Embodied Awareness: Neither Implicit nor Explicit, and Not Necessarily Nonverbal

Abstract

ABSTRACT— This article offers the concept of embodiedself-awareness (ESA) as a contrast to parental embodiedmentalizing, which is presumed to be implicit and outsideawareness. ESA, which consists of awareness of bothsensorimotor and emotional states, is essential for allforms of human development and self-regulation and islearned via mutual embodied attunement in interpersonalrelationship. Failure to develop ESA reflects a dissociationfrom the experience of living in a human body and issymptomatic of attachment problems and a wide varietyof physical and psychological disorders that may be reme-diated through clinical practices that enhance embodiedawareness. KEYWORDS— embodied self-awareness; attunement; parent–infant communicationConsider the difference between learning a new motor skill—-like a tennis stroke or a guitar chord—and delivering a skilledperformance. In the learning phase, repetition and slowing downheighten one’s awareness of the body’s sensations and move-ments, including muscle fatigue, pain, miscoordination, and flu-idity. One also becomes aware of a host of emotions related tothe action and the learning process, such as frustration, impa-tience, or elation. I call these felt sensations embodied self-awareness (ESA): the ability to sense, in the present moment andwithout mediating thought, these sensorimotor feelings alongwith the motivational and emotional feelings that accompanythem. ESA is an essential component of all forms of humandevelopment and well-being. Its absence at any age is a form ofdissociation from the lived body and is often accompanied bysymptoms of depressed moods, feelings of stress and lack of con-trol, attachment insecurity, and chronic physical disease (Fogel,2009).In their review article, Shai and Belsky (2011) define parentalembodied mentalization (PEM) as ‘‘parents’ capacity to (a)implicitly conceive, comprehend, and extrapolate the infant’smental states from the infant’s whole-body movement (i.e., kines-thetics), and (b) adjust their own kinesthetic patterns accord-ingly’’ (p. 175; emphasis added). Their argument is noteworthybecause it uses the word embodied to bring the infant’s gestures,actions, movements, and postures into the process through whichparents interpret and respond to their infants.Underlying this definition, however, is the proposition thatPEM is implicit mentalizing (which they describe as ‘‘noncon-scious, nonverbal, automatic’’) and not explicit mentalizing(which they describe as ‘‘verbal, re flective, controlled’’). My con-cept of ESA