Learning to Safely Process Emotions in My Body

My two-year journey from emotional repression to embodied feeling.

For most of my life, I thought of emotions as thought patterns rather than full-body experiences. I was either completely clueless about what I was feeling or stuck in mental analysis, and I had no idea how thoroughly I was suppressing emotions as a defense mechanism. Looking back, it's both obvious and somewhat embarrassing how disconnected I was from my own emotional landscape, though I've learned it's exceedingly common among fellow overly ambitious nerds.

The turning point came in late 2022 when I read John Sarno's "Healing Back Pain." The book's claim that my four years of intense chronic back pain likely stemmed from muscle tension caused by repressed anger seemed improbable. But when I developed an exercise in which I imagined myself as a dragon demolishing the objects of my anger, the tension subsided and the pain actually diminished.

This was a wild wake-up call about the power of the mind-body connection. But it didn’t automatically imbue me with a rich emotional skillset; in some areas of life, I remained just as stuck as I had been in my years of chronic pain. As Elena Lake notes, "Becoming emotionally fluent is a motor skill, the same way that learning to walk is."

Two years of practice later, the benefits have been transformative:

My anger, which used to linger for hours of exhausting rumination, now often moves through me quickly and cleanly. When it does appear, it actually feels physically pleasant—it kind of tickles.

Music has become a full-body experience. I find myself swept up in the emotional current of a song, often moved to tears by pieces I've sung or heard dozens of times before.

Speaking of crying—I do that now, regularly, and it's fantastic! (My therapist is very proud.)

Most notably, developing awareness of my own emotions has automatically enhanced my ability to read others', like emotional literacy was some kind of package deal. Turns out when you stop being emotionally constipated, you get better at dealing with other humans. Who knew?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Having Feelings

Daily Bodyscanning or Metta Meditation

In October 2023, I took UCSF's 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, committing to 45 minutes of daily meditation. I previously had been pretty inconsistent with daily practice despite completing two meditation retreats. But this course demanded consistency: every day, I'd do either a body scan or metta meditation. The transformation was dramatic and my interoception sharpened significantly. In somatic therapy sessions, when my therapist would ask "how does that emotion feel in your body?", my answers evolved from a vague "I feel tension" to more nuanced descriptions of flow, heat, or vibration. Suddenly I could perceive emotional sensations I hadn't even known were there.

Intense Breathwork Sessions

For several months, I attended weekly Somatic Breathwork sessions at New Mission Yoga in San Francisco, supplementing with home practice via YouTube. These weren't gentle relaxation exercises—they were intense experiences that often broke through my usual emotional barriers. The sessions followed a consistent pattern: the first half would release fear or anger, while the second half would open up into deep love and gratitude. Sometimes I'd reach euphoric jhana-like states before I could ever get there in meditation, giving me glimpses of deep okayness, a feeling that is often present now but rarely was at the time.

Somatic Experiencing and Ketamine Therapy

I started weekly Somatic Experiencing therapy in early 2023. In Somatic Experiencing, we talk about situations in my life that bring up emotion, explore how those emotions feel in my body, and then dive deeper into difficult feelings or retreat back into safety as needed by bringing up positive memories or expanding my awareness of the physical environment. This process very gradually builds comfort with processing difficult emotions.

Combining Somatic Experiencing with ketamine therapy sessions every 4-6 weeks significantly enhanced my progress. The ketamine sessions, guided by the same therapist, allowed me to enter a state where I felt a profound sense of safety and could explore emotions and difficult memories. Importantly, the co-regulation with my therapist during these sessions was crucial; I wouldn't have wanted to do it alone. Overall, this combined approach provided a safe environment for my body and mind to process emotions, facilitating deeper emotional healing and self-awareness.

Improv and Singing

Improv classes, which I started in early 2023, turned out to be surprisingly effective emotional training. One course with Leela in San Francisco specifically focused on accessing genuine emotion in scenes. I discovered that even when "pretending" to be angry or sad in character, real emotions would arise in my body. It was like finding a back door to my emotional world.

Singing, though, has been the real revelation. Whether it's karaoke, voice lessons, or just singing alone at home, it connects me to emotions in a way nothing else quite manages. There's something about fully expressing yourself through song that bypasses the usual mental barriers. Belting out “Words Fail” from Dear Evan Hansen or “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman brings me to tears and creates a tangible physical warm glow throughout my body.

Naming Emotions

Sometimes, simply naming what I'm feeling helps complete an emotional circuit. During therapy sessions, if I'm experiencing a physical sensation but can't quite place it, identifying the emotion—"this is anger" or "this is grief"—often helps me connect more deeply with the feeling.

I remember one particularly striking instance where I was stuck in anger for hours. None of my usual techniques were working. After cycling through different emotions, I finally realized what I was actually feeling was shame. The moment I named it, the shame flowed through my body and the anger dissolved.

While I tend to focus on the primary emotions—anger, fear, sadness, and joy—some authors recommend getting more specific. The principle seems to be that the more precisely you can name what you're feeling, the more effectively you can process it.

Anger Release

Anger is particularly tricky for many people, especially men. The fear of appearing abusive leads many of us to suppress anger entirely. After discovering how much repressed anger was contributing to my back pain, I developed various ways to release it safely: exercising to intense music, using a boxing bag, jumping around and screaming, or returning to the practice of imagining myself as a dragon.

Another approach is simply sitting with anger mindfully, allowing it to arise and move through me. After one meditation retreat, I spent an entire week letting myself feel anger fully—experiencing its heat in my body without acting on it. I’ve felt a little lighter ever since.

Trigger Practice

One particularly potent tool has been trigger practice, which I first learned about from Sasha Chapin. The format is simple but powerful: you ask someone to repeatedly say phrases that you know will trigger you, while you practice staying with the resulting sensations. You build up a reserve of calm beforehand, and then observe how your body responds to the triggers, practicing returning to baseline.

It's remarkable how activated you can get even in this controlled setting, but the practice works. It builds familiarity with difficult emotions and often reduces the power of specific triggers in real life. Unsurprisingly given this essay, the very first trigger I worked through was my reaction to being “accused” of being overly emotional. My partner said things like “Wow, you look frustrated; why is this such a big deal to you?” and I couldn’t help but laugh as I was filled with rage and confusion.

Outward Expression

Much of this work happened in controlled environments—therapy sessions, breathwork classes, private practice—and I learned that actually bringing forth intense emotions in real interpersonal situations took its own practice. Despite being intellectually open to sharing emotions, I found my body would often freeze up with tension when trying to express deeper feelings.

I've made a conscious effort to work through this, expressing deep emotions like gratitude and love to people I care about. Sometimes this meant starting with a heartfelt email when an in-person conversation felt too overwhelming. Other times it meant making myself vulnerable in person despite the discomfort. It's still challenging, but it gets easier with practice.

I've also worked on expressing anger safely and empathetically during conflicts, a skill that Fight Wise helped develop. The goal isn't to become more argumentative, but to express anger cleanly when it arises rather than letting it simmer and distort.

Coming Full Circle

Looking back on this journey, I'm struck by how what started as a desperate attempt to fix my back pain has evolved into something much more fundamental. The tools and practices I've described aren't just techniques for feeling emotions—they're ways of reconnecting with a part of human experience I didn't even know I was missing.

What's most surprising isn't how much better I feel, but how the world around me just makes a lot more sense.