March 17, 2025

Introduction Emotional literacy is often conceptualized as a cognitive achievement: the capacity to identify, label, and articulate emotional states. But long before emotion becomes word, it lives in the body. The body is not a container for emotion—it is its original language. Every feeling begins as a physiological event: a tightening, a flushing, a holding of breath, a pulling away, a leaning in. The body speaks in pulses and contractions, in temperature shifts, in muscular impulses, in the urge toward movement or stillness. It is not simply that the body expresses emotion—it is the site of emotion. To become emotionally literate, then, is not first to speak more fluently, but to feel more precisely. This requires a return to the body as the primary medium of emotional knowing. The Pre-Verbal Nature of Emotion Neuroscience confirms what trauma-informed clinicians have long observed: emotions do not emerge first in the neocortex—the realm of language and meaning—but in the limbic system and brainstem. These subcortical structures process threat, safety, and relational cues before conscious awareness. We feel long before we think. This explains why someone may “know” a situation is safe, yet still feel anxious. Or why a person can describe an emotion with perfect articulation, yet remain affectively numb. The body’s signals often precede—and outlast—cognitive interpretation. Eugene Gendlin’s concept of the felt sense is vital here: a bodily knowing that is murky, pre-linguistic, and yet profoundly trustworthy when attended to with care. Emotional literacy, through this lens, is not simply about naming feelings—it’s about cultivating the capacity to listen to the ambiguous, affective murmur beneath the surface of thought. Suppression, Expression, and the Body’s Archive When emotion is allowed—when it is met with attunement, mirrored accurately, and metabolized through expression or movement—it completes its biological arc. But when emotion is dismissed, shamed, or feared, it becomes lodged in the musculature, in posture, in breath. The suppressed emotion does not disappear; it migrates into the body. Shoulders lift chronically. Jaws clench. Breathing shallows. Pelvises constrict. Over time, these patterns harden into character structures: the vigilant stance of someone who learned to expect danger, the collapsed chest of someone who learned their needs were unwelcome. Wilhelm Reich called these “body armors,” and they are visible even when a person insists they are fine. Somatic literacy—the ability to read one’s own bodily cues—is essential to healing. This is not merely about noticing tension but understanding it as a form of encrypted memory. Somatic Therapies and the Restoration of Feeling Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy are therapeutic approaches grounded in the understanding that trauma and emotion are stored not only in memory but in the body’s physiological responses. These modalities help clients track internal sensations, allowing incomplete emotional processes to resolve through subtle shifts in movement, orientation, or breath. Consider a client who, during a session, instinctively turns their head to the right—something they hadn’t done in years. In the safety of the therapeutic relationship, this movement releases a held tension in the neck and chest. As tears come, the client realizes this was the direction they looked during a frightening event in childhood—but had since avoided without knowing why. That simple turn becomes a gateway to release, integration, and reclaimed agency. Somatic work is often slow because the body moves at the pace of safety. A tremor, a sigh, a spontaneous stretch—these are not small events. They are often the completion of survival responses frozen in time. Where talk therapy may offer insight without resolution, somatic work gives language to what has never been spoken: the ache beneath the numbness, the impulse that was never enacted, the fear still stored in the diaphragm. This is not regression. This is integration. Mindfulness and the Art of Tracking Mindfulness—when properly understood—is not relaxation. It is the disciplined, curious attention to the moment-to-moment fluctuations of internal experience. As a tool for emotional literacy, mindfulness is not about detachment, but specificity: Where is this tension located? Is it sharp or dull? Moving or still? What word, image, or memory arises alongside it? Mindfulness invites us to stay with emotion in its embodied form, resisting the urge to interpret or suppress. Over time, this cultivates interoceptive awareness—the ability to read the internal terrain of one’s own body, and in turn, the landscape of one’s emotional life. From Somatic Silence to Somatic Sovereignty Many individuals arrive in adulthood unable to name their feelings—not because they lack language, but because they’ve been dislocated from their bodies. This disconnection is not a personal failure. It is often the residue of trauma, cultural conditioning, or early environments where emotion was unsafe to feel, much less express. Relearning emotional literacy, then, is not just psychological. It is a physiological homecoming—a return to the body as both witness and refuge. To feel is to inhabit the body.To inhabit the body is to recover the full range of human experience: grief and pleasure, fear and desire, contraction and expansion. Somatic work does not bypass the mind—it anchors it. It restores coherence between what is known and what is felt, between what was endured and what is now possible. The body remembers everything.Emotional literacy begins when we learn how to listen. 📝 Optional Addition Reflection prompt:“What sensations arise in my body when I feel overwhelmed? Can I stay with them gently, without needing to change them?”