How to Feel Your Feelings and Why You Don’t
Updated: Jul 27
Miranda Jane is a Neurodivergent-Affirming Somatic Coach and Consultant, specializing in the masked and late-identified autistic and ADHD experience. Their personal crusade is to help recently identified AuDHDers understand and appreciate themselves, mind, body, and nervous system!
Many neurodivergent (ND) people have a hard time feeling their feelings. On its face, this is a curious concept, after all, it's right in the name. Feelings should be easy to feel. There are several reasons why autistic and ADHD people don't readily access their feelings, and it is a skill you can practice and improve at.
The physicality behind feelings: Interoception and alexithymia
Interoception is the brain's ability to perceive bodily signals like thirst and hunger, physical cues that let you know what you need. It provides you with the ability to regulate your physical and emotional health, using sensations in the body as data about what is needed. Many autistics and ADHDers have trouble with interoception. Sometimes we can’t feel the sensations at all or get overwhelmed by them. Often, we struggle to associate the sensation with the underlying need.
Alexithymia is a similar condition, also very commonly experienced by NDs, in which we have a hard time identifying and expressing our emotions. For years, I built resentment against my partner for misunderstanding me because he would frequently say I was “anxious” when I was just problem-solving. When I finally asked him why he thought I was anxious, he said, “You’re hunched over, clutching your stomach, chewing your nails, and pacing.” I finally saw it. I was anxious! Very likely my reasoning was impaired by my anxiety, which meant it was time for a snack or a walk and not time to problem-solve. Thank goodness for an outside perspective.
Environmental safety and masking
Masking is another reason we often miss our emotional cues. When one is masking, they are hyper-focused on what other people need and tend to turn the volume down on what they want or need inside. While masking, we are too busy prioritizing what is the safest thing at the moment instead of how we actually feel about the thing that's happening.
Sometimes masking is a conscious choice, but often it’s subconscious. Reflexive masking happens more often with undiagnosed autistic people, where we are essentially “performing human” because we know it hasn’t worked well to just be ourselves. This is instinctive, similar to how animals don't show they're in pain in order to camouflage vulnerability. In the same way, masking reflexively is a camouflage to fit in, and typically, we are not aware we are doing it.
Unaware masking reduces your ability to truly know how you feel about yourself and your feelings. I tend to see this in many new clients who will come to me and say, "How can I be 50 years old and not know who I am?"
Unreliable feelings
There is no right or wrong way to have an emotional experience. But we are often taught in childhood that there is a correct way, and we are doing it wrong. This makes emotions even more confusing. When we are raised to believe that certain reactions are unacceptable, it makes our emotions painful. Think about things like heartbreak, fear, and the physical sensations that go with our big emotions. If we don't have a strong, regulated nervous system, it can be preferable to just not feel them at all.
When we are left alone with shutdowns or meltdowns, our nervous system perceives that emotions are life-threatening. We feel our heart is literally going to break. Or we are literally going to be scared to death. Our brains do these incredible loops and twists to keep us away from these tender places.
One of the first things I do with my clients is work on feeling their feelings safely in their adult bodies, with adult skills, bringing compassion, curiosity, and self-acceptance to their feelings.
Defense mechanisms
Ultimately, the deepest part of the powerful defensive response has been building since infancy, when your system perceived emotional pain to be deadly. Sometimes emotional pain is deadly. Suicidality is one such example. Suicidal thoughts are an urgent and dangerous matter, but you can make peace with them. Please check out my other blog post on suicidal thoughts and actions.
There are also reports of people having profound physical reactions to emotional experiences, like hair going white from shock, or losing vision or hearing suddenly from trauma. While these are extremely rare experiences, for NDs, physical reactions to our internal state can be a part of daily life. When we are afraid or angry, we may experience selective mutism, colloquially known as “going non-verbal.” We melt down. We shut down.
So it makes sense that our defenses against feeling our feelings are strong, and that it will take some active engagement to turn it around safely.
How to start feeling your feelings
To begin to feel your true feelings, start by bringing compassion to your situation. You want to get the information from your emotions, but you struggle to do so. That's hard. You can start by acknowledging that it sucks to have to work so hard to get this information. It will take time and effort. That's okay. Bring the love to yourself, and this will help you with the next steps.
Set the stage by making it safe enough. First, cover your vital organs using a pillow or weighted blanket, or even a stuffed animal. Covering your vital organs is important because your body often responds as if there is a physical threat in the environment, even if the threat is emotional. Just thinking about the threat makes our bodies respond as though a tiger is growling at us.
When you put a pillow over your heart and lungs, your belly, your skull, whatever feels the most threatened, your skin senses the safety and reduces the physical responses. If you'd like, bring in extra sensory-pleasing items that make you feel emotionally safe. These can be things like aromatherapy, a journal and pen, or music. It's whatever you find soothing.
If you're hypermobile, find a way to make your body loose, like a wet noodle. Because hypermobile people are typically very tense, make sure you are not holding or bracing your muscles. You can lie on the floor or make a pillow nest to support whichever limbs feel painful.
Setting your environment this way creates a safe space to access the deeper emotions that hide behind your usual armor. This way, you can be with the emotion without fearing that you will fall into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Next, identify boundaries, like time limits. Commit to not making any changes based on what you learn. This is just information gathering. All thoughts and parts are welcome. There is no judgment. There will be no big consequences during this time.
Bring to mind the closest guess of where your emotions lie. Maybe you are thinking about a certain topic and sensed a flicker of something you couldn't quite understand. Take yourself back to that moment and get curious. Ask yourself what bad thing might happen if you got the full message of your emotions. Listen to your fears. Write them down. See if there is anything else you can do to make it safe enough to hear what your emotions have to say. When the fears are addressed, move towards the topic again. Get curious about what you're feeling. Notice your thoughts and the sensations in your body. Perhaps you've received some feedback from a friend. Tell your feelings that you want to know what they know.
Remember that this is a process. You can repeat this as many times as you'd like until you begin to feel that you are letting your feelings out. As you get to know your emotions, you will get to know yourself in the process.
At ND Friendly Life, we specialize in supporting late-identifying autistic and ADHD adults who recognize these patterns of loss of feeling in their own lives. Through individual coaching, couples and family coaching, and supported self-assessment, we help you understand your neurodivergent nervous system and build a life and career that work with it instead of against it. All sessions are offered online, serving clients in Vermont and worldwide. Curious to learn more? Whenever you're ready, you can learn more or book a free consultation on our website.
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Miranda Jane, Neurodivergent Affirming Nervous System Coach
Miranda Jane is a late-identified autistic ADHDer with a passion for helping people like them lead more pleasurable and fulfilling lives. They work with adults who are “twice exceptional” (2e), in many ways brilliant and in many ways struggling to function and disabled in their everyday lives. This particular blend of special skills and (often invisible) disability is particularly dangerous, leaving those who are 2e feeling thwarted in achieving their goals and leading to high rates of self-loathing, despair, and suicidality.
