40. How to Feel a Feeling: The 5 Steps of SIBAM for Nervous System Regulation
Most of us were never actually taught how to feel a feeling. We were taught how to override it, rationalize it, minimize it, or move past it as quickly as possible. We learned to stay in our heads and disconnect from what was happening in the body. But when we do that, we interrupt something important. As I share in this week’s podcast episode, what we suppress, the body will later express. What we resist will persist.
When an emotion or survival response starts to move through the nervous system, there is a real biological process happening. Hormones like adrenaline and cortisol mobilize the body. Muscles tense. Heat rises. The jaw tightens. The heart flutters. But when we have been conditioned to judge our feelings or talk ourselves out of them, we interrupt the process before it can complete. That is part of how the nervous system gets stuck in a stress response cycle.
This is why you can find yourself feeling reactive, overwhelmed, shut down, or angry in moments that do not fully match what is happening in the present. It is not because something is wrong with you. It is often because your system never got to finish what it started. And while feelings can often be metabolized through the body in less than 90 seconds, for many people that 90 seconds can feel incredibly vulnerable or unfamiliar.
In this week’s episode, I walk through the five channels of SIBAM, a somatic framework for helping you feel a feeling in a more tolerable and gentle way. SIBAM stands for sensation, image, behavior, affect, and meaning. Sometimes the doorway is noticing heat in your chest or tension in your jaw. Sometimes it is an image, an impulse, or simply naming the emotion itself. The goal is not to force a feeling. It is to begin learning the language of your own body so your system can move through what it has been holding.
If this is something you have struggled with, I think this episode will give you a much gentler and more practical way in.
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