Overthinking? You’re Not Broken: You’re Just Explaining Instead of Feeling

We live in a culture obsessed with insight, frameworks, and analysis. But healing isn’t just about understanding yourself... it’s about being able to feel what’s happening inside of you and respond from that place. This post explores why cognitive awareness is just one part of the picture, and how change actually happens in somatic work.

When You Understand… But Still Feel Stuck

I hear this all the time in consults. People have gone as far as they can with understanding why they are the way they are.

That's because you can know your patterns inside and out... but still not be able to shift them.

You can understand your history.
You can name your triggers, your attachment style, the boundaries you need to set.
You can have so much insight, and still find yourself acting from an old place.

This doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
It just means that knowing yourself isn’t automatically transformative.

When Thinking Becomes a Safety Strategy

One of the things I see all the time in my office is how people use analysis as a default:

• They explain instead of feel. (Makes sense, feelings and body sensations can be overwhelming).

• They analyze instead of sense. (Nobody likely taught you how to track sensations and energy).

• They stay in their heads because that’s where it feels manageable. (That nagging sense that if you could just figure it out... everything would click into place).

And this isn’t resistance. It’s protection, safety, and skill.

If you’ve lived through overwhelming or traumatic experiences, staying in your head can feel like a lifeline. It gives the illusion of control. And control feels safer than sensation... especially if feeling your emotions wasn’t safe in the past.

Especially if relating to your body has felt complicated.

And this isn’t just true for people with big “T” trauma.

If you’ve lived with chronic pain or illness…
If your body has been shamed, pathologized, or marginalized…
If your emotions were too loud, too much, too inconvenient for the people around you…

Then it makes perfect sense that you’d learn to stay in your head.

Maybe thinking became safer than feeling.
Managing yourself became safer than sensing your inner world.
Performance became safer than being yourself.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s how your system learned to survive.

The work we do in session together helps you to re-learn the skill of interoception (sensing inside of your body) at a pace that makes sense for you.

But what's the big deal about moving away from analysis?

Explicit vs Implicit Knowing

There’s a difference between explicit and implicit knowing.

Explicit knowing is conscious... it's the part of you that says:

“I know I learned this from my mom.”
or
"I remember nobody came to my 5th birthday party and I was sad."

Implicit knowing is different. It’s what lives in the body. It’s the water you’re swimming in. The beliefs you didn’t choose, but quietly shaped your existence from birth.

Implicit knowing is the identity that lives in your tissues. It's sensory - it lives in subtle sensory cues, and it shows up in sensation in your body. And it doesn’t change just because your brain understands it.

Implicit memory is that familiar knot in your chest, or the sinking feeling in your gut. Or how a certain smell can remind you of your grandma.

This is why people can know they’re safe... but still feel afraid.
Know they’re loved... but still feel alone.
Know what they want... but still freeze when it’s time to move toward it.

And no matter how much we try to Google our way to clarity...
We can’t think that knot in our chest into dissolving.

We have to feel through it and support your body to unravel the pattern and learn something new.

So change happens when something new becomes possible in the body.

The Paradox

Insight is useful. It’s just not the whole thing. Insight helps make sense of your experience. And there’s nothing like that puzzle piece clicking into place — when your brain finally exhales, like ‘ohhhh, that’s what it was."

But there’s a time for learning, thinking, naming, and decoding.

And there’s a time to stop figuring it out... and start feeling it.

Here's what that might look like in session.

We usually spend some time talking about what's going on in your life, what you're thinking, and what comes up for you as you reflect.

But we also slow down enough to notice what is happening in the present moment, and the subtle information your body is sharing: the tension in your chest, the way your hands are gripping, a fragment of a memory.

We spend time with what's just underneath your conscious awareness.

In the video at the top of this post, we used the example of anger.

In this example, moving from thinking to feeling is the difference between talking about why you're angry and actually moving towards feeling the anger in your body.

That might look like:

• Noticing what anger feels like in your body and validating it

• Setting a boundary and noticing your breath deepen

• Shaking, trembling, crying... and not stopping yourself

• Feeling the power underneath the anger (or the fear, sadness, grief, whatever's there).

In somatic work, we help your body to catch up and to share the more subtle implicit information below the words.

And when something new becomes possible in the body, in the subconscious, that's when things start to shift. This implicit work is what I do with clients in session in person and online. It's interesting, fun and creative.

And it feels sooo good to finally give your brain a break from the overthinking.

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For those exploring: trauma healing, somatic therapy, implicit memory, survival responses, stuckness, head-heart disconnection, emotional embodiment, therapeutic change

Watch the video: You're Probably Explaining Your Feelings Instead of Feeling Them

This post is for entertainment purposes only and is not intended as therapeutic advice or treatment. Everyone’s experience is different. Please work with a qualified practitioner for individualized care.