This article presents theoretical and clinical material to show how nonverbal core affective experience is a central constituent of the sense of being and, despite a failed caregiver surround, serves throughout life as a persisting, guiding source of continuity. In the course of the article, I explicate the crucial distinction, often obscured, between felt thinking and thinking about feeling. When these two phenomena are conflated, an emotionally informed sense of being-in-the-world and, with it, the experience of emotional vulnerability is covered over with cognitive reflections about it that distance the experience and explain away the meanings embedded within.