A good cry is restorative, creative, and cleansing. It can help us heal and regain a sense of hope. However, a good cry is paradoxical: it is about pain and relief, despair and hope, loss and gain.

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 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

This process of mutual coordination is called coregulation, the ability to be and move with another individual in relation to a shared set of interoceptive sensations and emotions and in relation to the linkages and boundaries of each person’s body schema.

Like suppression of feelings, suppression of urges has consequences, especially if the need for suppression of the urge is in conflict with one’s desires. In addition to the chronic muscle tension and possible pain, these consequences include feelings of discomfort and longing, distracted and impaired thought processes, obsessive thoughts about wha

Like somatization, which is a kind of ruminative focus on negative body feelings, rumination affects the immune, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine systems in a way that maintains illness: depressed thoughts and negative self-evaluations lead to depressed moods and vice versa in a self-sustaining cycle

Research shows that this link between the ACC and the motor areas creates the motivational aspect of emotion, what the body wants to do (intentions and urges), what the body does (emotion related behavior, including expressions and vocalizations). In addition to coordinating messages about urges and actions to the skeletal muscles, the ACC can also

We can assume that the horror was a spontaneous and emergent emotion as Sacks connected—in the subjective emotional present of embodied self-awareness—his change in body schema to his interoceptive self-awareness. He graciously admits to us that he could not stay in that emotional present: the horror was too disturbing.

I could, alternatively, be skiing down a mountain, noticing primarily my balance and direction (body schema) and my excitement (emotion) but completely unaware of my muscle pain, fatigue, and sense of feeling cold (interoception in the background). Or all three aspects of embodied self-awareness may be active, as during an especially rewarding musi