Many of us have felt something in the body before we could work out what was happening to us: a tightening in the stomach before a difficult meeting, a lump in the throat before we realise that something has upset us, a heaviness in the shoulders that the day’s tiredness does not explain. The mind puts the words together later: “I’m anxious”, “I’m sad”, “I’m worn out”.
For many years psychotherapy was considered above all a matter of speech: we talk, we explain, we understand. Gestalt theory, however, gave the body a central role from its earliest steps, and contemporary neuroscience is now confirming many of those early intuitions.
Why do I feel something in my body before I understand what is troubling me?
This question is not strange; on the contrary, it is a very accurate observation about how we work. Emotion does not wait for thought in order to exist — it precedes mental processing, is born in the body, and only then, little by little, is clothed in words. This does not mean something is wrong when we feel before we understand; it means the body is doing exactly its job.
What neuroscience shows: the body is not simply the “vehicle” of the mind
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described how thought and consciousness do not operate independently of the body but are born through it: the boundary of the body, the skin, the senses, the internal organs are, in neurobiological terms, a “place” of the mind (Damasio, 1994). We do not think first and feel afterwards; thought springs out of bodily experience rather than sitting above it.
A second discovery came from Giacomo Rizzolatti’s group in Parma, with the so-called “mirror neurons”: brain cells that are activated not only when we perform a movement, but also when we watch someone else perform it (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008). Understanding another person, feeling with them, trusting or fearing them is not only a mental process; it has a shared, bodily field between two people.
This sequence — first the bodily sensation, then the thought — is not accidental; it is essentially how we develop from birth. An infant does not yet have words to say what they feel, but they respond with their whole body: they cry, they stretch, they settle when they are held. The psychiatrist Daniel Stern described how our first sense of self, what he called the “emergent self”, is organised around bodily and sensory experiences, long before language appears or the capacity to think reflectively about ourselves (Stern, 1985). The ability to name, explain and narrate comes later, built upon this early, bodily knowledge. It is not that we ever outgrow this early way of functioning; we simply learn to clothe it in words. In adult life, when we feel something in the body before we understand it, we are doing nothing different from what the infant we once were was doing.
The contact boundary: an idea Gestalt formulated half a century earlier
Some fifty years before these discoveries, Fritz Perls and the co-founders of Gestalt therapy had already spoken of something similar: the “contact boundary” as the point where the organism meets the environment, where perception and movement give rise to thought, where the sense of self begins to take shape (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951). It is not the mind observing the body from a distance; it is at this very boundary — in the skin, the breath, the gaze — that experience is born.
The neurologist Kurt Goldstein, in whose laboratory Perls worked and met his wife Laura, was arguing as early as the 1930s for a holistic conception of the organism: the body is not a sum of separate functions but a unified, living entity that continually reorganises itself in relation to its environment (Goldstein, 1939/1995). This holistic view passed into Gestalt theory and explains why, in a session, we are interested not only in what someone says, but in how they breathe, how they sit, where they look, how they exist in their body.
This does not mean we ignore thought or speech; it means we treat them as a continuation of bodily experience rather than as something independent of it. When someone talks about something difficult and at the same time clenches their hands, that movement is not a detail; it is part of the meaning itself, information the body offers before words can formulate it.
Imagine someone who, shortly before an important meeting at work, suddenly feels a tightening in the stomach and difficulty breathing, without being able to explain why; “everything is fine”, they think, “there is no reason to be anxious”. But their body has already detected something the mind has not yet named: perhaps the fear of criticism, perhaps an old experience of rejection stirring. The tightening is not the problem; it is the message.
In a relationship, we may notice something similar: we see a frozen expression on our partner’s face and immediately feel a disquiet, before they have said anything. We did not have time to think it — we felt it in our body, like an echo of their tension. This capacity to “feel with” another person, before they even speak, is the foundation of empathy, and it is precisely what allows a therapeutic relationship to work.
Sometimes the therapist may feel what a client cannot yet connect with, often where there is a history of trauma or abandonment. After such an experience, the body “holds” material that the person themselves cannot yet metabolise, as though they have cut themselves off from it in order to be protected. In body psychotherapy this phenomenon has a name: somatic countertransference — the moment when the therapist feels in her own body something that corresponds to what the client cannot yet feel (Ogden, Minton & Pain, 2006). This is not guesswork; it is a form of knowing that passes from body to body before it can be clothed in words.
What helps us listen to the body
Relearning how to listen to the body is not automatic, especially when we have grown used to ignoring it. A few things one might try:
- Pause for a moment before answering the thought. Before saying “I have no reason to be anxious”, ask what your body is feeling at that moment.
- Name the bodily sensation, not only the emotion. “I feel a tightness in my chest” opens a different path of understanding and self-observation than “I’m anxious”.
- Notice the breath. A breath that catches often comes before the thought that will explain why.
- Do not rush to explain. The body does not always need an immediate explanation; first it needs to be heard.
In a therapeutic relationship, the therapist also attends to her own bodily response alongside her clients, and in this way gradually helps them relearn a language they may once have learned to ignore or to fear.
References
This article was inspired by the editorial by Spagnuolo Lobb, M. & Cavaleri, P. A. (2011), “Psicoterapia della Gestalt e neuroscienze: il perché di un dialogo”, Quaderni di Gestalt, XXIV(2), which summarises the dialogue between Gestalt theory and neuroscience. The scientific references below are the original works of the researchers cited in that editorial.
- Spagnuolo Lobb, M., & Cavaleri, P. A. (2011). Psicoterapia della Gestalt e neuroscienze: il perché di un dialogo. Quaderni di Gestalt, XXIV(2), 5–9.
- Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.
- Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
- Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton.
- Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2008). Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Goldstein, K. (1939/1995). The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. New York: Zone Books.
- Perls, F., Hefferline, R., Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.
- Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
