I was recently listening to a conversation with Peter Levine, where he briefly referenced Nina Bull. The name caught my attention. Bull is not someone who appears often in contemporary training or writing, yet Levine spoke of her as an early influence on how emotion and bodily organisation came to be understood.

I went looking for her work. What I found was familiar and striking. Familiar because many of her ideas are already embedded in somatic and relational practice. Striking because she articulated them with clarity and experimental rigor long before they became common currency.

Bull’s attitude theory offers a way of thinking about emotion that still sharpens how we understand posture, physiology, and feeling.

Emotion Begins as Preparation

Bull’s central claim is simple and demanding.

Emotion does not begin as a feeling.
It begins as a bodily preparation for action.

She used the term attitude to describe this preparation. An attitude is the way muscles, posture, and breath organise in readiness to do something. It is not thought, not emotion, and not yet action. It is the body poised.

By the time a person says “I felt angry” or “I felt ashamed,” the body has usually already shifted. Bull insisted that this shift is not secondary. It is the starting point.

Feeling as Held Action

Bull proposed that subjective emotion arises when a prepared action does not complete.

If the body prepares and the action follows, experience tends to move. If the action is restrained, delayed, or diverted, emotion intensifies and becomes more durable.

This reframes emotion as process rather than state. Feeling is the experience of a body organised for action that remains unresolved.

Once this is seen, a range of familiar emotional patterns begin to look different.

Sorrow and Restrained Crying

Take sorrow.

When something painful happens, the body often organises toward crying. Breathing changes. The throat tightens. The chest softens. If crying happens, the experience usually comes in waves and settles.

When crying is restrained, the preparation remains. The body stays organised toward an action that does not complete. In that holding, sorrow deepens and lingers.

From Bull’s perspective, sorrow does not cause the body to prepare to cry. Sorrow is what arises when the preparation to cry is held.

This shifts attention away from managing feeling and toward noticing what the body is ready to do and unable to finish.

Action Without Awareness

The same lens helps clarify the opposite pattern. Someone “flies into a rage.”

In many of these moments, the body prepares and discharges almost immediately. There is little capacity to remain with the preparatory state. Action arrives before awareness.

This is why people often say afterward that they did not realise how angry they were. The emotion had little time to become conscious because the action completed so quickly.

Bull’s theory distinguishes between anger that is held and anger that discharges, without assuming one is more regulated than the other.

What differs is the capacity to stay with the preparatory state.

Shame and Unfinished Withdrawal

Shame shows a different shape.

Shame is typically accompanied by a bodily preparation to withdraw. The head lowers. The gaze turns away. Breathing reduces. The body pulls back from contact.

If withdrawal completes, the moment may pass. When withdrawal is repeatedly inhibited, the bodily attitude remains. The action never finishes.

Over time, shame becomes less situational and more patterned. It arises quickly and shapes posture, attention, and relationship. From Bull’s perspective, this is not primarily a belief about the self. It is a motor organisation that has been held for too long.

This helps explain why insight or reassurance alone rarely shifts shame. Without change in how the body organises toward contact, the emotional experience stays available.

When One Emotion Appears in Place of Another

Bull’s theory also clarifies experiences that are often described as emotional confusion.

Many people notice that when anger begins to rise, tears appear instead. Anger prepares the body to move outward. Crying prepares the body to fold inward.

In environments where anger was unsafe or discouraged, the preparatory organisation for anger may be interrupted. The body shifts toward a form of expression that was permitted. Tears emerge.

This does not mean the person is mistaken about what they feel. It reflects which actions were historically allowed to complete.

The resulting emotion can feel unsatisfying, not because it is wrong, but because it does not match the original readiness for action.

What Bull Actually Demonstrated

Bull did not rely on speculation. In her experimental work, participants were guided into specific postural and muscular attitudes.

When participants adopted particular bodily organisations, corresponding emotional experiences followed, even without emotional prompting. When participants attempted to maintain an emotion while shifting into an incompatible posture, the emotion could not be sustained.

Bull’s conclusion was precise. Posture and muscle tone are not expressions of emotion. They are part of the conditions that allow emotion to arise and persist.

This is a stronger and more limited claim than is often made today.

Posture, Physiology, and The Limits of Change

Bull’s work is sometimes summarised as “change posture and you change emotion.” Her theory does not support that shortcut.

Posture matters because it participates in a wider motor organisation that includes breath, muscle tone, orientation toward others, and readiness for action. Changing posture can disrupt that organisation, but it does not automatically reorganise it.

This explains why posture-based interventions sometimes feel helpful and sometimes feel superficial. If posture shifts while the broader pattern remains intact, emotion reorganises quickly.

How This Changes How We Understand Emotion

Bull’s work underpins much of what is now taken for granted in somatic and relational practice. Her influence is visible wherever attention is paid to incomplete action, impulse, and the bodily organisation of emotion, even when her name is absent.

She offers is a way of seeing. Instead of asking what someone feels, her work directs attention to what the body is prepared to do, what is being held, and what has repeatedly been interrupted.

That shift changes how emotion is understood. It also places responsibility back on careful observation rather than quick intervention.