When You Can’t Feel Much: How Somatic Experiencing Helps Even When Sensations Are Hard to Identify

If you’ve ever sat down in a therapy session and been asked, “What are you feeling in your body right now?” and your honest answer was, “I don’t know,” you’re not alone.

Many people, especially those who have experienced trauma, struggle to connect with their body’s sensations or emotions. This sense of disconnect is not a failure or a flaw, it’s actually a protective adaptation. When your body has been overwhelmed, it may have learned to numb out or disconnect from sensation in order to survive. The good news is, you don’t need to be highly in tune with your body for healing to happen. Somatic Experiencing (SE) meets you exactly where you are.

Why It’s Hard to Feel Sometimes

When trauma has impacted the nervous system, feeling numb, disconnected, or “shut down” is often a sign that your body did exactly what it needed to survive. Rather than being a failure or a flaw, the inability to feel is actually a brilliant protective response, a way the nervous system shields you from overwhelming input.

Here are several common reasons why it may be hard to feel sensations or emotions:

1. The Freeze or Dissociation Response

If your body perceived a threat that it couldn’t fight or flee from, it may have gone into freeze or dissociation, a survival state that numbs both physical and emotional pain. This can feel like going blank, being disconnected from your body, or feeling emotionally flat. While helpful in the moment, this shutdown can persist long after the danger has passed.

2. Early Life or Developmental Trauma

If trauma occurred early in life, especially before language or emotional regulation were fully developed, your body may have learned to tune out sensation as a long-term coping strategy. Children often survive chaotic or unsafe environments by disconnecting from their internal world, simply because it wasn’t safe to feel.

3. Chronic Stress or Hypervigilance

Being in a constant state of alert (known as hypervigilance) can make you overly focused on external dangers and under-aware of internal sensations. Your nervous system is busy scanning for threats and doesn’t prioritize inward connection, so you may not notice hunger, tiredness, or tension until it’s overwhelming.

4. Medical Trauma or Body-Based Shame

Surgeries, invasive procedures, chronic illness, or being shamed for your body growing up can cause you to disconnect from bodily awareness. If your body has been a source of pain, fear, or shame, it makes sense that you’d avoid “feeling into it.”

5. Cultural and Familial Conditioning

Many people were raised in environments where they were taught to suppress feelings or ignore bodily needs. Statements like “don’t cry,” “tough it out,” or “you’re too sensitive” can reinforce disconnection from your emotional and physical experiences. Over time, this becomes habitual.

How Somatic Experiencing Works Even If You Can’t Feel Much

You don’t need to “get it right” or have perfect body awareness for Somatic Experiencing to work. In fact, SE is built around meeting your nervous system where it’s at and helping it gradually come back online. Here's how:

1. Starting with What’s Available

In SE, even the smallest cues are enough. Maybe you can’t feel tension or warmth, but you can notice, “I feel nothing” or “I feel kind of blank.” That’s a sensation too, and a valid starting point. SE can help you explore these subtleties with curiosity and compassion.

2. Developing a Felt Sense Slowly

Over time, SE helps you build a “felt sense,” a deeper awareness of internal body sensations. This might begin as a vague impression or a shift in posture or breath. With gentle guidance, those sensations become more noticeable and meaningful.

3. No Pressure to Perform

There’s no expectation in SE to have intense emotional breakthroughs or dramatic body releases. The process is slow, respectful, and non-invasive. Your body sets the pace, and your practitioner helps create an environment of safety and trust, where sensations can emerge naturally.

4. Using External Anchors

If internal sensations are difficult to access, SE may start with external resources, like noticing the contact of your feet on the floor, the feel of a blanket, or the stability of a chair. These simple physical cues help gently reconnect you to the present moment and begin the process of grounding.

5. Working with Images, Movement, or Metaphors

SE doesn’t rely solely on physical sensation. Sometimes, images, memories, gestures, or metaphors can be gateways to sensation. For example, imagining a wave, a color, or a safe place can evoke a body response even when you can’t feel much at first.

Healing Is Still Happening

Even if you’re not feeling much during a session, important changes are still taking place beneath the surface. Your nervous system may be processing at a subtle level, slowly building the capacity to feel safe again. It’s like thawing ice, quiet, gradual, and powerful.

Over time, people often begin to notice:

• More access to emotions

• Increased awareness of body cues like hunger or fatigue

• A greater sense of aliveness or presence

• A deeper connection to their own needs and boundaries

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You Don’t Need to Feel Everything to Start Healing

Somatic Experiencing doesn’t require you to be “good at feeling” or to know your body's language right away. It simply asks that you show up, and allow your body the time and space to reconnect, at its own pace. That alone is a powerful act of healing.

If you’ve felt disconnected from your body or emotions, SE offers a gentle, respectful path to help you find your way back, not by pushing through, but by listening carefully and honoring where you are right now.

Ready to take the next step?

Contact us at victoria@adayinthelifecounseling.com or call/text 720-583-5374 to learn more or schedule a session.

Even the smallest awareness is a doorway to healing. You're exactly where you need to be.