How to Feel — A book by Michael Donnell

There is a difference between knowing your feelings and actually feeling them.

Notify me at release
Cover of How to Feel by Michael Donnell

People arrive at this book from different directions.

Some have spent years in therapy, or in serious self-reflection, developing real self-awareness — and still find that in the moments that matter most, something closes. The feeling they can describe so fluently remains somehow just out of reach.

Others have watched themselves move through their closest relationships on autopilot, present to the shape of the conversation but not to the person in front of them — and known, somewhere, that this is not what they want.

Some have simply lived with a low-level sense of numbness, a feeling that life is passing at a slight remove: present enough to function, but not quite fully inhabited.

What these experiences share is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It’s that understanding our feelings and actually feeling them are different skills, and most of us were never taught the second one.

From the book

What I failed to understand, for longer than I care to admit, was that learning to feel is not preparation for living; it is living, and the two are finally, irreducibly the same thing.
The heart, it turns out, is not a selective instrument. It cannot be tuned to receive only joy while filtering out sorrow, cannot be calibrated to let in love while keeping out fear.

— How to Feel

About the book.

Most books about emotional life offer insight: an account of where your patterns come from and what they mean. This one begins from the suspicion that insight, however true, has not been enough. You can understand exactly why you do what you do and still find yourself doing it, still unable to reach the feeling underneath. That gap is not a failure of will or intelligence. It is a skill that was never taught.

How to Feel treats feeling as that skill. Drawing on somatic traditions and the science of how the body senses its own states, it describes how emotions actually move through us, why they so often stall before they finish, and what it takes to stay with them long enough to feel them through. The capacities it lays out build on one another: noticing sensation, letting it move, finding ground, staying when everything in you wants to leave.

It is not a program or a set of techniques to apply. It is a practice for becoming more fully alive to your own experience, which turns out to mean feeling more of everything, not only the parts you would choose. What it offers is a clearer sense of why the usual approaches leave something untouched, and a description, written from inside the same difficulty, of what becomes available when you stop managing your experience and begin to inhabit it.

Notify me at release

Some questions people bring to this book.

Why do I understand my emotions but still can’t actually feel them?
This is probably the most common thing people bring to this book, and it points to something most of us were never told: understanding your feelings and actually feeling them are different skills. They draw on different capacities, different kinds of attention, different relationships to the body. Most of the work people do on themselves, whether in therapy or in serious self-reflection, builds the first skill. The second is rarely taught directly. How to Feel addresses that gap.
I’ve been in therapy for years and still feel emotionally stuck. Will this help?
That depends on what kind of work you’ve done. Most talk-based therapy operates primarily at the level of insight and meaning, helping you understand where your patterns came from and why they persist. That work is genuinely valuable, and this book doesn’t argue against it. But insight and emotional access aren’t the same thing, and building one doesn’t automatically build the other. If you’ve done real therapeutic work and still find yourself hitting a wall, what follows is likely to feel like new territory.
What is somatic psychology?
Somatic psychology is the study of how psychological and emotional experience lives in the body: how feelings arise as physical sensations before we find words for them, how the body holds what the mind hasn’t fully processed, and how working with the body directly can reach what talking alone sometimes can’t. How to Feel draws on somatic and body-based approaches, but it’s written for a general audience with no background in the field. The concepts are taught through experience rather than explanation. You don’t need to know anything going in.
Is How to Feel a self-help book?
It was written for anyone, not just people in clinical settings, so in that sense yes. But it doesn’t read the way most self-help does. There are no frameworks to memorize, no steps, no worksheets. The book works more by changing how you pay attention than by giving you new information to think about. Readers who have found most self-help too simplified or too prescriptive tend to find this a different kind of thing.
Who is this book for?
For people who feel, at some level, that there is more available to them emotionally than they have been able to access. That can look like numbness, or a sense of life passing at a slight remove. It can look like difficulty staying present in close relationships, or a pattern of either intellectualizing feelings or being flooded by them. It can look like years of serious inner work that has brought real understanding and yet something still feels just out of reach. If any of that is familiar, this book was written for you.
Who is Michael Donnell?
Michael Donnell is a licensed psychologist based in Austin, Texas, with more than twenty years of clinical experience working with individuals, couples, and groups. His training integrates psychoanalytic foundations with somatic and body-based approaches, including Somatic Experiencing and Radical Aliveness. How to Feel grew from his clinical work and from his own long reckoning with the gap between understanding feelings and actually being able to feel them. He writes about the inner life at From Closer In.
What does it mean to actually feel an emotion?
When most people say they are feeling something, they mean they are aware of it. They can name it, explain it, maybe trace where it came from. What this book points toward is something more direct: the felt sense of the emotion itself, as a physical event happening in the body in real time. That distinction can sound abstract before you have experienced it. The book is designed to help you experience it, not just understand it.

Why I wrote it.

For years I thought the problem was that I didn’t understand myself well enough. I was a psychologist by training, already years into the work, and I had done a great deal of my own. I could name my feelings. I could explain where they came from. And still, when it mattered most, I couldn’t quite reach them. I remember a particular afternoon with my own sadness, unable to feel it directly, watching myself either performing it or sliding into something that felt more like wallowing, and asking a question I did not know how to answer: how do I actually feel this?

It took years to find an answer. When I did, it came not from my academic training but from teachers working in the body, in traditions that turned out to be teachable, practical, and nothing like what I had been led to expect. What I learned from them became the material of this book.

How to Feel is the book I wish I had found earlier. I wrote it for my clients, and for anyone who has come up against the same question I did, and wondered where to go next.

Credentials

Michael Donnell is a licensed psychologist with two decades of clinical practice and extensive training in somatic and body-based approaches.

Be first to hear

Notify me at release.

How to Feel arrives November 2026. Leave your address and I’ll write when the book is out. Nothing before then, nothing after.

Infrequent. Unpromoted. Easy to leave.