Embodied self-awareness involves interoception—sensing our breathing, digestion, hunger, arousal, pain, emotion, fatigue and the like—and the body schema—an awareness of the movement and coordination between different parts of the body and between our body and the environment. Conceptual self-awareness is engagement in a thought process of

Shock trauma is the effect of a relatively brief and sudden event like an assault or a drug overdose. Developmental trauma results when exposure occurs over a longer period of time. Eventually, the tissues around the interoceptive receptor sites may become physically threatened, at which point the person begins to feel pain.

The body schema is related to the skeletomotor system and the parts of the nervous system that are responsible for making movements intentional (meaning that the movements are in response to our interoceptive needs and desires), coordinated (smooth linkages), and comfortable (without excessive effort, pain, or fatigue).

In the suppression of urges, then, it is not just the brain but the neuromuscular system that is activated to contain the urge. If one is threatened but cannot fight or escape, the skeletal muscles in the arms, legs, and trunk that might have become fully active instead become tensed at a low level of contraction. If you’ve ever witnessed a cat (or

Neural learning is reflected in physiological changes in the nerve cells and their connections. Practice leads to the growth of an increasing number of interconnecting fibers that can synapse between cells. The more synapses between adjoining cells, the more likely there will be a direct communication between them, and the stronger the neural

As infants, before we can speak and conceptualize, we learn to move toward what makes us feel good and move away from what makes us feel bad.

Clinicians and educators who work with embodied self-awareness often talk about “mind” and “body.” This is an oversimplification that leads to misconceptions: the “mind” is in the head and the “body” is below the neck. The problem is that the mind is part of the body and the body has a mind of its own in its peripheral nerve cells and receptors and

Freudian psychoanalytic theory was among the first to recognize and name defense mechanisms, the forms of suppression having the goal of avoiding what is unpleasant or threatening to the self. Although some lists of defenses can have 30 different categories, for our purposes the main types are denial, repression, intellectualization, and projection

The clinical implications are very clear and have been substantiated by research: teaching clients to pay attention to embodied self-awareness can assist them in changing their thought patterns to more positive and self-consistent ones, to elevating their moods, and enhancing the ability of their prefrontal cortex to link thought and feeling based