Self-awareness can fail when the nervous system takes over

How to Feel Your Feelings with Simone Saunders

The episode shows why understanding emotional patterns is not enough when activation, numbness, or protective responses make familiar tools inaccessible.

3 key takeaways

1Embodiment connects emotional change to bodily sensations, environmental cues, and nervous-system states rather than insight alone.
2Functional freeze can look like productivity and competence while masking disconnection, avoidance, and unmet bodily needs.
3Curiosity, titration, and noticing what a feeling needs create manageable opportunities for new responses without forcing emotional access.

Don't miss

Saunders lays out the shift from noticing a sensation to asking what it needs, restoring agency without forcing the feeling away.

The brief

Forrest Hanson and trauma therapist Simone Saunders examine why self-awareness and coping tools can disappear during intense activation, when the body’s protective responses override deliberate access.

Saunders reframes embodiment as contact with internal and external signals, including tension, sensation, and environmental cues, while explaining how fight, flight, freeze, and fawn shape what feels possible.

The conversation names functional freeze as a hidden form of distress: someone may remain productive and capable while feeling internally disconnected from bodily needs and emotional experience.

Saunders offers a practical sequence for change: notice sensations and impulses, ask what they need, and experiment with responses while staying inside a manageable window of tolerance.

Her central caution is against instant trauma-release promises; lasting change comes through repeated, curious contact with the nervous system, including numbness, flooding, shame, and grief.

Books & mentions

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Where Do You Feel That in Your Body?

A book-length extension of the episode’s focus on recognizing and understanding emotional and traumatic experiences in the body.

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