Are body sensations the same as emotions? Interoception would say so.
Have you ever noticed that we often call the body sensations and emotions the same thing in English? Both are called feelings. In the past, it seems like most people thought of these two different kinds of feelings as unrelated. Modern research seems to strongly suggest that this is not true and that both types of feelings are directly related. This sense is known as interoception.
That’s where feeling butterflies in the chest come in.
- When we feel love we often hear people talking about butterflies in their chest.
- Strangely enough, when we’re nervous, we also feel butterflies. Or perhaps we feel moths?
It’s strange that we often talk about the same feeling of having butterflies in our chest or stomach and signifying either fear or love. However, from a Feelings Wheel 2.0 perspective, this may not be so surprising as scared and joyful feelings are next to each other and, therefore, quite similar. Sometimes, the only way to figure out what kind of butterflies we have, be those fear butterflies or love butterflies, is context.
I also suspect that feeling butterflies is usually associated, at least in love, as in the very beginning of love. So maybe what we’re feeling when we feel butterflies is both love and fear.
You can see other direct examples of this in American English (I don’t know if other forms of English use the same references):
- Sadness is usually heavy.
- Peacefulness is usually associated with relaxed body sensations.
- Powerful emotions usually have the sensations of upright posture.
- Joyful feelings are often talked about as being light.
- Scared feelings are often experienced as tight body sensations.
- Mad feelings are often referred to as hot body sensations.
- When we feel dread, we feel a pit in our stomach.
- When something makes us both sad and happy we call it bittersweet.
As we can see even in normal language, people link these sensations and emotions together. We may not actually be able to separate them in any practical way.
However, some people seem to have a harder time noticing body sensations than other people. It is very likely that a person who has a hard time understanding bodily sensations will also have a hard time understanding emotions. The work of occupational therapist Dr. Kelly Mahler is what brought this idea of interoception and understanding that it was important to my attention. Kelly is also very good at showing how not having good interoception gets in the way of emotional understanding and regulation.
So, if you’re having trouble understanding your emotions maybe you need to get better at understanding your body sensations. If that is so, you will find a lot of great information on Feelings Wheel 2.0 and entire chapters on interoception in Feelings Wheel 2.0 book.
You might also look at the teaching resources from Kelly Mahler if you’re interested in teaching interoception understanding to others.