Steadiness: Proprioception and Psychological Stability
Proprioception is the body’s quiet cartographer. It is the internal sense that continuously draws and redraws a map of where we are in space (Proske & Gandevia, 2012). Without requiring sight or thought, it allows us to know the position of our limbs, the angle of our joints, the sway of our spine. It is how you can scratch your back without looking, walk across a dark room without stumbling, or catch a falling glass with a snap reaction. It whispers feedback from receptors in our muscles, joints, and fascia, telling the brain: This is where you are. This is what you’re doing.
When proprioception is intact, the body moves with fluidity and precision. We don’t think about where our elbows are when we reach; we just reach. But when it is disrupted, our movements become disjointed. This can occur through injury, illness, or neurological dysfunction. In those moments, we overshoot or undershoot, feel disconnected from our own limbs, or hesitate. We become self-conscious not in the psychological sense, but in a literal way: conscious of the physical self as something out of sync. The grace of movement is replaced by awkward hyper-awareness. We are no longer oriented.
This sense – the embodied internal map – mirrors something essential in the psyche. Proprioception is to the body what self-awareness is to the mind. It is our ability to orient ourselves internally, to locate the shape and edges of our emotions, motives, beliefs, and reactions. Just as physical proprioception allows for balance, coordination, and adjustment, psychological self-awareness allows us to navigate social spaces, emotional undercurrents, and personal challenges with coherence and intention.
Embedded deep within this metaphor is the concept of core schema. The term refers to the cognitive and emotional patterns we form early in life that silently guide how we interpret ourselves and others (McArthur et al., 2019). Our psychological map. These schemas, shaped by experience, act as a kind of emotional proprioception. They give us a working model of the world: I am lovable, or I am not safe, or I must please others to belong. And much like the body’s map, these internal frameworks operate beneath our awareness, influencing our behaviors, decisions, and relationships.
But just as a distorted proprioceptive map can cause imbalance, a rigid or inaccurate core schema can disorient our inner world. If someone learned early that their worth is tied to performance, their “map” might always point toward overachievement, even in situations where rest or vulnerability would be more adaptive (Crocker et al., 2003). If one had internalized the belief that expressing emotion leads to rejection, they may habitually suppress feelings, unaware that their internal compass is misaligned (Shipman et al., 2003). The result is often a quiet ache – a sense of disconnection, confusion, or exhaustion that arises not from what is happening around us, but from how we are internally navigating it.
To move through the world with grace and resilience, we need both maps to function well. Proprioception keeps us physically upright; self-awareness keeps us emotionally grounded. Both allow for adjustment through subtle and continuous recalibrations while navigating the world. And both are learned – not fixed traits, but capacities that evolve through feedback, attention, and practice.
Improvement is Possible
One of the most empowering aspects of proprioception is its trainability. Dancers, athletes, and martial artists continually work to cultivate it. Cultivation cannot happen by sitting still and analyzing movement, but by moving, noticing, and refining. Awareness is built through repetition, rhythm, correction, and failure. The same is true for psychological self-awareness. We do not become more attuned to ourselves by overthinking in isolation, but by moving through relationships, challenges, and experiences with curiosity and reflection. We learn by noticing what we feel, naming it, and experimenting with how we respond. We can build or enhance the inner map through coaching, journaling, honest conversation, and even stillness. And we refine it over a lifetime.
There is also a kind of forgiveness in both systems. The body, when injured, learns to compensate. It recruits new muscles, rewires signals, adapts. The mind does too. When our early environments distort our internal maps through broken trust, or “learning” that love is conditional, we survive by drawing the best map we can with the tools we have. These schemas may limit us, but they were trying to protect us – they were trying to make sense of our experience. The work of adulthood is not to erase those old maps, but to update them – to say, with grace and gratitude, This path once kept me safe. But I no longer need to walk it.
In the clinical world, interventions like somatic therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and cognitive behavioral therapy support the idea that healing comes through awareness, not avoidance. Whether tuning into the breath or challenging an automatic thought, we are engaging the process of re-mapping. We are locating ourselves more accurately, learning to sense the difference between reaction and response, between being triggered and being present enough to make a thoughtful choice.
In this process, a paradox emerges: steadiness is not the absence of movement, but the integration of action, awareness, and intention. The body does not stay balanced by standing still, but by making countless micro-adjustments while moving through varied environments. The psyche is no different. Emotional balance does not come from avoiding discomfort or fixing every flaw, but from learning to stay present with ourselves while in motion, especially through challenge. It is the difference between being swept away by emotion and knowing how to ride the wave without losing our footing.
In a culture obsessed with speed and performance, both proprioception and self-awareness remind us to tune back into ourselves. To tune in. To notice. To trust the wisdom of the body and the evolving truth of the self. Just as a gymnast finds her center on the beam not by freezing, but by moving with precision, exploring and orienting along the way, we too find our psychological center through movement. We have to move. We have to engage with life, fall off balance, and return, again and again, to ourselves. Steady.
References
Crocker, J., Luhtanen, R. K., Cooper, M. L., & Bouvrette, A. (2003). Contingencies of self-worth in college students: Theory and measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 894–909. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.894
McArthur, B. A., Burke, T. A., Connolly, S. L., Olino, T. M., Lumley, M. N., Abramson, L. Y., & Alloy, L. B. (2019). A longitudinal investigation of cognitive self‑schemas across adolescent development. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(3), 635–647. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-00981-1
Proske, U., & Gandevia, S. C. (2012). The proprioceptive senses: Their roles in signaling body shape, body position and movement, and muscle force. Physiological Reviews, 92(4), 1651–1697. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00048.2011
Shipman, K. L., Zeman, J., & Champion, K. (2003). Childhood emotional invalidation and adult psychological distress: The mediating role of emotional inhibition. Child Abuse & Neglect, 27(2), 199–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0145-2134(02)00536-7