usually just wants all that unpleasantness to go away.

So here is a list of things we are trying to do when identifying body sensations:

• Learning that the body has even more sensations than we thought, and possibly have some wonder and curiosity about this

• Practicing tolerating these sensations, and giving oneself grace when you feel you just can’t tolerate it anymore

• Learning what “I feel nothing” might mean. (It could be the body’s attempt to ice out or numb out the experience because again, it’s too much right now. And that’s ok.) Leading to…

• Normalizing whatever can’t be tolerated. This week a client felt nothing. That’s all we concentrated on for a bit, just notice that there was nothing. Then I could provide psycho education as to why, and then we could come back to the body again and see if anything changed. We did not force it, but we practiced checking in, and we didn’t shame the “nothing”

• Instead of figuring things out in the thinking mind, seeing what info the body has about what is going on and how to cope

What skills do you see at play here? What are the possibilities?