It’s not uncommon for autistic people to have difficulty identifying and explaining emotions. This is called Alexithymia – a Greek term that loosely translates as ‘no words for emotion’.
Alexithymia is characterised by altered emotional awareness and can include:
– difficulty communicating emotions to other people
– confusion around bodily sensations connected to emotions
– challenges observing your own mental and emotional processes
While autism doesn’t directly cause Alexithymia, there are high rates of overlap with many autistic people experiencing this condition. This, in turn, can impact their ability to form and maintain relationships and clearly communicate their own feelings and needs. This difficulty understanding and expressing emotion is often misinterpreted as a lack of empathy. But not only do autistic people feel empathy, many even experience excessive empathy at times.
The misconception arises as neurotypical people often have a different understanding of empathetic behaviour, and therefore don’t always recognise autistic people’s expressions of empathy in line with their own understanding or expectations. Neurotypical children learn social skills through mimicry and repetition, whereas autistic children don’t tend to spontaneously imitate the behaviour of others. This can lead to difficulty showing empathy in a way that’s considered socially typical, which then carries into adulthood.
However, a lot of autistic people have hyper awareness of others’ feelings and may express empathy through doing something practical for someone else, like getting them food, drink, stimming toys, or helping them with plans. They might also show no outward expression of empathy, but feel it on the inside and express it verbally, through a display of their own emotion, or even bring it up at a later time.
Recognising emotions is a skill that can sometimes be learned with practice. One way is to use written words that represent different feelings. Emotions can bring on physical sensations, like feeling ‘buzzy’ when you’re happy, or ‘hot’ when you’re angry. Displaying these physical words on a wall at home can be a useful tool for pointing out and expressing different feelings.
Tips for regulating emotions
As well as recognising different emotions, it’s helpful to have strategies to manage them too. Below are a few tips for regulating emotions.
Have a sensory safe space
Always make sure you have somewhere to go, like a sensory safe space. This is your personal space. It might be a favourite comfy chair, or under a weighted blanket in bed. It could also involve increasing or reducing sensory factors like lights, noise, or smells. Whatever it is, make sure the people around you know that when you go there, you need time, space, and quiet to process whatever you are thinking or feeling.
Learn your triggers
Learning to recognise your emotional triggers can take some time and investigation. Do you find you often cry, feel ill, or start an argument after engaging in a particular activity or going to a certain place? If so, that activity or place might be a trigger. Once you identify your triggers, you can try to avoid them or make sure you have a sensory safe space to go to afterwards. You could also adapt your timings if your triggers are less strong at different times of day, like early mornings or late at night.
Stim freely
Sensory stimulation (stimming) is something we all do, but the actions might look different in autistic people than in neurotypical people. In the allistic population it might be fiddling with your hair or tapping your knee, while in autistic people it might look more like rocking back and forth, hand flapping, or playing with fidget toys. People stim to express a range of emotions such as anxiety, happiness, joy, anger, or worry. They may also stim to give themselves time and space to process what is happening or what they are feeling. Everyone should feel free to stim as it’s vital to wellbeing. But if you do feel self-conscious, you could go somewhere private like a bathroom to stim, have a fidget toy concealed in your pocket, or even use dance as a way of stimming with music.
For more information, watch the Autism & Emotions episode of Divergent Voices
