A Breathwork Class—and Framework—for Healing Codependent Thinking | Goop

In my six-month program, The Feminist Wellness Guide to Overcoming Codependency, we learn how to feel our feelings in our bodies in a real way and see and then shift our habitual, survival-based thinking so we can begin to thrive. I do is through two parallel frameworks that I’ve rigged together: a somatic framework and a cognitive behavioral framework.

Somatic awareness: I deeply believe that the first step in healing is awareness, and that starts with learning how to feel your feelings in a deep and physical way. For many of us, our culture, our society, and our families of origin have so often taught us to push away feelings that are scary or dangerous. When our thought habits and feeling habits are decades old, it’s challenging to understanding the feelings within us that are driving our dysfunctional behaviors. And it’s important to get in touch with them in that way: You can’t heal what you can’t see.

In my practice, breathwork is the portal for understanding our feelings as a felt experience and not just a cognitive one. If I feel sad, that cognitive experience might be something like: I feel sad because there’s a pandemic and my friend’s dad died. Whereas the felt experience of sadness, for me, is that I feel a clenching blue tightness in my chest. It feels heavy, as if it’s weighing down my energy.

Cognitive behavioral work: I combine the somatic aspects we discussed with an attention to our thoughts and the feelings they create for us, knowing that each thought triggers the release of what Candace Pert calls the “molecules of emotion.” It starts with a cognitive behavioral modality I’ve called the thought work protocol, which helps us to see how our chronic thinking creates feelings in our bodies.

Thinking you’re terrible, unlovable, unfixable, deeply stuck, and broken creates a groove in your mind that your body will believe to be true. In order to support our bodies in releasing self-doubt and self-denial, we look at what happens within us that triggers that body-wide chemical response. That means we have to get honest with ourselves about our habitual, ingrained thoughts—and we often can’t see these thoughts clearly until we stop and write them down. It’s only when we know what’s really going on inside of us that we can start to change that story.

And this is why the feeling in your body is so important: You can try to change your outlook cognitively all day long, but if you’re not in touch with what you feel and don’t bring your attention to that feeling, your efforts are usually not going to be sustainable. Your brain is going to go back to the old story. All chemicals that govern your emotions in your body are still racing around. We need to heal that first.