Understanding the Embodiment of Narrative in the Therapeutic Exchange
September 27, 2025

Lynn Preston MA, MS, LP

I find the word embodiment one of the most ubiquitous, ambiguous and pivotal terms of our time. To enter the realm of body and embodiment I have to put aside all the historic and cultural assumptions lodged in my psyche-soma to consider what body really means to me (besides feeling guilty about the croissant I ate this morning). Questions about the “physical” dimensions of the therapy process and what it means to “inhabit the body” are hanging in the air these days.  Candace Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine began to wake me up to “the more” of the body and the foolishness of the mind/body split in the late 90’s.   “Emotions are the nexus between matter and mind, going back and forth between the two and influencing both,” Pert wrote.

Later, Gene Gendlin’s conception of the body provided me with a wide-open door into this territory.

“Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people – in fact, the whole universe. The sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as felt from the inside.”

– Eugene Gendlin from Focusing

I’ve read this quote many times. Still, I have a palpable response of opening to its message.

The idea that we are not “isolated minds” or flesh-and-blood machines, but part of a gigantic system spanning time and space, felt physically from the inside, was a major shift for me. In Gendlin’s philosophy, the body is not a “thing” but an ongoing process of interaction. We are not sealed inside ourselves—not just a container for our minds or souls, a status symbol, or a tool to get things done. The body is a living process, a system that reaches far beyond the skin. We are interaction with our environment, others and the whole unfolding of life.

Gendlin called the subtle felt inkling of this interaction a “felt sense.” The felt sense is a vague but visceral awareness that can open new avenues of experience if we stay with it. This feeling sense is universal but difficult to articulate. For example, we all know what it’s like to wake up with the sensual quality of a dream still with us. Trying to hold on to it, we may poke at it with our minds to get it back. We know the release we feel when its story suddenly flashes before us. Another example that comes to mind is the nagging “feeling” one sometimes gets when leaving for a trip and realizing something has been forgotten. Even if it’s the worst case senario—your keys or passport—there is still a bodily release when it “clicks in.”

“It has to come, like tears or laughter or sweat, in a bodily way.”

– Eugene Gendlin from “The Wider Role of Bodily Sense in Thought and Language”

Felt meaning is alive in the moment. Gendlin sometimes asked a patient he felt was “reporting” (speaking about rather than speaking from), “Is the feeling of that here right now as we are talking about it?” He would point to his chest. Sometimes this brought immediacy and aliveness to the session. Other times it did nothing, in which case he would dismiss his question with a wave of his hand.

The body is not merely reactive. It is generative. We are meaning-making beings, constantly creating narrative, weaving the multidimensional worlds of experience into a tapestry of unfolding story. By symbolizing and explicating the many strands of implicit living, we find and make new pathways of thinking and feeling. We make the stories and the stories make us. When we pause and pay attention to a felt sense, we are not just noticing something in the body. We are entering a process that is body and situation together. The stories we tell are a handle or window into a vast implicit intricacy.

This is what makes narrative so powerful. When we form a story, we are giving words and shape (making explicit) to what was implicit in the body. Through story we enter the “more,” which can never be fully spoken. It is how we, as bodily creatures, carry our living forward. In telling our stories, we give voice to what is still forming inside us—the unfinished, the unspoken, the yet-to-be-understood.

Vignette:

One evening, my most despairing patient, Ben, sat slumped over at the end of a session. Convinced that he was never wanted and that no one would ever choose to have a relationship with him, he was lifeless and silent. I felt pressured, knowing another patient was waiting. What can I possibly do to enable Ben to go out into the night? Just then, there was a scratch at my door—my cat, Little Guy. Following my impulse, I opened the door. Little Guy bounded in, jumped eagerly onto Ben’s lap and began nuzzling and purring. Ben sat up straight, smiling broadly. “Oh, who are you?” he asked, his voice suddenly robust and delighted. His story—his deep conviction of being unwanted—shifted in that moment. A new embodied narrative took hold—an experience of being chosen and embraced. He asked if my cat did this with other clients. “No,” I answered honestly. Ben felt chosen. Little Guy has been an important part of our sessions ever since.

The stories we inhabit—and that inhabit us—are part of the embodied, intricate, interactive living system that we are. A bodily felt sense is not just “inside.” It is at the edge of physical, mental and emotional life. It is here, right now, and it also opens to what is beyond now—what is past and out of awareness, what is still forming. Paying close attention to the fuzzy edge of this strand of experience—of myself, of the patient, and of the relational field—is a vital part of my approach to psychotherapy.