Safely Exploring How to Feel Your Feelings
How to feel your feelings and emotions: a trauma-informed, polyvagal & somatic psychology guide
Feeling your feelings sounds like it should be instinctive. But for so many people, especially those with trauma histories, neurodivergence, high sensitivity, or learned emotional suppression from childhood, “feel your feelings” can be confusing, overwhelming, or even triggering.
If you’ve ever thought:
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“I can feel it, but it’s too much.”
“I feel nothing, I’m just numb.”
“If I let myself feel this, I’ll fall apart.”
…you’re not alone. And nothing is wrong with you.
If you’re new here I’m Laura, a counsellor, nature therapist and a somatic trauma therapist. My offerings are all about supporting you to connect with yourself and the world around you.
This guide brings together polyvagal theory, somatic psychology, parts work, the valence–arousal model, and trauma-informed principles to help you to explore how to feel your feelings in a way that is safe, manageable, and grounded in evidence-based psychology. You’ll also find suggested practices to try, to bring more connection to your feeling and emotional world.
Feelings vs emotions
We often use the words emotions and feelings as if they mean the same thing, but in neuroscience, they’re actually two different steps in your brain’s reaction processing.
Think of it like this:
An emotion is your body reacting.
A feeling is your mind noticing.
Here’s the breakdown:
Emotions: your body’s automatic responses
Emotions aren’t just “in your head.” They are body-based events; waves of physiological change involving the nervous system, the endocrine system, and brain processing. Emotions are the quick, automatic reactions that your brain creates before you’re even aware anything is happening.
They might show up as:
tightness in the body
warmth or coolness
heaviness
pressure
a racing heart
tingling
restlessness
hollowness
contraction or expansion
a lack of sensation (numbness)
These reactions come from older parts of the brain, areas that evolved to keep us alive. They’re fast, instinctive, and mostly outside of conscious control. You don’t choose emotions. Your brain produces them.
If it feels difficult to identify your felt experience, sensation and emotions, you could explore this post about the valance arousal model, which is a simple model that supports us to take a simple view of our internal experience.
Feelings: your mind’s interpretation
A feeling is what happens when your conscious mind notices the emotional reaction that’s happening in your body and tries to makes sense of it. That interpretive step, “What does this sensation mean?” is the feeling. This takes place in newer, more complex areas of the brain, the parts that handle:
awareness
language
meaning-making
reflection
Feelings are shaped by your experiences, memories, beliefs, personality and culture. Two people can have the same emotional reaction (e.g., a pounding heart) yet interpret it as completely different feelings:
anxiety
excitement
anticipation
dread
When you’re neurodivergent, like me and many of my clients, interpreting that emotion can be even harder. We often experience differences in interoception, the ability to sense and understand what’s happening inside our bodies, which means the signals can feel overwhelming or like they don’t make sense.
How feelings and emotions work together
Here’s the sequence:
Something happens
Your brain detects a trigger; anything from a loud noise to a text message.Your body reacts (emotion)
This is fast and unconscious. You might tense up, freeze, get flushed, or feel a jolt in your stomach.Your mind becomes aware of the reaction (feeling)
You label and interpret what’s happening inside you.You respond
Your behaviour follows your interpretation.
How to feel your emotions (body-first)
As we touched on above, feeling an emotion begins in the body. You don’t need to investigate or dig for meaning here; noticing and being with what’s present, slowly and without pressure, is enough. You might pause, observe or name the sensation with gentle curiosity: “My chest feels warm,” or “There’s some energy in my belly.” No analysis, no story, just awareness.
The science: these body-first reactions reflect activity in older brain structures like the amygdala, brainstem and hypothalamus, which shift your heart rate, breathing, and muscle tone before you consciously register anything.
Being in the body and connecting with emotions isn’t easy for many of us. So many of my clients tell me they feel really fearful about connecting with their felt experience, because they’re scared that they’ll get lost in it. But emotions themselves are actually time limited. I’ll talk more about this below but, for now, let’s look at ways to safely feel emotions.
How to feel your feelings (meaning-making)
Once you’ve noticed the physical emotion, the next step is letting that sensation gently become a feeling. Many of us are much more comfortable with this part of the process and most of Western talk-based therapies are rooted in using the mind to interpret what our internal signals might mean.
As well as skipping straight to this step, many of us have learned to disconnect from our bodily sensations and emotions. We intellectualise them, avoid them and push them away with strategies that were very much needed to survive our pasts, but that don’t serve us in the present.
Meaning-making is an important part of the process, but the stories that we tell ourselves about feelings can magnify and prolong them. Feelings themselves are actually time limited. I’ll talk more about this below but, for now, let’s look at how we experience feelings.
This doesn’t have to happen quickly. For many of us, especially neurodivergent folks or trauma survivors, feelings arrive in layers.
You might ask yourself something like, “If this sensation had a name, what might it be?” or “Does this feel more like excitement, overwhelm, or something else?” There’s no right answer, and there’s actually no need to name anything in order to process it. Processing happens in the body as much as in the mind.
The science: feelings emerge when the brain’s interoceptive and prefrontal regions, especially the insula, somatosensory cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, bring bodily signals into awareness and add interpretation.
Over time, this gentle practice creates a safer, clearer relationship with your internal world, supporting meaning-making without overwhelm.
Emotional sensations are time-limited
As I mentioned above, emotions, and the bodily sensations we experience as part of them, are time-limited events. Research in affective neuroscience (including work by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor) shows that the initial physiological wave of an emotion lasts around 60–90 seconds. This means the body produces a short wave of sensation, but the mind can keep the emotion alive, through:
rumination
story-making
prediction
catastrophising or imagining the worst case scenario
replaying memories
analysing why it’s happening
responding with unhelpful behaviours that maintain the emotion
In other words the body generates the feeling, emotion but the mind keeps it going. This doesn’t mean the emotion isn’t real. It means the emotional loop often comes from meaning-making, not the sensation itself. Emotion = sensation + interpretation + story.
The impact of trauma and the nervous system
In the processes described above, it’s assumed that the emotions or feelings you notice are your body and mind responding in a natural, understandable way to what’s happening for you right now.
When someone has experienced trauma, or when the nervous system processes the world differently, as is common in neurodivergent people, emotions and bodily sensations can show up that are based on patterns of past threat rather than our current experience.
An example of this might be feeling a racing heart or tightness in the chest when receiving constructive feedback at work, even though there is no real danger in the present moment.
Your body might be activating the same survival pathways it learned during past experiences and responding as if it needs to protect you. This doesn’t mean your reaction is “wrong”, it’s your nervous system doing what it knows how to do. Core beliefs or internal stories formed from past experiences like “I’m not safe” or “I have to protect myself” can maintain a state of alert, keeping the nervous system activated.
If this is your experience, there are a couple of processes that can support you to respond to this.
Polyvagal theory, which you can read more about here, shows us that the autonomic nervous system shifts between fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown states; when your experience is outside of your “window of tolerance,” it can be difficult to access or label emotions safely. Any work to feel your emotions or feelings should be rooted in work to create more safety and stability in your nervous system.
As I explain in this post about working with the nervous system, regulation work is not about fixing yourself or bypassing your feelings, it’s about creating enough internal steadiness to live in the world, as fully present as possible, without being swept away.
How to feel your feelings and emotions safely, using tritation and pendulation
One way to support yourself to explore how to feel your feelings and emotions and feelings, without it being overwhelming, is through processes called titration and pendulation, which are from Somatic Experiencing therapy.
Tritiation means experiencing only small, manageable amounts of distress at a time, allowing the body to gradually release and “discharge” tension without overwhelm.
This is made possible through pendulation, which is the practice of shifting your attention back and forth between a stressful sensation and something soothing or grounding. This could be a safe person in your life, a memory that feels safe and supportive or a belief that brings reassurance.
If this is completely new to you, if you’ve experienced trauma or if you’re neurodivergent, you might want to work with a trauma and somatically trained therapist.
To ‘pendulate’ between the difficult feeling and your supportive resource, you can focus briefly on the sensation of the emotion then move to the resource that you’ve identified, before moving back to the emotion. If at any point you cannot come back to the resource, you STOP. This is your body communicating its limits.
Moving between the two states lets the body experience and release tension at a balanced, sustainable pace. This gentle noticing and being with helps build connection between your body and awareness without activating old wounds or pulling you into trauma material.
Other practices to support you to feel your feelings and emotions
In this post you’ll find deeper reflections on the approach of somatic therapy, which supports us to be in contact with our internal experience. The post also has a somatic practice that you can try.
If you’d like to explore your somatic, embodied experience through the lens of nature, mythology and ritual, head to my Patreon where I share somatic, audio-guided practices. You can access various sample practices through my free membership.
Trauma-informed safety: slow is fast
Learning how to feeling your feelings should never mean diving headfirst into intensity. Our emotional reactions are protective, learned responses from a nervous system that is trying to keep you safe. The goal is not to force meaning or re-experience past trauma when exploring how to feel your feelings, but to notice what arises, gradually expand awareness, and create safe pathways for emotions to be felt, understood and integrated over time.
A trauma-informed approach includes:
pacing
resourcing
co-regulation
titration
consent (with yourself)
honouring our protective parts
stopping when needed
Emotional processing happens through stability, not overwhelm. You can read more in my post: Trauma therapy essentials: safety and stabilisation
Final thoughts: feeling is a skill
Feeling your emotions and feelings is not about pushing through your own limits. It is about connection, capacity and safety. It’s about learning to notice what’s happening in your body and mind, exploring it at a pace that feels manageable and allowing yourself to respond with curiosity and compassion. Over time, practicing this can strengthen the connection between your body and awareness, helping you navigate life with trust in your own inner experience.
If you’d like to explore other resources to support this work, here are all of the posts I linked to above, as well as a few others that you might find useful:
What I Mean When I Talk About Nervous System Regulation
Trauma therapy essentials: safety and stabilisation
Polyvagal therory for safety and connection
The valance arousal model: exploring inner experience
The three Rs : a tool for exploring mental health struggles
If you’d like to explore this with the support of a somatic, trauma therapist you can join my waiting list here. You might also want to check out my Patreon, which has lots of free resources, practices and reflections to support your connection to yourself and the world around you.
