When No One Taught You How to Listen to Your Body
Do you recognize what it feels like in your body when you're actually hungry? Not "I should eat because it's noon and this is when I eat," but the physical feeling in your body that differentiates hunger from something else — boredom, anxiety, or numbness. If you paused just now thinking about it, welcome in.
In the somatic space, we talk a lot about “listening into your body”, but how do you even do that? For something so commonly referenced, it can sure feel confusing, frustrating, and overwhelming to access. It’s not always as easy as it sounds, especially for those of us who grew up in environments where it wasn’t taught, modeled, or even allowed.
Why This Skill Often Never Gets Taught
Think about what it actually takes for a child to learn to listen to their body. Someone has to ask, how does that feel? Another person has to make space for the answer, even when the answer is inconvenient. Someone has to model checking in with their own body out loud, so a child learns the vocabulary around their felt experiences, and understand that this is a thing people do.
In households where survival and stability weren’t guaranteed or when perceived harmony took priority, there wasn't necessarily space for that kind of attunement. This is especially true for those of us from immigrant backgrounds or multicultural families where the household itself may have been acclimating to the realities of displacement and multilayered grief around loss of culture, community, and belonging. When the pressing question is are we safe, are we okay, is everyone fed and functioning, "how does your body feel right now" isn't exactly next on the list. Not because anyone didn’t care, but because attention, like everything else, is finite, and it went where it needed to go.
Over time, this isn't just something you didn't learn. It's something your body adapted around. If checking in with your internal state wasn't reinforced — or evenmore, if it was actively discouraged, seen as indulgent or dramatic — your nervous system learned to route its attention outward instead: toward everyone else's mood, what was expected of you, and staying useful or undisruptive. I've written more about how that outward-facing pattern shows up as emotional caretaking and parentification.
What This Can Feel Like Now
Not knowing what you're feeling until someone else names it for you
A delay between an experience and a physical sensation registering (e.g. noticing tension in your body, but having no idea when it actually started)
Discomfort when you do clock a sensation in your body, and take space with it
Defaulting to "I'm fine", because it feels normalized and you genuinely feel lost around how else to answer
Feeling like your body is something to manage, rather than something you experience from within
Just because you feel disconnected from yourself now, doesn’t have to mean that it’ll feel like this forever. It just means you probably haven’t had the opportunity to build it yet — and that’s okay. This is exactly where you need to be. In fact, learning how to do this is exactly what we do here.
Why Talking About It Isn't Quite Enough
Here's the tricky part: you can understand everything I just wrote intellectually, and still have trouble connecting with the felt experience in real time. In other words, insight can tell you that the skill is missing, but it can't hand you the skill itself. There’s often a gap that exists between talk therapy and somatic therapy — something I've written more about this in my post on how trauma lives in the body. Talking helps you understand the pattern. Somatic work is where you actually develop and integrate the skill you never got to build.
In session, this often starts incredibly small — almost embarrassingly small at times. Notice how your feet feel against the surface of the floor. Notice how the temperature sits against your skin. No, these observations aren’t profound on their own, but it’s an incredibly accessible skill to start strengthening our access to tuning into the body. What’s happening? How is it responding to this stimulus? What changes now? What does it need? Like any relationship, our relationship with self builds through time and experience.
Starting to Build the Skill
If this resonates with you, here are a few gentle starting points I’d like to invite you to explore:
Throughout your day, pause and ask, what am I noticing in my body right now? — with zero pressure to have a "correct" answer
When you notice a feeling of urgency arise, get curious about where that feeling is coming from
Begin to name physical sensations in neutral language — tight, tingly, warm, heavy, sharp — without assigning meaning to it
Give yourself permission to not know — you don’t need to know why, where it comes from, or what it’s going to do. Can we create space right now, just to hold it? To notice it and give it space to exist?
You're Allowed to Learn This Now
If this all feels new and overwhelming, please know that you’re not alone in this. As a therapist in San Diego offering online therapy across California and Washington, D.C., I'd love to support you in this work, at a pace that actually works for you and your nervous system.
Reach out here to learn more about working together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why don't I know what I'm feeling in my body? For many people, this isn't a deficit — it's a skill that was never modeled or reinforced growing up, often because survival, stability, or caretaking took priority in the household. The nervous system learns to direct attention outward instead of inward.
Can you learn to listen to your body as an adult? Yes. Body awareness is a skill that can be built at any age, though it often develops more slowly and gently than people expect, especially if it was actively discouraged earlier in life.
Why does my therapist keep asking what I feel in my body? Somatic therapists ask this to help build a skill many clients never had the chance to develop — connecting emotional experience to physical sensation. It can feel unfamiliar or even frustrating at first, which is a completely normal part of the process.
Is this related to intergenerational trauma? Often, yes. In many immigrant and multicultural families, survival-focused environments left little room for inward attention, so this disconnection can be passed down across generations without ever being explicitly taught.
Do you offer online therapy in California? Yes. I'm based in San Diego and offer online therapy to adults throughout California and Washington, D.C..
About Me:
Hi, I’m Stephanie Shao (she/her), Licensed Clinical Social Worker (CA 127453; LICSW DC LC200003288). I am a somatic trauma therapist and specialize in intergenerational trauma, bicultural identities, relational attachment & security, and grief & loss. I enjoy integrating both mind and body in my work, alongside practices of mindfulness and self-compassion.
As a human, I identify as a second-generation Taiwanese American. I was born and raised in the D.C. Metropolitan area, and am currently based in San Diego, California. I’m passionate about collective healing and am a big believer that healing takes place in community!
If you are looking for individual counseling, please message me. I’d love to chat more about your individual needs and to explore if we’d be a good fit. I also publish a monthly newsletter, Kindred Collective, if you’d like to stay in touch about upcoming events and all things identity-related. In the meantime, don’t forget to check out some other blogs here. Stay in touch!