The Story Is Not Where the Pain Lives

Decades ago, when I was in college, I knew someone I will call Rita. She had a troubled past, and everyone around her knew it, because she had no reservations about telling her story at any opportunity. I listened. And I listened again. I did my best to really hear her. But it never seemed to be enough. She would tell the same story, in the same pained voice, at the next opportunity. I felt compassion for her, and at the same time I found myself wanting to escape, not wanting to hear the same story again, going nowhere. Perhaps you have known a Rita. Perhaps you have been one. I know I have been Rita.

I have been working with people for a long time. I started in NLP, developed Core Transformation in the late 1980s, and Wholeness Work has been my main work for almost two decades. In all those years, the thing I keep returning to is not what people focus on when they talk about their experience, but where, exactly, in their experience the change actually happens. That is what this piece is about.

There is no other reality than experienced reality

Whatever you are dealing with right now, you are dealing with it as experience. The situation reaches you as experience. The other person reaches you as experience. Even your own feelings and body sensations reach you as sensation. There is no second route in.

This is not a denial that other people exist or that the world is real. It is a statement about access. The only way you ever encounter any of it is as experience. Which means that when we work on something inside ourselves, we are working on a structure within experienced reality. That is the only place the work can happen. There is no other workshop.

Once you accept this, a question becomes interesting. What is experienced reality? Is it one thing? Or does it have components?

Experienced reality is layered

Experienced reality is not one thing. It has layers, and each layer behaves differently. Anyone who has done inner work has felt this without necessarily having language for it.

You can think of a knot that a rope has gotten itself tied into. If the knot is located near the surface, near the ends of the rope, you can easily find the end and undo it. If the knot is tightened somewhere in the middle, no amount of fiddling with the ends of that rope will undo that knot. You have to find the specific loop that is holding everything else in place. And if there is a series of knots, and the entire length of rope is taut, one may need to release the tension along the whole length before any single loop will yield.

Experience is like this. Experience has layers, and each layer is a different kind of knot, held in place by a different kind of tension. Working at the wrong layer is pulling on the ends of a rope whose tight point sits somewhere deeper.

So what are these “layers of experience”?

Story

The outer layer is the story. The narrative: who did what, or what happened, and what it means to you. It is the layer most people live in most of the time, and the layer most therapy operates on. When you describe your situation to a friend, or write in your journal, you are usually working here. The story is real. It captures something. It is also only one layer, not the whole of it. Usually the story has an inner movie the person replays in their head, and then describes verbally to other people.

Labeled feeling

Beneath the story is how we feel about what happened. This includes the labeled feeling: sadness, anger, anxiety, shame. Sharing feelings can feel more emotionally satisfying than just describing what happened. It can feel like we are being more real, more in tune with what we actually feel. But labels are still labels, categories we drop our experience into so we can recognize it and tell someone about it. Anyone who has tried to describe a difficult emotion accurately has noticed that the available words are coarser than what is actually happening. You say “I feel anxious,” and somewhere there is a small knowing that the word is not quite the thing.

Direct experience

Going deeper, we can move from labeled feeling to direct experience: the actual sensation, before it has been named. Heaviness in the chest. Buzzing in the belly. A density behind the eyes that has not been called anything yet. Movement. Weight. Temperature. Granular, specific, generally pre-verbal, though easy to verbalize once you are sensing it. Language captures this well when it lets go of categories: “I have something on my chest,” “I am burning with desire,” “it felt like my heart broke into pieces.” This is the somatic layer, and it is the first layer at which something can actually shift. It is where Focusing, Hakomi, and somatic therapy do their work.

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Up to this point, each layer describes the content of our experience — what we are experiencing. The next two layers describe something different. They describe the experiencer.

The I

The fourth layer is the self that does the experiencing. This is the level where my own work begins to differentiate from most other methods.

As we go about our day, our attention moves among different images, sounds, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. I notice the person I am talking to, I notice the room I am in, I notice a stress sensation, or a feeling of joy. Yet in the background, there is an “I” that is experiencing all these things. That I is a kind of interface. Nobody can say what the I is, exactly. Yet we all experience that we are an I, a self. We use the word constantly in our speech: “I’m doing this,” “I’m feeling that.” If we can find the I that holds a problem, then meeting that I gently is often enough to dissolve the problem it was holding. It can provide surprisingly quick relief that also feels complete. Not just a quick fix.

This is what sages have pointed at throughout the ages, and it turns out to be rational, born from a real understanding of the structure of human experience.

When we find the I and sense its quality directly, where it is located, whether it feels airy or dense, whether it is vibrating or still, we are no longer anywhere near body sensation. We are experiencing the self that does the experiencing, and sensing it directly. This can sound abstract. It is not. It does not start with thought. It starts with location.

Awareness

Finally there is Awareness itself: the capacity through which any of the above is registered. You can easily recognize right now that awareness is present through the body. If something touches your shoulder, there is an automatic awareness of it. You do not have to send your awareness there to check. You just notice the touch because awareness is already present, throughout the entire body.

And if right now you pause to notice the space all around you, awareness is also present there. If a sound comes from the left, or someone calls your name from the right, there is an automatic receiving of the sound. You don’t have to send awareness out to get the sound. There is just an automatic receiving of it, because awareness is already present through the space around us, in every direction.

And in our subjective experience it is limitless. It has no edge or border. That becomes clear when we check within. Directing our attention toward awareness in this way is usually soothing, without trying to be calm. It just happens on its own.

Operating at the layer where healing becomes easy

You can spend a year reframing your relationship with your father. Working on the story, refining the narrative, finding new perspectives. The story shifts, and something genuinely changes at that layer. And then his name comes up in conversation, and the same tightness arrives in your chest, just as it always did, as if the year of work had not happened. The work was real. It simply was not reaching the layer where the tightness lived.

You can spend years naming and accepting your anxiety. Sitting with it, making peace with it, expressing gratitude for it in your journal. The label gets softer. You relate to it differently. And yet the underlying sensation, the actual buzzing or pressure or hollowness, is still doing what it has always done. The work was real. It also did not reach the layer the sensation was on.

Just try it yourself for a moment. Bring to mind a name, or a situation, that you have already done real work on: years of therapy, or a lot of thinking, or long conversations with people who knew. Something whose story has genuinely changed for you. Now notice what actually happens in your body when the name arrives. If there is still a tightness, a subtle bracing behind the sternum, a small hardening somewhere, that tightness is not held in the story. It is held one or two layers beneath.

This is what many practitioners are intuiting when they describe a client as plateauing. The client is doing the work. They understand themselves. They have insight. And still something is not moving. We tend to say integration takes time. Often, though, what keeps the experience stuck is on a different layer than the work has been reaching.

A story can integrate by being told differently, but often it does not. Meaning does not dissolve by being acknowledged. A sensation does not respond to argument or negotiation. A small I does not release by being reasoned with. The kind of contact that works at one layer does not work at another, and confusing them is most of what makes inner work feel mysterious or vague, when it is neither.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has long been the dominant evidence-based therapy in most of the West, and it is still the form most often prescribed and reimbursed. It operates on the story we tell ourselves, the patterns of thought, the labels we give experience. It does real work there. For some people that is enough. For others, the story shifts and the unease beneath stays where it was. Even within the evidence-based tradition, the search has been quietly moving toward what sits beneath that layer: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy, somatic and parts-based approaches now entering mainstream practice. The field is recognizing that something deeper is needed.

Most of this is not new

The recognition that there is a layer beneath language, where the actual movement happens, is not original to me. People have been working at that layer in many traditions.

Contemplative traditions worked with the distinction between experience itself and the conceptual overlay we place on top of it long before Western psychology had a name for it. I do not claim to know Dzogchen from the inside, but it is one tradition, in the Tibetan lineage, that has explored this distinction for a very long time. Various shamanic traditions worked with related distinctions in their own vocabularies. I am not saying these traditions are doing what I do. They are not, and would not want to be described that way. But the recognition that there is a layer beneath conceptual mind where something different is possible is a very old one, worked with carefully across many cultures, long before twentieth-century Western therapy began to circle back to it.

Eugene Gendlin saw this most clearly in the modern Western context. His work on Focusing, going back to the 1960s, was built on exactly this distinction. He called it the felt sense, the bodily, pre-verbal knowing of a situation, and he showed that something can shift there that cannot be reached by talking. Anyone who has done Focusing knows the moment when the felt sense changes and something opens. That moment is not at the story layer. Gendlin had that map. I came to my own version of it later, by a different route.

Hakomi, developed by Ron Kurtz, works at the same layer through a different door. Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine’s work, also operates beneath the verbal layer. The body-psychotherapy tradition more broadly, going back to Reich, has pointed at this for decades. More recently, the nervous-system-regulation conversation that has spread through somatic practice and into popular discourse names parts of the same territory in its own vocabulary. Each has its own way of getting beneath the words. Each has produced real results.

What I do differently

Where my work goes further is at the fourth and fifth layers, the I and Awareness. Once someone can locate the small I that is holding a particular experience in place, and once that I can be met by Awareness rather than merely observed, something releases that no amount of contact with sensation alone will produce. In Core Transformation I approach this through parts of us and the states they are seeking. In Wholeness Work I go to the I directly. Both operate beneath the content. Neither needs the story to be told. The change does not happen in the telling. It happens at the I, and in the Awareness that meets it.

Rita

I think of Rita sometimes. For years I believed the kindest thing I could do was listen harder, that if I could just hear the story well enough, something in her would finally be met. I was working at the only layer either of us knew was there. The story was accurate. Her voice carried the pain faithfully. But the pain was never in the story. It was one layer deeper, in a place the telling could describe but never reach. No amount of telling on her part, or listening on mine, was ever going to land where the thing actually lived.

I was listening to the story. The pain simply lived a layer beneath it, and was held in place by a layer beneath that.

- Connirae Andreas

Written in dialogue with Peter van Rhoon

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A footnote. In this article I talk about the layers of experience from content, to the experience of the limited self (the “I”), to Awareness. There are quite a few additional layers mapped out in Wholeness Work, along with the ways to meet and transform the “knots” found at each additional layer. See the book, The Wholeness Work Essential Guide, Level 1: Healing & Awakening, for a fleshed-out version of how to find and dissolve the “I”s, plus how to find and dissolve the next layers of the unconscious that need to be met for those continuing on the journey of healing and transformation.

Originally published on Connirae’s Substack. Subscribe there to get new reflections in your inbox.