Coaching practices for My Head Says I've Dealt with it but My Body Didn't Get the Message There's Still a Knot in My Chest and a Tightness in My Shoulders That Flares Up Later and Drags the Whole Thing Back Even When I Thought I'd Moved Past it
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For My Head Says I've Dealt with it but My Body Didn't Get the Message There's Still a Knot in My Chest and a Tightness in My Shoulders That Flares Up Later and Drags the Whole Thing Back Even When I Thought I'd Moved Past it, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My head says I’ve dealt with it, but my body didn’t get the message
- My head knows there’s nothing I can do about this, but my body refuses to get the message
- I feel it in my body before my head catches up
- I can talk about my feelings all day from the neck up, but the real stuff seems to be locked in my body
- My body keeps sending me messages
Practices that may help
- Body Scan and Session Closure
Sweep attention through the body after processing to catch residual tension before closing the session.
EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - Willing hands and half-smile (acceptance through the body)
Use open posture and a faint half-smile to signal acceptance to the body, when the mind can’t get there yet.
Radical Acceptance, Made Practical - Pair the word with a body location
Name the feeling and where you sense it: "tight in the chest", "heavy in the gut".
Affect Labeling: Name It to Tame It - Tracking shadow material through the body
Notice where in the body suppressed reactions live — tension, constriction, or deadness are somatic shadow clues.
Shadow Work - Read bodily signals as information
Treat tension, energy dips, and gut feelings as data about needs and emotions, not just noise.
Interoception, Explained - Track body sensation (the felt sense)
Follow raw physical sensation with curiosity — tingling, warmth, pressure — rather than the storyline.
Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained - Relax and release stuck energy
When emotion grips, consciously relax and let the energy move through instead of clamping down.
The Untethered Soul, In Practice - Find the felt sense
Locate the unclear, whole-body sense of a situation before you name it.
Focusing and the Felt Sense, Made Practical - Apply somatic tracking to difficult emotions as well as pain
The same curious, non-fearful attention that retrains pain responses can be applied to emotional sensations in the body.
Somatic Tracking, Made Practical - Ground in the present when the past intrudes
Use the senses and the room to signal "that was then, this is now" when memory floods the body.
The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
Related concerns
- Feeling Your Feelings In The Body
After naming an emotion on the Feeling Wheel, find where it lives in the body.
Locate the emotion in the body as well as naming it
- The Body Keeps The Score Summary
Bessel van der Kolk’s core claim is that overwhelming experience is registered in the body and nervous system — not just as a memory but as ongoing physiological dysregulation — so calming the body ("bottom-up") can be as important as talking ("top-down"). The broad insight that trauma shows up physiologically is well supported; some of the book’s specific claims and favored therapies are more debated than the book’s certainty suggests. These are self-regulation skills, not a substitute for trauma treatment.
- Bodily Intuition
Treat physical sensations in the moment as data about what is actually happening inside you.
Reading the body as a self-knowledge instrument
- Bodily Maps Of Emotions Practice
After naming an emotion on the Feeling Wheel, find where it lives in the body.
- Does Somatic Experiencing Work
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, proposes that overwhelming experience leaves incomplete survival energy "stuck" in the body, and that gently completing and discharging that activation — in small, titrated doses, moving between activation and calm (pendulation) — helps the nervous system settle. The body-awareness skills it teaches are low-risk and increasingly studied, but the evidence base is still emerging and the "stored energy" model is a clinical theory, not established physiology. These are self-regulation skills; trauma work belongs with a trained professional.
- Edge Of Memory Somatic
When working with a difficult memory, start at its least intense periphery — a moment before, a sensation at the boundary — rather than its core.
Approach the edge of the memory, not the center
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