Interoceptive Awareness
Interoception helps health professionals and clients deepen their awareness of various aspects of their felt experience and serves as an embodied anchor from which to witness experience.
Select both images to learn more about interoceptive awareness before continuing.
When stress is overwhelming, associated felt states can be too great to bear. This can result in a person disconnecting or “dissociating” from certain aspects of felt experience (decreased interoception).
Sometimes, they also become hyper-aware of other aspects (increased interoception) such as pain signals or other bodily signals of discomfort that may be relevant physiologically for threat avoidance.
In addition, self-awareness of bodily states can also help the health professional to detect if and when their own nervous system is becoming activated, enabling them to engage practices to restore regulation. Felt-sense information is also essential for ‘clinical intuition’ which has been described as a “fully embodied mode of perceiving, relating and responding to the ongoing flows and changing dynamics of psychotherapy” (Marks-Tarlow, 2012).
Did You Know?
In recent decades, there has been a rise in psychotherapeutic modalities that specifically work with interoception, such as Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Hakomi, Mindfulness-based approaches, and others that are sometimes collectively referred to as “bottom up” processing modalities.
References
Marks-Tarlow, T. (2012). Clinical intuition in psychotherapy: The neurobiology of embodied response. W. W. Norton.