‘Feeling Felt’

There's a phrase I keep coming back to in my work: feeling felt. Dan Siegel coined it, and the first time I encountered the term, I recognized something I had been circling for years without quite naming. The thing that actually happens in the room that causes therapy to work. The thing we're all, on some level, still looking for.

Feeling felt is the experience of being with another person who gets it. Not because they've been through the same thing, not because they have the right words, but because something in their presence communicates: I am with you. I see what's happening inside you.

It sounds simple. It is not simple. For many of us, it's the thing we never quite got.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think we move too quickly past it. We assume that being understood is a nice bonus, a comfort, something that makes life more pleasant. What the research and the clinical literature suggest is something more precise: being understood is how we become ourselves in the first place.

Winnicott wrote that the mother's face is the infant's first mirror. Before we have language, before we have a concept of self, we look at our caregiver's face and we see ourselves reflected back. When a mother looks at her baby with delight, the baby learns: I am delightful. I exist. The self doesn't emerge in isolation. It emerges in response to being seen.

This is where I find Winnicott most useful- as a theorist of what goes wrong when it doesn't. What happens when the mirror is distorted? When the caregiver's face reflects their own anxiety, their depression, their preoccupation? The baby still looks. The baby still searches. What they find is not themselves. They find the parent's internal world instead.

I want to be careful here, because this can sound like blame, and that's not what I mean. Most parents are doing the best they can with what they have. The point is not that someone failed. The point is that something was missed, and that missing has consequences. Not trauma, necessarily. Not anything that would make the news. Just a quiet, consistent experience of looking for yourself in someone else's eyes and not quite finding what you need.

Peter Fonagy's work on mentalization helps me think about what, exactly, gets missed. Mentalization is the capacity to understand behavior in terms of underlying mental states. It's the ability to hold in mind that people have minds. That behind every action is a web of feelings, thoughts, intentions, histories.

When caregivers mentalize their children well, they treat the child as a thinking and feeling being who is separate from them and has separate experiences, from the start. They wonder aloud: Are you tired? Are you frustrated? I think maybe you wanted the blue cup and I gave you the red one. This kind of curiosity teaches the child that their internal world is real and worth investigating. It says: You have feelings. You make sense. Let's figure you out together.

When this doesn't happen enough, something else develops. A sense that your inner life is either invisible or too much. A habit of tracking other people's emotions while losing the thread of your own.

I see this all the time in my practice: brilliant, competent adults who can read a room in seconds but struggle to identify what they actually feel. They learned that attending to themselves was either unsafe or pointless, so they stopped. They became experts in the external world, in managing other people's needs, in performing a self rather than inhabiting one.

This is where the concept of mutual recognition becomes useful. Jessica Benjamin describes it as the experience of being acknowledged as a subject by another subject. Not just mirrored, not just seen, but actually met.

The distinction matters. Being seen the way an object is seen is not the same as being known. Someone can observe you, even observe you accurately, without being moved by you. We come to know ourselves as real, as people who matter, through the experience of mutual impact. I affect you. You affect me. We are both changed by the encounter.

This is why advice-giving often falls flat in therapy. You can tell someone they matter. You can say it clearly and mean it completely. It doesn't land the same way as watching your therapist's face change when you say something painful. The difference is the difference between information and experience. The client has to feel themselves as someone who has an effect.

So here is my musing, the thing I keep turning over in my own mind as I sit with clients:

Therapy works not because the therapist has answers. Therapy works because the therapist offers a particular kind of presence. A presence that says: I am tracking you. Your internal world makes sense to me, even the parts that don't make sense to you yet.

This is what Siegel means by feeling felt. It is the live experience of attunement. For people who grew up without enough of it, this experience is not merely nice. It is corrective. It rewires something.

I don't mean that metaphorically. The research on interpersonal neurobiology suggests that attuned relationships actually change the brain. They help regulate the nervous system. They build capacity for distress tolerance and self-reflection. We are, it turns out, built to be shaped by each other.

The part that moves me most, though, is not the neuroscience. It's what I watch happen in the room. What I experience myself in the room. Feeling felt teaches you how to feel yourself. When someone is curious about your inner world, you become curious about it too. When someone treats your emotions as meaningful, you start to believe they are. Slowly, sometimes over years, you develop the capacity to mentalize yourself. To be your own good-enough parent.

I think about this with my clients often. The ones who come in apologizing for taking up space. The ones who have spent their whole lives performing okayness because no one ever taught them that their real feelings were welcome.

What I offer them is not expertise, not really. I offer them my attention. My willingness to be affected by what they bring.

Over time, something shifts. They stop apologizing. They start saying "I think I feel..." and then actually finishing the sentence. They begin to trust their own perceptions. They start to take up space, not because I told them they were allowed to, but because they felt it in the room.

This is what I mean when I say that being known is the thing that heals. Not insight, though insight matters. The slow, accumulating experience of being with someone who feels you. Who treats your interior life as real.

We look at another person's face, and we find ourselves reflected back. First our mothers, then our friends, our partners, our therapists. The mirror is never perfect. It doesn't need to be. It just needs to be good enough, often enough, that we start to believe we're actually there.

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