Why Can't I Be in My Body?
The Pattern
You live slightly above your body. Not always, and not dramatically, but there is a habitual distance between you and the physical sensations of your own existence. You can go hours without noticing you are hungry. Emotion registers as thought before it registers as sensation. Your body surprises you with its signals rather than being something you inhabit with fluency. Being asked to drop into your body or to notice what you feel physically can produce a specific blankness. Somatic dissociation is the specific form of dissociation that involves disconnection from the body's sensations, needs, and signals. It is not the dramatic dissociation of severe trauma presentations. It is the quieter, more pervasive disconnection that forms when the body becomes associated with overwhelming experience. When the body was the site of too much, the psyche found a way to be not-quite-there. To live from the neck up. To process experience through thought rather than sensation, because sensation was where the overwhelm lived. The body as site of overwhelm is the core of this pattern. For many people with this experience, the body was where pain happened: physical pain, overwhelming emotion, the helplessness of not being able to control what was being done to or experienced through the body. The psyche's response to overwhelming bodily experience is logical and effective: leave. Withdraw the sense of self from the body. Process from a remove. The body can continue to function. You can be somewhere slightly safer. The cost of this solution is the body's signals becoming noise rather than information. Hunger, fullness, fatigue, arousal, pain, pleasure, fear, joy, these are all first experienced as body sensations before they become emotions or thoughts. When you are not quite in your body, these signals are dampened or delayed, which means you are operating with partial information about your own experience.
Origins & Context
Peter Levine's foundational work in Somatic Experiencing describes somatic dissociation as the body's response to unresolved trauma: the freezing of incomplete defensive responses and the numbing of the somatic experience as a protection from the intolerable. His central clinical observation, in Waking the Tiger, is that animals in the wild do not develop post-traumatic syndromes because they discharge the freeze response through shaking and trembling. Humans, whose social norms prohibit this completion, hold the incomplete defensive responses in the body, and the dissociation develops as a management strategy.
Bessel van der Kolk's research, particularly in The Body Keeps the Score, documents the neurobiological evidence for somatic dissociation: the altered interoception in trauma survivors, the reduced activity in the brain regions associated with body awareness, the way trauma literally changes the relationship between the brain and the body's signals. His central argument is that trauma is fundamentally a body experience and that recovery requires body engagement, not just verbal processing.
Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy approach is built on the clinical observation that many trauma survivors have learned to process experience from the top down, prioritizing cognitive and verbal processing over somatic experience. Her work describes the habitual patterns of body use that develop in response to overwhelming experience and the specific therapeutic process of restoring access to the body's own wisdom.
The body was where the overwhelm lived, and leaving was the first protective move, so complete and so practiced that the body's signals became noise rather than information.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the hunger signal that arrives late. You were not hungry and then you are suddenly ravenous, without the gradual awareness that you should have had of appetite building. The body gave signals you did not register because you were not quite connected to the place where they were being generated.
You feel it in the specific blankness that body-based questions produce. How does this feel in your body? What sensations are present right now? These questions, which are natural and answerable for many people, produce a particular kind of not-knowing. You look inward and find... not much. Or the sensation is there but it is muted, distant, requiring effort to locate.
It shows up as a disconnect between emotion and body sensation. You know intellectually that you are anxious. The bodily correlate of that anxiety, the chest tightening, the shallow breathing, the held belly, is less accessible. The emotion is a thought rather than a feeling, processed cognitively rather than somatically.
It shows up in the way certain body-based practices, yoga, dance, massage, somatic therapy, can produce unexpected emotional responses. These practices bring the person back into contact with the body's stored experience, and the return is sometimes accompanied by emotion that was being held in the somatic material. The crying that happens during a massage. The grief that surfaces in a yoga class. These are not random. They are the body remembering.
Named in the Literature As
Named in the Literature As:
1. Somatic Dissociation (Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk) — the disconnection from the body's sensations, signals, and felt experience as a consequence of overwhelming somatic experience, producing a habitual distance from the body's interior. 2. Altered Interoception (Bessel van der Kolk) — the neurobiological alteration in the ability to detect and interpret signals from the body's interior, associated with trauma and chronic stress. 3. Top-Down Processing Bias (Pat Ogden, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy) — the habitual prioritizing of cognitive and verbal processing over somatic experience, which develops in response to overwhelming bodily experience and is maintained as a default processing style. 4. Body as Site of Trauma (somatic trauma literature) — the understanding that traumatic experience is stored in the body's tissues, postures, and physiological patterns, not only in narrative memory. 5. Freeze and Somatic Numbing (Peter Levine) — the relationship between the freeze response and somatic dissociation, in which the immobilization of the incomplete defensive response is accompanied by a numbing of somatic experience as a protection from the overwhelm that produced the freeze.
Related entries in this library: dissociation, somatic-healing, the-body-as-home, reclaiming-the-body, why-i-feel-like-i-am-watching-my-life-from-outside-it
Nikita's Note
Learning to be in my body was one of the stranger and more profound experiences of my healing. Not dramatic. Not sudden. More like learning to hear a language that had always been spoken but that I had tuned out so completely I had forgotten it was there.
The body is not the enemy. It is the place where you actually live. And the sensations that feel overwhelming at first, the ones that drove the original leaving, become more navigable with practice and with safety. Coming back does not have to be all at once. It can be one sensation, one breath, one moment of actual contact with the physical experience of being alive.
From the work
The body was where the overwhelm lived, and leaving was the first protective move, so complete and so practiced that the body's signals became noise rather than information.From Was It Abuse? by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in Was It Abuse? — available on Amazon.