The Felt Sense of Doula Work
I am a copywriter for a continuing education platform for psychotherapists. In my role, I meet many expert therapists who are offering courses and I learn about their work.
So far, I’ve learned about:
How I Learned About Felt Sense
A few weeks ago, I was interviewing one of the experts about a course she was creating and she kept mentioning ‘felt sense.’ She used that term in a few sentences and alongside other concepts included in her course.
But I wasn’t sure what she meant by felt sense. So I asked her to define it for me.
“Many people think ‘felt sense’ means something they feel physically, like on their skin using the sense of touch. But it’s not that at all. In the specific context I’m talking about right now, it’s the experience one feels when they are deeply listened to. They can feel in their body that they are being deeply listened to, which leads them to feel safer and therefore able to be more vulnerable and say more. There’s an actual energetic shift that happens inside of them. And that shift is felt by the person doing the listening. The listener knows the way they are listening caused that shift and opened the other person up so a shift happens inside of them as well.”
I was blown away. Not because this sounded outrageous.
Because I’d been doing it for over 20 years as a doula.
Only I didn’t have a word for it.
What is Felt Sense?
Felt sense was a term coined by Eugene Gendlin. He described it as:
A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.
A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.
The vague, beyond-words experience of a felt sense is more than just a "gut feeling" or intuition. It’s not instantaneous. It forms, fuzzy at first then morphing into clarity. It is the sense of the whole of a situation.
Because doulas are typically working with clients in atypical situations — labor, postpartum, death, crises — we cannot count on luxuries like talking during someone’s labor. So doulas learn to rely on all our senses and a state of just being to feel into what is going on in any given moment.
I believe that is where our capacity for felt sense comes from.
How do doulas learn these skills without knowing what they’re doing?
This revelation about felt sense got me thinking about how I learned how to do that. Because when I did it, it felt like magic. How did all the other doulas I knew learn it? And how did I teach it to thousands of doulas without having a term or definition for it?
Here’s how I would teach it to birth doulas:
After a long session learning about and practicing communication skills for doulas — which included how to listen more deeply, how to use all of your body (not just your ears) to listen, how to ask open-ended questions, how to be an active listener, and how to ask for consent before providing information — I would tell my students:
“You will sit down with your clients for a prenatal visit and at the end of that 2-hour visit, you’ll be shocked by how deep and profound your connection will be in that short period of time. I don’t know how it happens or why, just trust me that it does. Sitting here now, you don’t believe me. But I’m telling you, if you use these skills, it will happen and I want you to remember my words today. You did that.”
Since that interview with the therapist, I’ve talked to a number of my past doula colleagues who are now therapists. I want to emphasize that all of these doulas were birth doulas, and I believe there’s a reason for that as well.
Turns out, becoming a therapist is a really common career path for birth doulas. I can think of 10 just off the top of my head and I bet there are hundreds more. I think that’s because many of the nuanced skills we use as doulas translate to the therapist role easily. In fact, I’d venture to say doulas are waaay ahead of the game when entering the field of psychotherapy.
What my doula-turned-therapist friends tell me is that doulas learn on the job many of the most important skills that therapists struggle to learn because the skills aren’t actually taught in grad school. Mainly theories and general modalities of therapy are taught.
Why Doulas Excel in Their Next Careers
In my career as a doula, I studied developmental psychology, attachment theory, pre-and perinatal psychology, the consciousness of babies in utero and newborns, embryology, endocrinology of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. None of those things are required to be a doula, those were just my particular areas of interest and I am a very curious person so I read books, attended conferences, and took classes on my areas of interest.
Other doulas dive into other areas: postpartum adjustment, neurodiversity, trauma survivors, special needs infants, sleep, infant feeding, nutrition, business and marketing for doulas...the list goes on and on.
But every doula finds an area of interest and explores it.
What this means for any doula entering a new career field is that they’ve got so much knowledge already — and now they’re learning from people who will use words to communicate it all — the rest comes much more easily.
So whether they go on to work with families in social service agencies, to affect policies and legislation in government, to provide more expansive birth support as a midwife or obstetrician, to treat individuals as a therapist, to heal the body as a massage or craniosacral therapist, chiropractor, or acupuncturist, or to become a better parent or human being, what they learned as a doula is perhaps the best training ground possible.
What else do doulas know to do without knowing what they’re doing?
Besides learning how to listen, we learn how to sit and just be. We learn the skill of patience, observing what is happening around us and not jumping to reactions.
We learn how to watch people for facial expressions, body language, posture, voice inflection, the eyes, what’s not being said as much as what is being said. And we’re not just watching our client. We’re watching their partner, kids, family members, friends, doctor, nurse, or midwife. Whoever is in the room. We call it ‘reading the energy in the room’ and it’s a crucial skill for facilitating communication in emotionally-charged situations or when conflicts are happening.
We dance in the realm of the unknown. We learn to be okay with not knowing when a baby will come, how long the labor will be, or what someone will be like during birth.
We step into our client’s space with the acknowledgement that we have little political power. We don’t want it. We want our clients to have all the external power. We have a mother-lode of internal power in our hearts.
We learn to not have answers. Sure, we have information — and we learn to ask our clients if they’d like to partake of our information, rather than shoving it down their throats — but in the realm of the unknown no one has the answer...not the doctor, not the client, not the doula.
The Art of ‘Holding Space’
Another thing we learn to do, which almost everything I’ve mentioned so far is a part of, is holding space. This is especially relevant to birth doulas.
Holding space can be defined many ways but it involves these components:
- Creating an energetic container — the space — for an experience to occur
- Being fully present and empathetic with healthy boundaries to protect yourself from absorbing energy that isn’t yours
- Allowing whatever needs to happen in the container to happen — i.e. not trying to influence, coerce, or create a certain outcome
- Creating space for vulnerability, scary or dark thoughts, ‘negative’ feelings or emotions without fear of judgment, rejection, punishment, shame, or retaliation
- Witnessing and acknowledging the emotions, words, and actions that arise in the container
- Being fully present and able to witness your own emotions and responses and acknowledging them as well
- Being an energetic “guardian” of the space to help align others who enter the space and help them adapt to what is in the container
- Being free of judgment, intentionally putting aside your own beliefs, opinions, agenda, and desires for a situation
Holding space, in essence, is a way of creating and holding the energy of a physical space and the people and experiences within it, and holding those things to the highest good.
You can watch my demonstration of holding space in my vlog post here.
How do doulas get so good at this stuff?
As I mentioned earlier, doulas often get good at doing by doing.
There aren’t many situations in life where you have to rely on instinct because all the other tools we typically use — communication, knowledge, behavioral norms — aren’t available.
But there’s something that precedes being thrown into a space where you have to just be.
And that is the thing that compels someone to be a doula in the first place.
It’s either a love of babies, birthing people, pregnancy, families, reproductive justice, empowerment, lactation, child development, or something related to the fascinating process of ushering people through emotionally challenging times in life.
No one thrives as a doula without something afire in their belly or heart. You just cannot take someone who is not interested in birth and convince them to hold space for hours beside a moaning person in a birth tub while listening to Enya.
So there’s an underlying affinity to these nuances — felt sense, sitting in the unknown, holding space, and being present — that gets refined in the process of becoming.
That is what doulas nurture in themselves and in their clients.
That is what I nurture in doulas.
Have you been sitting on the threshold of becoming a birth doula? My friend and colleague, Amty Kramer of Thresholds, and I are collaborating to bring both of our doula trainings for the price of one to aspiring doulas.
- 40-module online birth doula training course
- Unlimited monthly Q&A calls with Carrie
- 4-live Zoom sessions with Amity that cover emotional intelligence and relationship skills
- Community forum for 24/7/365 problem-solving, connection, networking, and resourcing
- Inclusive content and approach to birthwork
- Taught through a social justice and anti-racism lens
