How to Deepen the Felt Connection with Yourself – A Bottom-Up Approach
- Brainz Magazine
- 3 hours ago
- 10 min read
Written by Pauline van Borrendam, Haptotherapist
As a haptotherapist with 30 years of experience, Pauline van Borrendam has a deep understanding of how feelings show up in your body. She knows how feelings get blocked, how to unlock them, and how to regulate overwhelming feelings.
Do you long for a deeper connection with yourself? Do you crave more peace and balance, more meaning and fulfillment? Are you living too much in your head, stuck in constant busyness, too restless to pause and connect with deeper layers within yourself? Are you experiencing physical symptoms that won't go away?
Maybe everything you've tried so far has brought temporary relief, but the problems keep coming back.
If so, this might interest you, a different approach that works bottom-up. Instead of starting with your mind, focus, or willpower, you start from simply feeling the feelings in your body. It's simple, yet it's not, because we're not used to it. Let me guide you through an approach that helps you trust the feeling process as it unfolds. Once you understand how it works, you can practice on your own.
What is so good about bottom-up?
Most coaching, therapy, and self-help approaches work top-down. This means you either start by talking, analyzing, and gaining insight, which then allows feelings to arise and be processed, or you use willpower to achieve results, ‘I want to be relaxed, so I'll do exercises, meditation, or positive affirmations.’
Top-down approaches often use techniques, to-do lists, or specific tools. They rely on insight and willpower to achieve change. This can be effective. Sometimes it's enough, and you do feel better. But if you want something deeper, start from the other end, begin by feeling your feelings, and keep feeling them without interrupting, steering, blocking, fighting, fleeing, interpreting, or criticizing them.
When you don't interfere with the feeling process, you enter a part of yourself you don't consciously know. By starting with the feelings in your body, you tap into a tremendous library of unconscious knowledge stored there. You simply need to give it more space, allowing that knowledge to unfold. How did this knowledge get there? It's the imprint of everything you've experienced in your life, good or bad. In your body, you'll find confidence, peace, trust, firmness, and vitality from positive experiences. And you may also find tension, emptiness, restlessness, or pain from difficult or traumatic experiences.
Simply repressing your tension, emptiness, restlessness, or pain, or relying on quick fixes, won't bring about real change. But moving through the feelings and listening to the information they provide will lead to lasting change. It may lead to discoveries you never expected or sought, things you never knew you were carrying.
Let your bodily feelings lead the way. Following this path brings you into the unconscious world of who you are at a deeper level. You can never enter that world when you're trying to reach goals from your head, steering everything consciously from the start.
Example of a bottom-up process
Here's an example of how this might work. Say you're a busy entrepreneur with a successful business, working your butt off, but still feeling unsatisfied and restless.
You begin to feel your feelings and stay with them. You welcome the restlessness and the sense that something isn't quite right. Each time you get distracted or want to analyze, you bring yourself back to feeling what's present in the moment.
Then you start feeling tired. Your mind quickly analyzes, ‘Oh, that must be from working so hard. I need more rest. I didn't realize I was actually this tired.’ (This is very common when you're usually in an active mode, the tiredness only becomes apparent when you slow down for a while.) But that analysis might be too quick, and therefore superficial.
You could stop here, you've discovered something you weren't aware of. But you could also continue. If you do, it might unfold like this. As you give in to the tiredness, feel where it shows up in your body, and surrender to it. This might trigger thoughts like, ‘Oh no, if I really give in to this, I might not finish what I planned for today.’
You welcome that concern too. Then you start feeling sadness. You don't know why, but it's rising up. Welcome the sadness as well. You begin to cry, wondering what this is about. The sadness subsides.
Now you feel much more connected to yourself in your body. And the strange thing is, your tiredness is gone, along with the restlessness and dissatisfaction. You feel a renewed sense of peace and fulfillment. You never realized you'd been carrying sadness inside, probably unconsciously running from it by staying busy all the time, leaving no room for deeper feelings. Sometimes understanding what the sadness is about emerges during the process, sometimes later, and sometimes not at all. As you engage with this process more regularly, you'll likely begin to understand your sadness along the way.
Wisdom of feelings
Feelings move on their own. We all know this, when a toddler falls and hurts himself, we pick him up, hold him on our lap, and comfort him. He cries, maybe talks about what happened, and then he starts to calm down by himself. It happens naturally, that is to say, when we don't interfere. This is one of the purposes of feelings, to process painful experiences. When we're scared, shaken, and in pain, crying while being lovingly cared for helps us calm down and regain our balance.
But perhaps our parents did interfere, they told us that big boys don't cry, or they distracted us to make us feel better quickly, skipping the time needed to process the feelings. Or they gave us a lollipop to stop us from feeling bad. Chances are, we didn't learn to let feelings run their course in their own time and way.
In childhood, we're too young to process these feelings on our own. We have to push them away and rely on survival mechanisms. Those suppressed feelings never really disappear, they remain hidden in the tense or numb parts of our bodies. They wait for a new opportunity to be processed later. Suppressed feelings lead to physical and/or emotional symptoms that signal there's still something waiting to be acknowledged and completed. How clever this system is, it happens unconsciously. It only requires our adult selves to recognize that we all carry feelings that couldn't be processed earlier, for whatever reason, but can be processed now.
Practice: How to feel your way through
Now let's practice. Simply sit down, no special posture needed, and no need to relax. You can close your eyes or leave them open, just feel what works best for you. Open yourself to whatever wants to emerge.
When feelings are given room to move through you, they arise and subside on their own. The process works in layers, starting at the surface and going deeper over time. When you let feelings lead, they find their own new balance. No steering is necessary, it actually works better when you don't interfere.
Let your mind notice and follow, not steer. Our heads don't know what's necessary in the moment, our feelings do. So, when you're tense, don't try to relax. Instead, welcome the tension. No scanning, no focusing.
This alone can be challenging for people who are used to being in control and meeting expectations. If this is difficult for you, notice that it makes you uncomfortable, and welcome that feeling. How does it show up in your body? Is your breathing or heart rate speeding up? Does your chest feel tight? Welcome those feelings.
Another challenge might be not feeling anything at all. Does it feel like your mind is running the show? How does that feel? Does your head feel full, heavy, or busy? Does that feel good, or not so good? How does your body feel? Does it feel distant, hard as a rock, or empty?
All these are possible when you "don't feel anything," yet they're all different experiences. So stay in a feeling position. Don't interfere, don't try to get out of your head and into your body, and don't try anything. Because when you start trying, you lose contact with what you're actually feeling. If you stay in a feeling position, the feelings will deepen.
It doesn't matter how "bad" your starting point is, staying in a feeling position will improve things. It's fine to start with physical sensations like tension, restlessness, discomfort, or pain. You don't have to be at an emotional level to begin.
Sometimes, when we invite and welcome these physical sensations, they subside easily. Accustomed to being suppressed and fought against, once they're given space simply to exist, they move through us quite easily. This surprises people, but it's like the example of the toddler on your lap. When the adult is comfortable with the toddler's feelings, the toddler's tension quickly fades.
We can go even deeper. Feelings can also intensify when given space, especially if they've been suppressed for a long time. You might start by feeling tension in your neck and shoulders, and when you make room for it, the tension intensifies. It starts to really hurt. (Don't try to make it go away by stretching your neck! That's just symptom management.)
Ask yourself, "How does it affect me when the tension worsens and starts to hurt?" If it scares you, welcome the fear. If it frustrates you, welcome the frustration. Here we're entering a deeper level, the level of how you're affected, the emotional experience.
When you suppress feelings, there's a cost, tension in your body, pain, or parts of your body feeling empty and disconnected. When you're well connected to your feelings and your body, it shows in balanced tension, vitality, and relaxation. When you've unconsciously suppressed feelings, that's where symptoms begin.
But here's the good news, these symptoms lead you right back to the suppressed feelings. We can use that as our entry point. If the symptom leads you to fear, anger, or sadness (or any subset of those broader feelings), accept and welcome it.
Stop suppressing. Let the feelings run their course. If you start trembling, let it happen. If you start crying, allow it. If you feel the urge to make noise, go ahead. Let feelings express themselves however they need to. They'll subside once they're given room.
This way, you move through unpleasant sensations and feelings toward a deeper connection and renewed balance. Once you reach a new level of peace and feel better, you can complete the process by taking time to reconnect with the outside world.
What doesn't help (but what we tend to do)
Here are some examples of what might happen during the process that can hinder your progress. If you recognize these patterns as they happen, you can return to simply feeling your feelings, nothing else.
Don't try to understand why you're having these feelings during the process. This will pull you into your head, into thinking, and you'll lose contact with the present moment. This blocks the process of moving through your feelings. Let the feelings lead. Once you reach a new level of balance, you can certainly look back and see if you understand what just happened. If images or thoughts arose during the process, you can explore them more deeply afterward.
Don't focus on unpleasant feelings. Focusing means your mind takes control, which disrupts the process. Focusing also amplifies unpleasant feelings, which can lead to overwhelm. We're not aiming for that, it doesn't help you move through.
When you focus on unpleasant feelings, you also miss what could support you, not everything in your body feels bad at the same time. The parts that feel okay will guide you through. So, when difficult feelings arise, stay connected to them, but don't focus on or dive into them.
On the other end of the spectrum, we also don't want you staying at a safe distance from your feelings. Then they won't move either. When we don't let ourselves be touched or moved by what we feel, feelings can't serve their purpose. We can't process feelings without truly connecting to them. Connection is a fine line between not staying too distant and not losing ourselves by diving in too deep.
Don't steer toward what you perceive as the desired direction. Feelings have their own logic, deeply rooted in our being. Discover how they work within you. If you don't feel safe with how the process unfolds, you can always step back and stop. Try to identify what's blocking the process and what you might need to continue. You can always seek help from a therapist.
How to navigate problems that arise
If you struggle with interruptions to the feeling process and find yourself repeatedly doing things that aren't recommended, there are ways to work through this while staying connected to your feelings.
If you can't stop analyzing, explore what's happening in your body, "What feeling is hidden beneath this behavior? Does not knowing where these feelings come from make you restless?" If so, welcome that restlessness.
When you stay away from truly experiencing what you feel, what are you keeping your distance from? Make a kind of U-turn. Start by noticing that you unconsciously steered away from truly experiencing the feelings that are present. Then reverse direction, steer back, and ask yourself, "What feeling was I steering away from? And can I stay with that feeling now?"
In my experience, the process encounters many disruptions like those I've mentioned, but if you accept them too (they're not your fault, they just happen), the process will continue to deepen. Ask yourself what the disruptions feel like and how they affect you. Are you getting irritated? Welcome it. Welcome the sense of being blocked, welcome the resistance, and feel it in your body. Does everything you just felt suddenly get ‘erased’? Welcome that. It's a way of unconsciously protecting yourself. Simply accept it and surrender to it. If it makes you sad, allow that. The feelings will return. Don't try to recapture what you just felt, feel what arises now. The more disruptions you accept and move through, the deeper you'll go, and the greater the improvement you'll ultimately experience.
In conclusion
Working bottom-up is a rewarding journey, you never know how the process will unfold. It builds trust as you discover that your feelings find their own new balance, one that's better than before, without your interference. Over time, it becomes easier to surrender to the process, even when it sometimes feels difficult in the moment.
Of course, there's more to it, more options and possibilities. This is just the beginning. I plan to write about six more articles like this based on haptotherapy, followed by four articles that go even deeper into working with child parts stemming from childhood trauma. This will cover TIST (Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment), founded by Janina Fisher. These articles will be helpful when your struggles run deeper due to more severe childhood trauma.
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Read more from Pauline van Borrendam
Pauline van Borrendam, Haptotherapist
Pauline van Borrendam has worked with affective touch for 30 years. She specializes in healing childhood trauma, beginning with the body. Since April 2025, she has also been a certified TIST therapist (Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment). The core approach of both haptotherapy and TIST involves felt connection in the body, deep acceptance, and empathy as the primary forces that lead to healing. Haptotherapy and TIST avoid rational or will-driven attention and help you find an inner state where you experience a deep sense of acceptance, safety, surrender, and love. The healing that comes from this entry point is unmistakably clear and palpable in your body, and it lasts.
Tips to read more about the body-mind connection:
Prof. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Gabor Maté: When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
