Why dysregulation makes it hard to feel anything

When we’re in dysregulated states, accessing the felt sense becomes very difficult.

When we’re in shutdown, we tend not to feel much. Everything’s kind of numb and blank and absent. And even though in Focusing we work with numb and blank — we can sense those things in our bodies — when a person is in such a dysregulated state and doesn’t really have access to herself, she tends to talk about those things rather than being able to sense them inside.

Same with fight or flight. A lot of times, people feel very flooded. And in freeze — they just feel stuck.

It’s hard to experience anything when we’re not in ourselves in that moment.

The way this interacts with the Experiencing Scale is this: all of that is a lot to feel, and we don’t want to feel it. And if we’re not in ourselves, we tend to be in the higher numbers of the Experiencing Scale — meaning we’re not going as deep. There’s just so much uncomfortableness there. So how can we go deep and really experience it if it’s so overloading?

It’s not perfect — but as a general guide: if a client is at a 1 or 2 on the Experiencing Scale, she tends to be more in shutdown. If she’s at a 3, she tends to be more in fight or flight. To get to a 5 or 6 on the Experiencing Scale — to be able to actually have a felt experience and move toward a felt shift — a person needs to be at least a little bit more regulated.

Which means that before we can help a client go deeper in Focusing, we sometimes need to help her nervous system find enough safety to even make that possible.

For practitioners: tracking the nervous system and tracking the Experiencing Scale are not two separate skills. They’re the same read, informing the same move.

For self-employed women: on the days your system is flooded or shut down, going deeper into yourself isn’t going to work — not yet. The starting point is regulation, not depth.

Ready to practice this in real time? Click here to schedule a one-on-one session and let’s take that next step together, at your own pace.

Warmly,
Rena

P.S. Don’t forget to connect with me on WhatsApp. I share visual reminders to anchor these ideas and link to new content weekly.

This week’s book recommendation: If this email resonated with you, I recommend Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method by Eugene T. Gendlin. Where the original Focusing book gives you the concept, this one gives you the clinical application — specifically, how to work with clients in those difficult moments when nothing seems to be happening, and how to stimulate and enable a client’s capacity for direct experiencing and felt shift. If you want to go deeper into the moment-to-moment process of what actually happens in a Focusing-oriented session, this is the book. Order a copy here — this is an affiliate link which doesn’t cost you anything extra and helps support my work.

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