Next post in the series (coming): #2, Mapping Fearful Fear
This is the audio, transcript, and commentary for Part 1 of a single, self-contained demo session with Susan, a participant in a small training I conducted in early 2017.
I’ve provided two versions of the transcript. The first is generated by Substack, synced with the audio, and is verbatim. Click the transcript button above and use it to navigate through the session.
A lightly edited, more readable version of the transcript is below. This one has my comments interspersed throughout in italics to give you more information about what’s happening in the session, using what shows up to illustrate the method and what it reveals about the territory of feeling.
(NOTE: Susan — not her real name — gave me her full permission to share her session with the public. I am immensely grateful for her offer.)
We’re working remotely by video conferencing. My intention is to give her a complete experience of mapping and moving several feeling states and to demonstrate the basics of the fieldwork process.
As you follow this, you might imagine yourself in either my role, Susan’s role, or both. You’ll see an example of how to facilitate fieldwork sessions as well as what it is like to undergo the fieldwork process.
A note about the audio: The sound quality is not that great, and there are many pauses as I take notes and do the drawings in going through the process. I’ve decided to leave the recording mostly as-is rather than remove the silences to give you a real idea of the pacing of the actual session.
The first three of these audio-plus-transcript posts will cover our experience of mapping four states. We’ll wait until after I present the full fieldwork moving instructions in a few months before proceeding to the second half of the session. The full map-and-move, though, will look like this when all states are drawn:
I generally take my notes in MindManager, which offers a good visual interface for organizing the states. Here’s what the final mindmap looked like:
And here is a PDF file with my notes, exported from MindManager:
Enough with the preliminaries — let’s get started!
Identifying No!
Susan: I think something that's really up for me right now in general is receiving, allowing myself to receive. And specifically to receive love.
Joe: That sounds like a great place to work. So what do you experience in situations where you're not allowing yourself to receive love?
Susan: It's a noticing, like somewhere inside my physical body there's a barrier or boundary, like the love can’t come in. I can feel it around the outside of me. And I can even feel it on my skin, on the outside of my body, but as it approaches, and I would say maybe as it approaches my heart, there just seems to be a boundary. So that my heart… when I'm loving, when I'm sending love out, or opening my heart to someone else like in terms of connecting with them, I can feel my heart open. But when I think, “Oh, there's just this wave of love coming my way, and it would be so delicious to take it in,” it seems to stop. Like to not go fully in.
Joe: Right.
Susan: And it's almost like there's a fear, if I really took it all the way in, I might just explode with love or something. You know? It would be more than my system can handle.
J: OK.
S: I mean, I'm just seeing that right now, that behind that barrier is I think a fear that it would just be too much.
J: So do you have any experience of what “too much” can feel like for you?
S: It feels like a loss of control. Like it's more than I can control or contain. (These things are occurring to me as I'm speaking to you.) So it's…
J: So the feeling of loss of control…
S: Yeah.
J: Let's zoom in there. What would you call that feeling, the anticipation of what it feels like to lose control, to have more than you can contain or control?
S: Again it feels very scary. I mean, like there's some fear, like what's gonna happen?
J: So what would you like to call that fear?
S: Just, “no.” I mean, I notice when you asked me what I would like to call it, I wanted to do this. {gestures with arms blocking chest}
J: OK. Would it make sense to give it the name, “No"?
S: Yes.
J: OK. Does it need an exclamation point after it?
S: Yes.
J: All right then.
In this first few minutes, my goal is to help Susan identify and name a single feeling state for us to map. She has identified something she is calling No! but there also seems to be an indication of something else that could be called “fear,” as if the “barrier” is the No! and as she says, “behind that barrier is I think a fear that it would just be too much.”
I want to call your attention to the way in which I’m encouraging her to call her feeling states by whatever name she finds most useful. We shall see that the standard vocabulary for feeling and emotion is far too limited to capture the immense diversity of actual feeling experience, and it’s important to honor the uniqueness of each person’s experience of every feeling state in this way.
At this early stage, we’re not sure whether the No! is the fear, or the fear is a separate state related to the No! I suspect they are two different states, but that’s OK. I don’t need to know right now. For now we’re ready to map the first named feeling state, and we’ll discover more through the mapping.
Mapping No!
J: Now I'm going to lead you through a series of questions to help you describe what No! actually feels like. Just be open to whatever comes up, whatever shows up for you as an answer to the question, and test out: does that seem like it's true for you in your experience. And don't get too hung up on whether it's a right answer or not. It's just feeling your way into something that captures your experience as best as we can. All right? {susan nods “yes."}
So when you put your attention on this fear, this feeling of No!, if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?
S: Heart level, starting mid chest, just below my heart, up probably to my jaw. So through my throat.
J: OK. So mid-chest, just below your heart, up probably to your jaw. So all the way through your throat. Is it just the front part of your chest, or does it go all the way through to your shoulder blades?
S: No. Just on the front.
J: And in that region, if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this has qualities of substance, would you say that it seems more like a solid, or a liquid, or a gas, or some kind of light or energy, or something else?
S: Solid. Definitely solid.
J: OK. And hard or soft?
S: Hard.
J: Heavy or light?
S: Heavy.
J: OK. Anything else to notice about the substance quality? Does it resemble anything from the material world?
S: Well it feels like a steel plate.
J: OK.
J: What temperature would you say this steel plate seems to be?
S: Slightly cooler than body temperature. Like not freezing cold, but I experience it as cool compared to my body temperature.
J: OK. And if you were to say that this feeling, this felt experience, this substance, this steel plate has color, what color would you say it is?
S: It's silver, I mean like stainless steel color.
J: So the color of stainless steel. And would you say it's opaque then, like steel, you wouldn't be able to see through it at all?
S: Yes. It's definitely opaque.
J: OK. And is it shiny like stainless steel then?
S: Yes.
J: OK. And is this stainless steel plate moving in any way?
S: No.
J: So it’s perfectly still, no pulse or vibration?
S: Nope.
J: Any force or pressure that you notice?
S: Yeah, a little. I mean, I'm sitting up, so it's not like it's weighing on me, keeping me from breathing. But it is as if it's pressed solidly against me.
J: OK.
S: So I'm very aware of but I'm not feeling crushed by it.
J: OK. And if you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound that arises with this feeling?
S: Kind of a hum, like mmmmmmmmmmm.
J: OK. What note is that?
S: It is kind of a low tone.
J: A low tone, yeah.
S: And more a minor key than a major key.
J: All right. Is there anything else you want to notice about what this feels like?
S: Well it feels like it covers my chest up to my collar bone, so like from my collarbone to my jaw, my neck and throat, I feel like a little upward pressure. You know, like if someone were, like if I press on my chest, then there's kind of a pressure up in my body.
J: OK. Got it. So the actual steel plate doesn't come up to your jaw, but…
S: No. Just to my collar bone.
J: But then there's the experience of something pushing up.
S: Yeah.
In this portion of the session, we map the first feeling state. I introduce the mapping process by giving Susan full latitude to explore, letting her know there are no “right” answers to the questions I’ll be asking and putting the responsibility on her to find the best ways to capture her experience. My primary job is to guide her attention; her job is to report what she finds. Along the way I’m also taking detailed notes to support her reflection and integration of our work after the session.
Susan is a bodyworker, and has studied a couple of somatic therapy methods as well, so she finds it easy and natural to answer the fieldwork questions. She is able to place her attention on her inner, felt experience of No! and quickly report back about its qualities. Some people will have an easier time than others, and I’ll be sharing later in the book how to help support someone learning this skill for the first time. Check to confirm.
The questions themselves follow a standard form in this mapping. I’ve found that most often, things flow most smoothly when attention is led through the feeling experience in this order:
Location, size and shape.
Substance, including the possibilities of solid, liquid, gas, light, energy, or other.
Temperature.
Color and transparency.
Movement, force and pressure.
Sound.
(In the example of substance, providing a list of options makes it easier for the explorer to say “no” to specific qualities and notice which one fits best. It’s a little harder when the question is left wide open. We’ll notice later, though, that Susan doesn’t need this careful guidance.)
At the end of this section, we see that the force of the steel plate pushing inward on her chest is eliciting a responding sensation of something behind the plate pushing upward. These kinds of interactions between feeling state forms are common, and in this example, I choose to explore that upward pressure in her chest.
Identifying Fearful Fear
J: What would you say that is, that's being pushed up? What's your experience of what's behind the plate?
S: It sounds weird but it feels like the metal plate is kind of pushing on the fear, like the fear is rising up in my throat.
J: Ahh.
S: So, like, “Oohhhhhh!” Kind of a panicked, “Whoaaaaaaah,” like that.
J: OK. So it's like the fear is actually behind the No!.
S: Yes.
J: Ah hah. OK.
S: It's like the No! is to protect, almost, (that sounds weird too, but), to protect the fear.
J: Right. And what would you like to call the fear? Do you want to call it “fear” or something else?
S: Actually, it's like Fearful Fear.
J: Ah.
S: Which is kind of funny, but it seems to be what's true.
J: OK. Great. You can call feelings anything you want. So Fearful Fear is a great name. I'm going to suggest that we go ahead and map Fearful Fear, because we will find that No! probably isn't going to want to move as long as that fear is there. Right?
S: Right, because it's the protector.
J: Exactly.
S: It's not going to go anywhere as long as there's something to protect.
J: Right.
Here we see clearly how the No! and the Fearful Fear coexist and interact. These are two distinct feeling states that are simultaneously present. Susan’s awareness of the actual, felt experience of this interaction provides insight into the meaning of the feelings.
Completing No!
J: So, the No! – come back to the steel plate. We'll map the Fearful Fear in a second. If you were to capture in words what seems true, or real, or important to that steel plate, what would you say?
S: Well it feels very responsible, like it's got a very important job to do, and it really needs to do it well. So a big feeling of responsibility.
J: Right. OK. Anything else that comes to mind that you want to notice about this No! feeling?
S: Well I notice it also has a feeling of competence, like it's up to the job.
J: Ah hah. Great. So it's a competent protector.
S: Yes.
J: OK.
Here we are inviting this specific feeling state to express its perspective. By inviting this expression, we have an opportunity to learn more about the nature of this feeling state, what it is trying to accomplish, and what other feeling states might be interacting with it.
It’s important that we welcome whatever the expression is, honoring the No! exactly where it is. In doing so, this part of Susan is invited to lean into the process, to trust where we’re going. (In this case, the No! is expressing something that might be conventionally considered a positive sentiment or function. But as a facilitator I want to remain positive in receiving an expression even if it might seem to be “negative” in conventional terms.)
What’s Next
In the next post, we will dig into mapping the new feeling state that revealed itself, the one Susan named Fearful Fear. What do you anticipate?
Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments!
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