The Mind-Body Connection: Developing a Felt Sense of Your Internal Experiences

In a prior article, Developing Your Inner Sense of Being Calm, Grounded and Centered, I began a discussion about developing the ability to be calmer and more grounded and centered in your body. I also provided techniques for how to do that.  But what if you don't have a sense of what's going on in your body and you're having a hard time connecting? That's the topic for this article (see my article: The Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

Mind-Body Connection: Developing a Felt Sense of Your Internal Experience

Developing a Felt Sense of Your Body
Since the mind and the body are connected, it makes sense that what goes on in the body affects the mind and what goes on in the mind affects the body.

Most people are so accustomed to focusing on their thoughts that they don't have experience paying attention to their bodies.  When asked to sense into their bodies, they have no idea how to do this, so this is something I teach many clients in my psychotherapy private practice in New York City and I'll address in this article.

What is a Felt Sense?
A felt sense is an internal bodily awareness that develops as you become more attuned to what's going on in your body.

The concept of a felt sense was developed by the American philosopher, Eugene Gendlin, and it refers to the connection between the mind and the body.  According to Gendlin, who developed Focusing therapy, the felt sense is a combination of emotion, awareness, intuitiveness, and embodiment.

When people begin to practice getting a felt sense, the experience is often unclear to them. Initially, people often describe it as a vague sense of their inner experience.

On the most basic level, they might experience it as various sensations in their body, aches, tension, soreness, tightness and so on.

As they practice and become more attuned to their body, they might begin to become aware of other physical sensations as well as emotions that are linked to those sensations.

How to Begin to Develop a Felt Sense of Your Body
When I work with clients, I often teach them how to develop a felt sense of their body so they can be aware of their emotions and where they feel these emotions in their body.  This is a valuable skill to have in therapy because it allows you to sense what you're feeling and the progress you're making in therapy.

Whether you realize it or not, you've had the experience of having a felt sense of your body many times.  You just might not be accustomed to thinking about your experience in that way.

For instance, when you wake up in the morning and you have a vague sense that you have a sore throat, in order to figure out if your throat is dry or if you really have a sore throat, you might sense into your throat when you wake up, then again after you have a drink of water and later on when you have your coffee or tea.

This sensing in is an initial experience of having a felt sense, and it could include any part of your body.

You can practice doing this when you wake up in the morning by sensing into different parts of your body to develop an increased awareness of your body.

Becoming More Attuned to the Mind-Body Connection Through a Felt Sense
As you become more aware of what's going on in your body, you can begin to connect bodily awareness with your emotions.

I often teach my psychotherapy clients, who are disconnected from what's going on for them physically and emotionally, to develop this skill.

Since emotions are held in the body, you can begin to become more attuned by paying attention to muscle tension in your body.

For instance, you might become aware that whenever you feel angry, you feel tension in your stomach.  Or when you're anxious, you feel tension in your shoulders or lower back, and so on.

How Trauma Affects the Mind-Body Connection
By definition, trauma is a psychological response to an experience that's overwhelming for the individual. What matters is the individual's subjective experience of the event(s).  What might be overwhelming for one person might not be overwhelming for another.

When someone experiences trauma, s/he can lose an ability to experience the felt sense and the mind-body connection.  This is called "dissociation"  or "emotional numbing" which is a self-protecting mechanism to keep the traumatized person from being completely overwhelmed.

There are various degrees of dissociation on a spectrum from mild to severe.  Usually, the greater the impact of the trauma on the individual, the more dissociated s/he becomes.

Although this emotional and physical numbing is self protective, it also creates problems for the individual because s/he has a decreased awareness of emotions and bodily sensations (see my article: What is Emotional Numbing?).

Emotional numbing can decrease awareness of emotional pain but, unfortunately, it also decreases awareness of positive emotions too like joy and happiness.  It can create a feeling of emotional flatness and rob the individual of a rich emotional life.

Emotional numbing can make it difficult for the individual to know what s/he feels at any given time.  Aside from making it difficult for the individual, emotional numbing can create problems in a relationship (see my article: How Trauma Affects Relationships).

Getting Help in Therapy
Many people have a difficult time sensing the mind-body connection, especially if they have suppressed their emotional and bodily awareness because of traumatic experiences.

Experiential therapists, who use mind-body oriented therapy, like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing and AEDP, work with clients to overcome the clients' blocked sense of emotions and bodily sensations so they can be aware of their felt sense and live a richer, more fulfilling life (see my articles:  Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy and Experiential Therapy Helps to Create Emotional Breakthroughs).

If you're struggling with unresolved problems that create obstacles for you emotionally and physically, you could benefit from working with an experiential therapist.

Many therapists, including me, are providing online therapy (also known as teletherapy or telehealth) while they're out of the office due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Overcoming your problems in therapy will allow to live your life to the fullest.

About Me
I am an experiential therapist who is licensed to provide psychotherapy services, which include psychodynamic psychotherapy, EMDR trauma therapy, AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, sex therapy, clinical hypnosis and EFT for couples.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

I have been focusing on managing emotions and emotional intelligence in my last three articles (see my articles: How to Develop Emotional Intelligence, How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them and Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions).  Those previous articles include self help techniques.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The current article focuses on how experiential therapy can help if self help techniques don't work for you (see my article: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

What is Experiential Therapy?

Experiential therapy is a broad range of mind-body oriented therapies, which include:

• Somatic Experiencing (SE): Mind-Body Oriented Therapy: Somatic Experiencing

• EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Can Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs

• Parts Work (also known as Internal Family Systems, Ego States Therapy): How Parts Work Can Empower You

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy): What is AEDP?

• Hypnotherapy (also known as clinical hypnosis, hypnosis): What is Clinical Hypnosis?

Each of these modalities work in a different way, but what they all have in common is that they use the mind-body connection.

Rather than just talking about your problems in an intellectual way (as is usually the case in regular talk therapy), experiential therapy helps you to make the connection between your mind with your body to get to emotions that are often unconscious (out of your awareness).  

In that way, experiential therapy tends to be more effective than regular talk therapy (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

Experiential therapy is also used to help clients to overcome emotional trauma, including shock trauma and developmental trauma.

How Does Experiential Therapy Help to Manage Emotions

Since all experiential therapy works with the mind-body connection, clients learn to identify and manage their emotions.

For instance, many people come to therapy with emotional blocks.  These blocks are often unconscious.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

Emotional blocks often occur due to past negative experiences and unresolved emotions, including emotional trauma.

Once they are uncovered, these blocks usually involve negative feelings about the self.  Common examples are "I'm not good enough" or "I'm not lovable" or other similar feelings.

But since the blocks are often unconscious at the start of experiential therapy, clients are unaware of them at the start of them at first.  When they come to therapy, these clients might only have a vague sense that something is wrong, but they don't know what it is.

An experiential therapist attunes to clients and listens for the underlying unconscious roots to the problem.  She will also help clients to develop a felt sense of the problem by asking clients to feel the sensations related to the problem in their body (see my article: What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?).

Many clients can sense into their bodies to identify emotions, but many others can't.  When clients can't sense emotions in their body, an experiential therapist knows that this is part of the block and works in an empathetic way to help clients to develop this skill.

Clients who are unable to identify emotions often sense a difficult or uncomfortable sensation.  From there, the experiential therapist starts where the clients are at that point and helps clients to differentiate sensations into specific emotions like anger, sadness, frustration, contempt, shame, and so on.

Being able to detect emotions on an experiential level is different from having intellectual insight into these emotions.  It means actually feeling it as opposed to just knowing it in a logical way. 

This is an important distinction between regular talk therapy and experiential therapy because change occurs with the combination of intellectual insight and emotional awareness.

Clinical Vignette: Developing Skills to Manage Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The following clinical vignette which, as always, is a composite of many cases to protect confidentiality is an example of how experiential therapy can help a client learn to identify and manage emotions as well as work through unresolved trauma:

Ed

After Ed's wife gave him an ultimatum to either get help in therapy or she would leave him and take their children with her, Ed began therapy with some ambivalence (see my article: Starting Therapy: It's Not Unusual to Feel Anxious or Ambivalent).

Ed told his therapist that he often yelled at their young children when he got upset and then regretted it later because it frightened them.  He said he tried various self help techniques, like trying to pause by taking a few breaths, but his emotions often overrode any attempts he made to keep from losing his temper.

Initially, Ed was unable to identify the emotions involved when he got upset. He just knew that he felt overwhelmed, but he couldn't identify the emotions involved.

His experiential therapist provided Ed with psychoeducation about experiential therapy and the mind-body connection.

Over time, she helped Ed to go back into a recent memory where he became upset with his children. She helped him to slow down so he could feel in his body what he was experiencing at the time.  

At first, Ed had difficulty detecting physical sensations or emotions in his body, so his therapist helped him to develop a felt sense of his experiences by using a technique known in hypnotherapy as the Affect Bridge (also known in EMDR therapy as the Float Back technique).

One of the emotional blocks they encountered occurred when Ed had a memory of himself at five years old when his father told him, "Big boys don't cry."  There were other times when his father scolded him when Ed got angry or when he made a mistake.  

As she listened to Ed's history with his father, his therapist realized that these experiences resulted in Ed numbing his emotions from an early age which was why he was having problems identifying his emotions.

Using Parts Work, his therapist helped Ed to develop compassion for his younger self.  He could look at his own five year old son and realize just how young he was when his father shamed him (see my article: Developing Curiosity and Self Compassion in Therapy).

Developing self compassion was an important part of Ed's therapy and, over time, feeling compassionate towards his younger self enabled Ed to get to the underlying emotions that had been numbed for many years.

Gradually, Ed was able to detect sadness when his throat felt constricted, anger when his hands were clenched and fear when his stomach was in knots (these are examples of how one particular person experiences these emotions and not universally true for every person).

As he continued to work in therapy on identifying and managing his emotions, Ed realized that when he got upset with his children, he was not only experiencing anger, he was also experiencing fear.  Fear was the underlying emotion at the root of his upset.

By then, Ed was curious enough to question why he felt fear when he was upset with his children. By sensing into his experience using the mind-body connection, Ed realized that fear was related to his childhood experiences with his father.  

He realized that he felt the same fear and sense of helplessness in the present that he experienced when he was a child (see my article: How Traumatic Childhood Fears of Being Helpless Can Get Triggered in Adults).

He realized that, although his father never said it directly, his father communicated to Ed that whenever Ed was sad or angry or made a mistake, Ed was allowing himself to be vulnerable to being ridiculed or worse.  

In other words, what was communicated to Ed was that so-called "negative emotions" or making a mistake was dangerous.  

This was a pivotal moment in Ed's therapy.  He realized that when his children made mistakes, which could mean making a mistake in their homework or getting an answer wrong, this sense of fear and vulnerability to danger were triggers that rose up in him without his awareness (see my article: Becoming Aware of Emotional Triggers).

Underneath his anger and fear, he sensed his intention to protect them, but instead of coming across as protective, he came across as harsh and critical, which was scaring them.

Once Ed learned to detect these emotions, he was able to stop himself from yelling at his children.  Having those physical cues he learned in experiential therapy allowed him to calm himself first so he could respond to his children more empathetically.

After he learned to manage his emotions, Ed worked on his unresolved childhood trauma with EMDR therapy so he was no longer triggered in this way.  

The work was neither quick nor easy, but once Ed worked through these issues, he no longer felt triggered.

Conclusion

Experiential therapy can help you to develop skills to manage your emotions.

Regular talk therapy can help you to develop intellectual insight into your problems, but problems often don't change with insight alone.  Change occurs on an emotional level.

This is an important distinction between talk therapy and and experiential therapy: With experiential therapy you can develop both insight as well as an emotional shift which enables you to make changes.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples, and I have helped many clients to manage their emotions and work through unresolved trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?

There is a concept known as the "felt sense" that is central to all modalities of experiential therapy, including EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Somatic Experiencing, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) clinical hypnosis (also known as hypnotherapy) and EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples).  

What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?

What is the Felt Sense?

Eugene Gendlin developed the concept of the felt sense in the 1960s and he included it as a central part of his experiential therapy known as Focusing.  Since the 1960s, the felt sense has become an essential part of all cutting edge experiential therapies.  

Experiential therapists help clients to develop a felt sense by teaching them to tune into their embodied experiences of emotions and memories.  

By tuning into these embodied experiences, clients increase their awareness of the connection between their physical and emotional experiences, which is the integration of the mind-body connection (see my article: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

How Do You Detect the Felt Sense?

Developing an awareness of the felt sense takes practice.  It starts with turning your attention inward to notice what you're aware of in your body.  

For instance, when you close your eyes and focus on your body, you might notice you feel a tightness in your throat, and your therapist would ask you to stay with that sensation in your throat if it felt tolerable to you.  As you continue tuning into your throat, you might sense not only that the muscles in your throat feel tight but you also feel an emotion connected to that physical sensation--sadness.  

As you continue focusing on that bodily sensation and emotion in your throat, you might also become aware that this is a very familiar experience to you--you have felt it many times before when you tried not to cry.  

Then, as you continue focusing, a memory might come of your father telling you, "Don't cry. Big boys don't cry" and how you choked back your emotion in shame when you heard your father say this (see my article: Overcoming Shame in Experiential Therapy).

As you continuing focusing on your physical and emotional experiences in your throat and you tell your therapist what you're experiencing, you might feel a loosening of the muscles in your throat as you release the emotions that have been pent up for a long time.

This example is just one of many that clients in experiential therapy have experienced.  Other examples could include noticing a heaviness in your chest that's related to pent up sadness or a tightness in your jaw that's related to unreleased anger and so on.

A skilled experiential therapist can help you to modulate your experiences in session so that they remain manageable for you and you're not overwhelmed (see my article: Expanding Your Window of Tolerance).

How is Working With the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy Different From Talk Therapy?

Talk therapy usually focuses on helping clients to develop intellectual insight into their problems.  While this is important, it often doesn't change clients' problems (see my article: Why is Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy?).

As shown in the example above, the felt sense in experiential therapy isn't just about intellectual insight.  It's an embodied experience that integrates both the mind and the body, and as such, it brings greater awareness on both levels and offers a window into the unconscious mind.

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, experiential therapy includes many different mind-body oriented psychotherapy modalities.

Clients who work with experiential therapists usually discover that using the mind-body connection to work on their problems is a more integrative approach that brings about transformative experiences in less time than regular talk therapy.

If you have been struggling on your own, you're not alone.  An experiential psychotherapist can help you to overcome the obstacles that are getting in the way of making positive changes in your life.  

Rather than continuing to struggle on your own, seek help from an experiential therapist so you can live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist (see my article:  The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Therapy).

I work with individual adults and couples.

One of my specialties is helping clients to overcome traumatic experiences (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about it me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 or email me.

 

Developing a Felt Sense of Connection From a Distance

In my two prior articles, The Mind-Body Connection: Developing a Felt Sense of Your Internal Experiences and Developing Your Inner Sense of Being Calm, Grounded and Centered, I discussed the felt sense of connecting to internal experiences of emotions and physical sensations. Aside from experiencing a felt sense of internal experiences, during this pandemic most of us are grappling with how to develop a felt sense of connection with others even though we're not physically present with them.

Developing a Felt Sense of Connection From a Distance

Connecting With a Felt Sense From a Distance
When I was in Somatic Experiencing training about 10 years ago, I remember our instructor starting our morning sessions by having us close our eyes and breathe so we could settle in (see my article: Somatic Psychotherapy).

By slowing down and getting quiet, we transitioned from wherever we had been prior to coming into the training room to where we were in the here and now in the training room (see my article: Being in the Present Moment).

I was always so grateful for that transitional time because it allowed me to let go of the stress of getting around in New York City, especially on the subway, to being fully present in the moment in the training.

After the Somatic Experiencing training group settled, our instructor asked us to feel our connections with other healers in the area.  By healers, she was referring to healers of all kinds and all traditions, both traditional and nontraditional--whether they were doctors, nurses, other psychotherapists, physical therapists, bodyworkers and other nontraditional healers.

Part of the meditation was to feel the connection with these healers in our immediate area and slowly extend our sense of connection to all of New York City, then the tri-state area, the East Coast and gradually expanding to encompass the whole country, other countries and the universe.

This meditation of connecting with healers from everywhere was so comforting and it was wonderful to know that, at any given time, other people in the healthcare and healing world might also be connecting and resonating in this way.

During the first week that New York City residents were told to stay home and I began Zoom teletherapy sessions, I thought of this meditation and used it with my clients.  I was so happy that, just as I found it comforting to connect with other healers in this way, my clients also felt comforted.

Discovering New Ways to Develop a Felt Sense of Connection From a Distance
During this pandemic, there's a difference between knowing that we're all going through this experience together and actually feeling the resonance of these connections.

Over time, as we continue to be challenged by the COVID-19 crisis and we are physically distant from one another, we'll find new ways to make that heart-to-heart connection with people we care about because we need to feel those connections.

Being able to feel these social connections are vital to our sense of emotional and physical well-being, and our imagination and creativity will enable us to find new ways to connect with each other.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you're feel overwhelmed, you're not alone.  Help is available to you.

Many psychotherapists have transitioned to online therapy, which is also called teletherapy or telemental health), during this time (see my article: The Advantages of Online Therapy When You Can't Meet With Your Therapist in Person).

Developing a Felt Sense of Connection From a Distance

Making the phone call or sending the email to get help from a licensed therapist is the first step in your healing process.  If you need help, take the first step in your healing process.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

I am currently providing online therapy while I'm out of my office.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Psychotherapy is More Than Just Venting: Understanding the Importance of Balancing Content and Process in Therapy

If you've never been in therapy before, you might not know what to expect, which is why I've written several articles to educate people about starting therapy (see my articles: Starting Therapy, Psychotherapy and Beginner's Mind, The Benefits of Psychotherapy and How Talking to a Psychotherapist is Different Than Talking to a Friend).  One important concept in psychotherapy is the importance of balancing content and process.

Psychotherapy: Understanding the Importance of Balancing Content and Process in Your Therapy Sessions

Psychotherapy is More Than Just Venting
Many people who have never been in therapy before think that their therapy sessions will be a place for them to vent about their problems and nothing more.

They think that they can use their therapy sessions to just release whatever is on their mind, so they can empty themselves of what's bothering them.

While venting is an important part of therapy, it's only one part.  If therapy were solely about venting, it would be of limited value since you can vent with a friend, family member or a spouse.  Why pay a psychotherapist if you're only going to vent?

Understanding the Importance of Balancing Content and Process in Therapy
Psychoeducation is an important part of therapy, especially for people who haven't been in therapy before.

Understanding the difference between content and process in therapy is important, and it's essential to balance both in order to have a successful therapy.

Content is just what you would think it is--you talk about what's on your mind: What happened during the week and other things that are on your mind.

Many people who begin therapy only focus on content.

Often, people provide so much content in therapy sessions that there's little time for processing, which is another very important part of therapy.

Processing in therapy is stepping back from the content, experiencing your feelings about what you're talking about, and telling your therapist about your feelings.  For example:

• What is it like on an emotional level for you to talk about these issues with your therapist?
• How is the content that you shared with your therapist meaningful to you?  
• How does it relate to your past, present or wished for future?  
• How does it relate to other things that you and your therapist are working on?  

and so on.

Let's take a look at a fictionalized scenario that illustrates the importance of balancing process and content in psychotherapy sessions:

Ida
Ida started therapy after her breakup with Sam.

She had never been in therapy before, and she started therapy because she was afraid that she would alienate her friends if she kept talking on and on about the breakup.

After the consultation with her therapist, Ida had her first therapy session.  During that session, Ida started venting non-stop about what happened in the relationship.

Since it was Ida's first therapy session, her therapist realized that Ida needed to vent and allowed her to talk.

During the next session, Ida was talking non-stop again about the relationship, but she wasn't talking about her feelings.

When Ida stopped to take a breath, her therapist gently and tactfully pointed out to Ida that she was providing a lot of information about the relationship and the breakup, but she wasn't talking about how she was feeling.

Her therapist explained to Ida why it's important to not only relay information in therapy but also to talk about her feelings--in other words, to balance content and process.

Her therapist asked Ida to slow down rather than try to get in as much information as possible in their hour together.  She told her that by slowing down, Ida would be able to sense into her feelings and process them.

Ida wasn't sure she understood, but she knew how to slow down.  So, rather than racing ahead to her next thought, she focused on what she had just said, which was that she felt betrayed by Sam, her ex.

At first, Ida didn't feel any particular emotions.  Then, her therapist asked Ida to focus on her body and sense if she was holding onto any emotions (see my article: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

Ida felt a tightness in her throat and, as she focused on that tightness, she began to cry.

After she cried for a few minutes, Ida felt an emotional release and she realized that she had been holding onto this sadness in her throat.

From that session on, Ida was much more mindful of the importance of both process and content.  Rather than speaking quickly to vent, she slowed down and allowed herself to feel her emotions.

Ida realized that she had been speaking quickly as a way to not feel her emotions.  She was racing from one thought to the next because, without realizing it, she thought it was just a matter of purging herself of these thoughts so she could let them go.

But as she took the time to process her thoughts and emotions, she began to feel more emotionally integrated.

Psychotherapy: Understanding the Importance of Balancing Content and Process in Your Therapy Sessions

Conclusion
A common misconception about psychotherapy is that therapy is just about venting, but this is only a part of what therapy is about (see my articles about other common myths about therapy: Common Myths About Psychotherapy: Therapy Takes a Long Time and Common Myths About Psychotherapy: Going to Therapy Means You're Weak).

Many clients who are new to therapy think that they will use their psychotherapy sessions to just talk and purge themselves of their thoughts.

Psychoeducation is an important part of psychotherapy, especially for people who are new to therapy.

When therapists provide clients with psychoeducation about the importance of balancing content and process in their therapy sessions, clients usually realize how essential this combination is to their healing process.

Rather than just venting about what happened, they're also taking the time to feel how they are affected and make connections to the past, present and their wishes for the future.

The emotional integration of balancing content and process is an important part of what is healing in therapy.

Getting Help in Therapy
A skilled psychotherapist knows how to provide psychoeducation to assist clients to use both content and process in therapy (see my article: How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

Like any other skill, it can take clients time to develop these skills.

As a psychotherapy client, with the help of your psychotherapist, you learn as you become more experienced in therapy.

Although it might seem contradictory, going slower to process thoughts and feelings moves the therapeutic work along faster than just venting.

Venting without any processing is a superficial way of talking about  "the story" of what happened and not about your related emotional experience.

If you're feeling stuck or you're having difficulty overcoming your problems, you could benefit from attending therapy with a skilled psychotherapist.

You're not alone.  Help is available to you.

After you've worked through your problems in therapy, you'll have an opportunity to live a more fulfilling life.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during regular business hours or email me.