Affect Tolerance or Feeling our Feelings

Affect tolerance is a term we use to indicate how much emotion or feeling in our bodies we can sit and tolerate with without needing to shut it down. This is a crucial skill we want to learn when we have chronic symptoms. The reason being is that many chronic physical symptoms in the body are really emotional symptoms. So we want to feel our feelings, not shut down our emotional feelings, or symptoms in this case.

I like this article which covers the topic of affect tolerance.   It is a skill that I teach others so that we can access our feelings and stay open to them without resisting or reacting to them to make them worse.

If our symptoms are just emotions, then feeling our feelings helps to heal them. This is the somatic approach to healing symptoms. Reach out if you want or need one to one support on how to do this or think of joining the weekly somatic practice group I host on Wednesdays. We will be deepening the practice of connecting to our bodies in an open way to feel it to heal it!!