When Feelings Don’t Have Words: Learning the Body’s Language of Emotion

The Unspoken Language of the Body
Many of us grew up in homes where emotions didn’t have words. You might remember moments when you felt sad and a caregiver  said, “You must be hungry, let’s get you a snack.” Growing up in an Italian home, these were words I heard often from my well-meaning Nonna, who just loved to feed me and see me happy.

Or, perhaps your experience was of feeling scared and being told, “Don’t be silly, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

These responses certainly weren’t meant to harm us. Most often, they came from caregivers doing their best - people who had never been taught to understand or name their own emotions. But over time, these moments quietly taught the body a powerful lesson: my feelings aren’t safe to show, maybe even not safe to feel.

Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges (2011), helps us understand why this matters. Our nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety or danger, and not just in the world around us, but also in our relationships. When emotional expression is met with confusion, shame, or is dismissed, the nervous system learns to mute those signals. So that over time, we may lose touch with our body’s emotional vocabulary altogether.

The good news is this: the body still speaks, communicating through sensations even when words fall silent. You can learn to understand its language again — slowly, kindly, and with curiosity. That’s the work of somatic awareness: learning to listen to what your body has been trying to tell you all along

The Body as the First Language of Emotion
Long before we had words, we had sensations. A quickened heartbeat, a sinking feeling in the stomach, a lump in the throat — these were our earliest ways of knowing how we felt. Emotions aren’t abstract concepts floating in the mind; they’re physiological experiences that ripple through the body (van der Kolk, 2014).

So you might see anger appear as heat in the face or tension in the jaw. Fear might flutter through the stomach or tighten the chest. And joy might soften the muscles and feel warm around the heart, expand the breath, and bring warmth to the skin.

As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk (2014) reminds us, emotions live in the body as much as in the mind. They are messages, sensations that want to be noticed. When we begin to tune in to these internal cues, not as symptoms to fix but as information to understand, we reconnect the mind and body in ways that are deeply healing.

On a side note (shameless promotion for counselling coming up here…!), this is why therapies such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Somatic Experiencing, and mindfulness-based approaches place such emphasis on the felt sense (a concept that refers to how we experience or feel emotion in the body). Developing this inner listening allows us to recognize emotion as information rather than as something to fear or suppress.

When It Feels Uncomfortable
I am going to share with you a practice that you can try at home. However, first I want to mention that if turning your attention inward feels challenging, you’re not alone. For those who have experienced trauma, the body can feel like uncertain ground. After all, sensations were once the messengers of pain, fear, or loss, and your nervous system wisely learned to protect you by turning the volume down.

From a polyvagal perspective (Dana, 2018; Porges, 2021), this is a survival response, not a flaw. The body’s defenses — numbing, distraction, shutting down — are ways of preserving safety when it once wasn’t available.
So as you move into the practice that follows, please remember: there is no right pace, and you don’t need to feel anything specific. The goal isn’t to force awareness, but to invite it — gently, with compassion, and always with choice. You can also choose not to engage in the practice at this time, or to have a supportive person in your life try it with you — you know yourself best and you are in charge here.

Reconnecting Through Somatic Awareness
Somatic awareness simply means paying attention, intentionally and compassionately, to the sensations that arise in your body. It’s the practice of noticing what’s happening inside you with curiosity, without judgment, and without the need to change it.

Here’s a simple practice, if you feel up for giving it a try:

Start Small:
Choose a quiet moment when you’ll have a couple of minutes to yourself. If it’s comfortable, lie down and settle in. As you center with your breath, bring to mind an emotion you’ve been feeling lately.
Begin with something mild — perhaps irritation rather than anger, restlessness rather than grief. As you notice that emotion, gently turn your attention away from what sparked it and drop your awareness into your body. Notice where that emotion sits — perhaps in your chest, your stomach, your shoulders, your hands, or your face.

Body Scan:
Now that you’ve recognized where the emotion lives in your body, widen your awareness — like zooming out with a camera — to notice what else is present. Move your attention slowly from the top of your head through your body and down to your toes, simply noticing sensations, temperature, pressure, or areas of warmth and tightness (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

This sequence is intentional. Beginning with one small area helps you widen awareness gradually, prevent overwhelm, and reinforce curiosity over avoidance. The body scan becomes a way of broadening your focus safely, helping you notice not just where the emotion is held, but how it shifts and interacts with the rest of your system.

Name What You Find:
Try giving language to what you notice. You might say, “I feel heaviness in my chest,” or “there’s a fluttering in my stomach.” Even if you can’t name the exact emotion yet, describing the sensation itself begins to reconnect the circuit between mind and body (Lieberman et al., 2007; Gendlin, 1981; Siegel, 2012).

Breathe with It:
Finally, bring your attention back to your breath — feeling the inhale, then the easy release of the exhale. Slow, steady breathing signals safety to the nervous system (Porges, 2021) and helps you stay grounded as you explore.
As you breathe, notice with curiosity: what has shifted? What is the felt sense of that emotion doing now?

With practice, you may begin to recognize patterns — certain sensations that accompany particular emotions or memories. Over time, this awareness becomes an anchor. It helps you recognize the early whispers of emotion before they swell into overwhelm.

Creating Conditions of Safety
If you noticed that turning inward stirred up discomfort, that’s completely natural. For some, paying attention to the body can awaken sensations that have been quiet for a long time. There’s no rush here: the goal is to create conditions of safety that allow awareness to emerge naturally.

Here are a few ways to help your nervous system settle:

• Move your body: take a short walk, stretch, gently shake out your hands and shoulders, or cross your hands over your chest and brush your arms from the shoulders down. Movement activates the vagus nerve through gentle stimulation of muscles and joints, signaling safety and helping energy shift.
• Temperature shifts: splash cool water on your face or hold a warm mug in your hands. These stimulate the vagus nerve, influencing heart rate and supporting regulation.
• Sensory grounding: notice the texture of fabric against your skin, the scent of something soothing, or the sounds in your space.
  
  

These actions, while small, can help to “wake up” the nervous system just enough to bring you back into a state of regulated alertness — a place where awareness and curiosity can coexist.

Why Support Matters
Learning to connect with emotion, including the felt sense of emotion can feel new and uncomfortable at first. If that is the case for you, please know that you don’t have to do the work alone. A counsellor trained in trauma-informed approaches can guide you in noticing sensations without overwhelm, helping you pace the process and build capacity for emotional regulation.

In EMDR therapy, this often begins with resourcing: developing grounding practices and internal templates that create a sense of safety, nurturing, or protection. We might also anchor into supportive memories that evoke calm and stability (Shapiro, 2018)). These become inner anchors that allow you to explore emotional material without being swept away by it. Over time, you learn that emotions can rise and fall without destabilizing you — that they are waves, not undertows.

The Journey Toward Emotional Awareness
Learning to recognize and regulate emotion is something we can cultivate. If we weren’t taught how to feel and name our inner experiences, reconnecting with them later in life can feel awkward, even frightening. But with practice and safety, it becomes a path home to yourself.

At first, you might only notice small moments — a flicker of warmth in the heart when you see a friend, a tightness in the chest before you speak your truth. These moments are the nervous system learning a new language: the language of emotion. As you continue, awareness deepens. You begin to trust that your body is not your enemy — it’s your ally, your internal compass. Each sensation, each breath, is an invitation to listen more closely. Because healing doesn’t always begin with words. Sometimes, it begins with the simple act of noticing — and realizing that your body has been speaking to you all along.

References
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. 

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. 

Gendlin, E. T. (1981). Focusing.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. 

Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation. 

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). 

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. 
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