by Velleda C. Ceccoli Ph.D. on July 18, 2011

You know that feeling you have when you realize something? You notice it, perceive it, sense it, immediately, you feel it on the inside? You have a hunch, you feel it in your bones, you have an inkling, a sneaking suspicion, a sense, a gut feeling, a presentiment. You just know something without knowing how you know it. Intuition. Your sixth sense. Felt and known. That is intuition. A communication from the right hemisphere of your brain. The one responsible for sub-symbolic communication and for the processing and regulating of emotion. The place where the unconscious lives.

Many people follow their intuition, others have a difficult time trusting it, because they cannot pinpoint the source of their knowledge, of how they know, so they may dismiss it. Some would say that the former are right brain people and the latter left brain people (for more on this check out this link- http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/). That is to say, each of our brain hemispheres has its own window for affect tolerance. The right hemisphere in our brain deals with deeper, more intense and extreme emotions and their regulation. Those emotions that are encoded in relational memories and are felt but not necessarily translated into  language. The left hemisphere of our brain deals with moderate levels of arousal and behavior that is under our voluntary control, behavior that is known to us and can be talked about and known because it has been mediated by thought and action. But I get ahead of myself.

In the past ten years, more and more books and authors have begun talking and writing about intuition as a sixth sense, and the fact that our first impressions and choices are usually right. Usually, but not always. Why is this so? The short answer is: because information is filtered by a number of areas in the brain, all of which have developed and been impacted by our experience, particularly our early relational experience. This may help us or lead us astray. Current neuro-biological research confirms that our early relationship to our caretakers is the catalyst for brain development and lays the foundation for how our brain will grow and perform. More to the point, it accounts for how we will experience our feelings and manage our emotional states.

Back to intuition. In order to attend to our sense and feeling of something we need our bodies. We cannot recognize a feeling unless we have an embodied experience of it. Think about it, where do you feel your anxiety? Your fear? Your sadness? Butterflies in your stomach? Lungs closing in on you? Limbs tensing up? A heavy heart? It takes a specific change in our body, a felt experience in order to connect to our internal self. We need a body to experience feelings. The ability to link our felt experience to our thoughts allows for some recognition and integration of sensations, feelings and cognitive states which in turn allows us to regulate and manage our emotions. In order to attend to our intuition we need to be able to listen to our bodily sensations, to feel them and experience them. Only after we feel it can we follow through on it, or not. Feelings translate our ongoing life-state (including our dream states) so that it can be understood in the language of our mind. So what happens if you can’t feel it?

Often in illness, particularly chronic illness, there exists a state of ongoing emotional dysregulation because illness may make it difficult to hold onto bodily sensations (and to experience one’s body in an organized way), further disrupting one’s experience of one’s own body and wrecking havoc with the person’s ability to identify feelings as well as regulate them. In other words, the ability to recognize feeling states is in itself regulating of them.

Psychoanalysis has long viewed affects as the raw material of internal life. Rage, panic, anxiety are all examples of disruptive affects which interfere with our ability to modulate our emotional states. Such affective states activate our right hemisphere, whose window for intense affect tolerance is greater than the left hemisphere. Feelings differ from affects in that they represent a form of unconscious perception that is based on the original template of our emotional life. A feeling is a separate sense. As such, it comes about internally, speaking through the body. It is ours alone, although it develops within our early relational context and history, and gains its relevance and meaning there. From a neuro-scientific point of view, feelings are a set of homeostatic, regulatory reactions, which unfold within us and represent our body involved in a reactive process. Think of them as body-maps speaking to the brain. Feelings speak a language that is not based on words, but instead, on internal sensations which are interactive and relationally determined. Feelings differ from emotions in that emotions link affects with thought, ideas and memories, and as such, are more complex and a step ahead of feeling or sensing something.

Intuition may very well be what connects the “life of the limbs” – a metaphor from developmental psychology which speaks to the sensori-motor organization of our bodies- to the life of the mind. The one cannot exist without the other. And perhaps intuition offers a bridge between the two. Intuition. A presentiment. I like this word because it captures what I am trying to write about here. Pre- as in before, sentiment– from the French for feeling, emotion, sense. So before we can actually put something into words and think about it, we have to rely precisely on our feeling, our sense of it. Before we can speak or think about something we know it because we can feel it and sense it. There you have it. Perhaps we could say that this is our very own extra-sensory-perception. Our sixth sense. That is, if we can manage to tune in.


{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Erika Schwartz, MD July 19, 2011 at 9:07 AM

While conventional medical training does not encourage or even accept the importance of intuition in the practice of medicine, the most valued and highly regarded physicians are intuitives. The best diagnosticians and luminaries in medicine when asked how they figure out the most complicated cases, invariably use the term ” intuition or sixth sense” to describe how they got there. Unfortunately, the scientific world and the clinical world haven’t reconciled yet. It’s time to help the two use intuition to bring the two together. Thank you Dr. Ceccoli for opening the door!!!


Velleda C. Ceccoli Ph.D. July 22, 2011 at 7:51 AM

Thank you for this comment. Despite movement in the right direction, the same can be said in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. While intuition is a key factor in our work, for many years practitioners who spoke about this were considered to be “out there” and as working on the fringe or edge without a clinical technique or methodology! Yet many of the advances in the way that we think and practice have come precisely from those who speak openly about their process and thought.


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