Earlier today a client and I were discussing emotions. We were compiling a list of possible feelings. To the list we had generated she added "fat." I said, "well, fat isnt' really a feeling." She looked at me suspiciously.

Earlier today a client and I were discussing emotions. We were compiling a list of possible feelings. To the list we had generated she added "fat." I said, "well, fat isn't really a feeling." She looked at me suspiciously.

Then she said, "That's ridiculous. I feel fat almost all the time. Of course it's a feeling." We went back and forth a few times, me insisting it wasn't an emotion, she insisting it was. I wondered how long we could continue like this. She certainly had more energy than I did, and looked as if she could go on until I either changed my mind or fell out of my chair from exhaustion.

But after a minute she became quiet and asked, "OK, if fat isn't a feeling, why do I truly feel fat so much of the time?" Her question led to a very interesting discussion of the function of "feeling fat." She began to realize that the moment she experienced any emotion she immediately had the thought that she was fat. "Feeling fat" was taking the place of feeling any of her emotions; it was her "default setting" for dealing with emotions. 

As she thought about it, my client was amazed at how often she used this default setting- "hundreds of times a day." She also found an answer to a question that has plagued her: why don't I know what I feel? She could now understand that she didn't let herself experience her emotions long enough to identify what each of them might be- within an instant of any emotion showing itself, it became obscured by her "feeling fat."