Where do you feel that in your body?

On the mind body disconnect

Part I

‘Where do you feel that in your body?’

A (brown man) friend and I were walking down the beach earlier this week discussing this seemingly simple question, often asked by our therapists. I remember when I was first asked that. I was 27, burnt out, and desperate to ‘fix’ my relationship with sex — which turned out to be a much wider conversation around my relationship with my body. How could I know what I wanted, liked or needed when I was so numb, without a clue where I felt things? The first fifty-ish times I was asked that question my answer was, ‘My head.’ I wasn’t feeling the feelings, I was trying to rationalise them. Bury them with intellect. The same went for pleasure — this is meant to feel good, it looks good, so I must feel good, right?

Therapy forced me out of my head. I was introduced to expressive exercises to physically feel my feelings. They had me throwing things about, beating the shit out of pillows, dancing, screaming. And something magical happened: my heart broke open. I felt everything. I sobbed for days. I finally started to understand where I felt things. The hurt in my gut, the way joy reaches my eyes, how my fingers tingle when I am anxiously excited, how my chest contracts when I am anxiously nervous, how my shoulders lock when I’m angry or the ghostly way my lips feel when I romantically want someone.

It took a while but it opened up my world to a vocabulary of intimacy. I’m acutely aware of how I respond to people, physically. How I relax when I’m held, how the hairs on my arms stand up when someone whispers in my ear, the way I tense up in anticipation, how taking a deep breath softens me, how dry my mouth gets when I’m nervous. I also know how easy it is for me to get into my own head and how much easier it is for me to get out of it, these days. I know me. That 27 year old girl who was so disconnected from her body is a far cry from the person I am today. Me, today, understands it’s all me and it’s all connected. The idea that we can compartmentalise? A myth — the body keeps the score.

I’m haunted by ‘the why’ (Simon Sinek has really made this phrase cringe and I hate him for it) in my own life. Why did it take me so long to reconnect with myself? Maybe there’s a part of me that was protecting myself from unwanted touch. Or maybe I shut myself off so I could just focus on my job and not dwell on stupid men in tech. Or maybe it was the guilt and shame I felt around my faith and my desire. Or maybe I was good at converting discomfort and anxiety into anger, locking my body out of the process. If I didn’t feel, I couldn’t hurt. Now, I sometimes wish I wasn’t so connected because it all bloody hurts (yes, I’m joking, I would rather it this way but omg it’s a lot sometimes). I’m haunted by the why because I fear losing touch with myself in moments of sadness and heartbreak, where the quick relief of numbness could undo years of me discovering what it means to finally feel.

Part II

When my friend told me he didn’t know where he felt his emotions, I couldn’t help but think about how that shows up in sex. It’s often:

‘Grab it,’ he says.
‘Touch me,’ she says.

I have found the men in my life often talk about their genitals like separate entities that aren’t connected to them (I guess the exception being, ‘She/he gave me head,’ or ‘she/he went down on me.’ But I’m not going to let the anomaly get in the way of a good theory right now). We act like it’s the erect penis experiencing pleasure, not the entire body.

I actually think there’s a whole thing here about men being told that sex is less of an emotional activity for them, that women get attached more, etc. We know that gender norms condition men to separate emotional intimacy from sex — a socially constructed cutting of the cord between body and mind. If you're told ‘to feel’ is not masculine, of course, you’ll shut it down. It’s a survival tactic. And if I stop generalising men and zoom in on South Asian diasporic men, the situation is even more dire. Diaspora communities often inherit conservative attitudes about sex, inherited from the generation their families immigrated, whilst contending with growing up here with the expectation of being sexually liberal (‘here’ being where we’re immigrants to). Yes, I appreciate there’s nuance here that I would like to write about at some point, but there’s something to be said about how confusion, mixed with guilt and shame can make us feel unworthy of pleasure. I know how shame and guilt can inhibit desire and satisfaction. How it can remove me from the experience.

And if we don’t know how our bodies house our feelings, is there any surprise we relate to them in the third person? If you don’t know how to sit with emotion or locate it in the body, it makes sense that you start relating to pleasure from a distance. To experience pleasure only as a mechanical or a localised act for the genitals means you stop the overwhelm and the vulnerability. You stop the pain. It’s easier to walk away when you’ve never fully arrived.

But we deserve the pleasure we might be missing out on because we were never taught how to stay in our bodies. We deserve the intimacy — not just with our lovers or for our lovers, but with and for ourselves.

Part III

I think I’m writing this piece because I wish I’d known there was help sooner. Or maybe it’s that I wish I’d known other people who felt the same. That it was OK to think sex is a Big Deal™. That it was OK, and very normal, to need support. That it was important to focus on this part of my life. That it’s OK to admit that relearning how to relate to myself will always be one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced.

If this helps one person take the first step to seek out help it was worth brain dumping on here. Because there is support. In fact, a lot. I’m not a therapist or an expert but I have dropped a few things below that have supported me on my own journey below. Books are my preferred way of consuming information, so this list 100% won’t be for everyone. It’s also very incomplete! If a comprehensive list is something of interest though, I will collab with a professional to get one to you! Let me know.

Resources

Books

• The Body Keeps The Score

• Come As You Are

• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

• The Right to Sex

• Anything Esther Perel is great.

Therapy

There are so many types of therapy out there. And it’s really important you do your own research. Again, I’m not a professional and I’m learning alongside you.

Sex therapy, psychotherapy, trauma informed therapy, somatic psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems type stuff, etc. There are people doing great work to bring together culturally informed therapists like southasiantherapists.org and talathrive.com.

Yoga is also a thing that people talk about helping with mind body connection which I’ve also found helpful.

Hoffman Process. I’ve talked about this before. This is a course I did. It’s very much not for everyone but it did have a huge impact on me.