Today, I would love to share the origin story of my multi-year curiosity project and the topic of my doctoral work: interoception.
I am privileged to work as an occupational therapy practitioner with children and adolescents who experience sensory processing and integration challenges. Late one summer afternoon, I walked into my mentor’s office for advice…
You see, the little girl I was working with was experiencing significant emotional volatility. I was hoping to understand the source of her struggle. I left with the hypothesis that the child (who was cognitively gifted) was living in a constant state of fight or flight because she was experiencing a discrepancy between her cognitive strength and her sensory processing. She was white-knuckling her way through each day by over-relying on her cognition.
Up to that point, she had been taught cognitive management (top-down) of her emotions. In her case, the cognitive piece was no longer serving her because the root cause of her sensory (bottom-up) processing challenges was not being addressed.
In the mind-body interplay, there was an overemphasis on the mind.
The questions I began to ask included:
*How can emotion be controlled if it cannot be identified?
*How can emotion be identified if it isn’t experienced/felt in the body?
And the main question that led me down this path…
*Where does emotion reside in the sensory system?
Many years and hours of research later, I can confidently say that emotion is rooted in interoception.
Want to read one of the first articles I found on the topic of interoception and emotion?
Click the link below!
Reference:
Critchley, H.D., & Garfinkel, S.N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.