Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT)

Teaching the Body to Know Itself

Price and Hooven’s 2018 paper presents the theoretical foundations and clinical approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT), a manualized intervention designed to develop interoceptive awareness as a primary pathway to emotion regulation. The paper occupies a strategically important position in the embodied therapy literature: it takes the neurobiological construct of interoception — which researchers like Craig and Khalsa have identified as foundational to emotional experience and self-awareness — and translates it into a teachable, sequenced, clinically applicable skill set. MABT is not a theory about interoception; it is a method for restoring it.

Three Skills of Embodied Awareness

The paper articulates MABT’s three-phase skill development with clinical precision. Body literacy is the foundational skill: the capacity to identify, locate, and describe internal body sensations — to know that the tightness in the chest is not merely “stress” but a specific pattern of muscular tension with specific spatial boundaries and specific qualitative characteristics. Body connection is the sustained attention to internal experience over time — not a momentary check-in but an ongoing, stable awareness of the body’s internal landscape as it shifts and changes. Body regulation is the capstone: the capacity to use interoceptive awareness itself as a regulatory strategy — to notice rising activation, attend to it somatically rather than cognitively, and allow the body’s self-regulatory processes to restore equilibrium.

The Clinical Population

MABT was developed specifically for populations whose interoceptive capacity has been disrupted by trauma, substance use, or chronic pain — individuals who have learned, through necessity or habit, to disconnect from their own bodies. The traumatized individual dissociates from visceral sensation because sensation has been associated with threat. The substance-using individual overrides interoceptive signals because the body’s messages (hunger, fatigue, pain, emotional need) have been chemically suppressed or replaced. The chronic pain patient catastrophizes interoceptive signals because every sensation has become a potential harbinger of suffering. MABT addresses these populations by rebuilding interoceptive capacity from the ground up, starting with the most basic skill — noticing that the body has sensations at all — and progressing toward the complex capacity to use those sensations as information for self-regulation.

The Depth Psychological Connection

MABT’s approach resonates with a lineage of embodied therapeutic practices within the depth tradition. Gendlin’s Focusing, developed within the humanistic-existential tradition, cultivated the “felt sense” — a bodily-formed, pre-verbal knowing that functions as a guide to emotional truth. Fogel’s “embodied self-awareness” describes the ongoing, moment-to-moment capacity to sense the body’s internal states as a foundation for selfhood. Woodman’s body-soul workshops used movement, breath, and clay to reconnect women with their embodied experience as a pathway to individuation. MABT synthesizes these traditions with contemporary interoceptive neuroscience, providing a framework that is both clinically rigorous and somatically deep.

Training Interoception, Restoring the Self

The paper’s most consequential claim is that interoceptive awareness is trainable — that individuals who have lost contact with their bodies can learn, through structured therapeutic practice, to sense, sustain attention to, and regulate through their internal experience. This is not a minor therapeutic gain. If interoception is the foundation of emotional experience, self-awareness, and the capacity for relationship — as the neuroscientific literature increasingly suggests — then the restoration of interoceptive capacity is not one therapeutic goal among many but the foundation upon which all other therapeutic work depends.