when we shift our bodies, we shift our emotions

Stanley Keleman is the founder of Formative Psychology™. His work is based on the premise that the physical shape that humans form using their bodies is inextricably correlated with our emotions and our psychological reality.

“These shapes – which form through inheritance, aging, behavior, feelings, and response to challenges – give rise to emotions, thoughts, and experiences.”

Feeling follows form.

The exciting part is that people can learn to influence the shapes that we’ve inherited and learned, and become creators of our personal experience.

In 1986, Stanley Keleman described the 4 somatic body types in his seminal book Emotional Anatomy: The Structure of Experience:

Body Type 1: Rigid

Body Type 2: Dense

Body Type 3: Manic

Body Type 4: Porous

Illustration of the 4 Somatic Body Types from Emotional Anatomy, book by Stanley Keleman

In my search for 1 easy graphic to understand the complexity of the 4 Somatic Body Types, as described in Emotional Anatomy, I couldn’t find any. And so I created my own.

What you see below describes each body types with a memorable metaphor (a hummingbird, a leaky hose, a fortress wall, a scared deer), the valuable function behind each body type, and the corresponding conversational move that is associated with that body type.

Illustration from Emotional Anatomy

I was first exposed to Stanley’s work in 2018. (read more about that experience)