Neurodivergence & emotions: what’s really going on?

Neurodivergent clients often speak about challenges with identifying and experiencing emotions, where some extreme experiences are described as Alexithymia. Emotional dysregulation is common with being neurodivergent, and the effects disabling. But how do ND people really experience emotions and how can we talk about it differently, so we can help reduce the anxiety and stress created by overwhelmed nervous systems.

Often talking therapies are focused on the pursuit of having a client state what specific emotion they are currently feeling, but does that really work for ND people?  Here are some thoughts about what might be going on for an ND client.

Emotions don’t exist in isolation

This is something I’ve always struggled with – and I feel that neurotypical people don’t have the same kind of struggle (just my observation, this may or may not be the case). I never really have just one emotion at a time. When someone says “how are you feeling” I will tell them the most positive element, but not the other, equally present feelings, or the multiple contexts popping off in my head. When I think about how I’m feeling today, I can tell you I feel content, but also concerned, anxious, hopeful and resigned, all at the same time. To try to describe how I’m actually feeling would need me to say what each relational context is, with the related somatic experiences, which would take forever, and most definitely would not be the linear monologue I feel many NT people expect.   

So when we speak with ND people, and they struggle to identify an emotion, are they actually thinking “there isn’t one that fits all of these things”, or if prompted by a therapist, “that emotion you’ve identified, it’s right, but it’s not the full picture”. It's easy to imagine how an ND client might be disabled by this kind of conversation.  They are being asked to say how they feel, but how they feel is connected to so many other thoughts and experiences and contexts, that it’s almost impossible to extract and identify specific emotions.  For me, it’s a bit like trying to say which bit of a cake the egg is. Just let me tell you about the cake…

Emotions are embodied

Some neurodivergent people describe feeling emotions, not intellectually, but in their body. This somatic identification of emotion is difficult to articulate using “emotion” words. I can tell you my heart is racing, I have tension in my shoulders, my lower back hurts, or I feel a bit sick, but I couldn’t say if that’s because I’m excited, I’ve sat down too long looking at my phone, or I have a stomach upset.

The separation of brain and body is something NT people seem to be able to do (and are keen to do), in order to simplify and label what is going on for them. But with ND people it’s all interconnected, maybe because our brains are a glorious and complex web of neural pathways, always making connections, often in novel ways. In which case, working with the whole story in which the emotion lives, rather than focusing only on a single part, on emotion, may be more relevant and useful. And encouraging someone to notice when their back hurts, what they were doing before it started hurting, exploring that feeling of tension, considering the whole experience of body and mind, may be more useful than focusing on emotions in isolation.

I’m too overwhelmed to notice specific emotions

As neurodivergent people, we are often overwhelmed by life, whether because of the vast amount of sense data coming at us, or because we are constantly trying to make sense of the neurotypical world we live in, with its often nonsensical or illogical processes, its injustices…and then there are all those unspoken rules. Not to mention the shame we can feel when we are judged by ableist others.

We are very often in a high-stress state, and our nervous systems have us in permanent fight, flight or freeze mode. There’s just no way we can cut through all that pumping blood and surging hormones to actually notice emotions – there’s too much “YOU’RE IN DANGER!” stuff going on. We are living in a state of perpetual anxiety driven by our nervous system’s response to threats to our safety. We may have been in this state for most of our lives – in which case of course we haven’t learned to notice and identify our specific emotions, we’ve been too busy keeping ourselves safe. We need to be calm and relaxed enough to be able to look inside and notice what is going on for us at an emotional level.

Working with our parasympathetic nervous system, engaging our theta state, so that we learn to de-escalate ourselves enough to look inside, may well be a very important part of the therapeutic process for ND people. Luckily many of us have an excellent ability to achieve this state, when we focus on something we love – engaging our interest in the things we love relaxes us, so why don’t we do more of this in therapy.

Lets talk about this together

Free2BMe’s Spicy Spaces provide a place to deep dive into topics like this and consider together how we might better understand our neurodivergent clients, and ourselves in relation to them. 

We’ll be looking at neurodivergence and emotion on Saturday, 17 February.

In this session we may consider (based on what the group agrees):

• Is neurodivergent anxiety different? Is it neurological anxiety, which is closely tied to the nervous system rather than unease, worry and fear? Can we use this concept as a way to understand overwhelm?

• How can we talk about emotions and embodied feelings with clients who identify with alexithymia?

• How can clients manage the frustration of the double empathy problem?

• How can ND therapists manage their own emotions in their work with clients?

Book your place here – it would be great to discuss this with you.

 Cover image by Bagus Bramantya