My friends,
I don’t know if it has been the neurodivergence, I don’t know if it has been the trauma I’ve experienced throughout my life, or a wild combination of both - but I have really sucked at feeling my feelings. Like, really sucked.
If you want to skip my storytelling and head straight to the ‘how to’ goods, feel free to scroll down. But you’ll probably miss some juicy bits.
I’m a Gemini rising and despite the fact that this is the only air in my natal chart, I’m almost all brain, all intellect. If you’re an ND person you’ve probably already heard this figure, but autistic people’s brains are 42% more active at rest than that of their neurotypical counterparts. I’d really like a study that reveals how much more active our brains are not at rest. Mach eight? The speed of light? Yeah, k. Probably.
Being so head-heavy, I have become quite adept at intellectualizing my emotions. I want to take a moment to point out that, from a somatics point of view (soma means body) intellectualizing your feelings can be a part of feeling them. In other words, it isn’t a bad thing, and can actually help regulate a person who has trouble feeling the full depth and breadth of the emotional ocean within.
However, when we spend too much time in our heads about our feelings, we run the risk of narrating them and giving them a much more robust plot than may naturally exist. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t seek to identify the ‘why’ behind our big sad, our anxiety, our anger - or whatever we happen to be feeling at the moment. Sometimes the answer is obvious: like a beloved person or animal passing away, or we’re in a conflict with our spouse, etc. But sometimes emotions seem to bubble up out of nowhere or are delayed (delayed processing evidently happens a lot for autistic folk, and I am included in that) and we can be left scratching our heads. When the emotion is powerful, or we have a small window of tolerance, it can be easier to hit the eject button and fly up into the brain to begin rationalizing the feeling.
What is the window of tolerance?
“Window of Tolerance a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel is now commonly used to understand and describe normal brain/body reactions, especially following adversity. The concept suggests that we have an optimal arousal level when we are within the window of tolerance that allows for the ebb and flow (ups and downs of emotions) experienced by human beings. When we experience adversity through trauma and unmet attachment needs this can drastically disrupt our nervous system. Our senses are heightened and our experiences and reactions are typically intensified and strategies are less readily accessible to us. Adverse experiences also shrink our window of tolerance meaning we have less capacity to ebb and flow and a greater tendency to become overwhelmed more quickly.” (Read the full article where this excerpt comes from here).
It’s likely that all of us have had a shrunken window of tolerance at one point or another. Sometimes it grows in size again organically, like a flower in its gentle expansion / contraction rhythm as it opens and closes. But other times, we need to do the brave work of opening it again.
This is where I am now, in my healing journey.
I have realized that as an autistic person I do have trouble sometimes identifying my feelings and often they are delayed. This can be a mystifying experience, especially when, days to sometimes weeks later, I’ll finally experience the emotions that were simply unavailable to me for a while. I’ll wake up anxious and not know why. Or I’ll feel like having a meltdown and not understand the cause. Sometimes it takes me a while to find the ‘why’ - and sometimes, in the past, I’d come up with stories for the why to make myself feel better. I’d say to myself, “Oh well it must be because of x.” Or, “Well I guess y happened a while back, maybe it’s that.”
Again - if there is actually something to identify, then it is quite worthwhile to identify it. Emotions are messengers, after all. But they’re also simply charges, that wish to move unhindered to completion. In other words, they wish to be discharged.
But this is where we - namely I - get in the way. Ejecting into my brain and narrating the emotional experience (or being fully focused on distracting myself at all costs, repressing or bypassing) can sometimes leave the emotion to get stuck. In the book I’m currently reading called The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, he talks about how we (typically) have three options for ‘dealing’ with our emotions.
Obey - for example, we feel a surge of anger and throw something or begin yelling.
Struggle against - for example, we feel a rise of anxiety and reach for our 3rd drink of the evening.
Unhook - allowing our feelings (and thoughts) to pass through us without judgement, which in turn allows for us to untether ourselves from them.
The first two options are quite sticky. If we obey our thoughts and emotions, we are forever enslaved to the stormy seas and may never experience a pause that would allow for mindful responsiveness. If we struggle against them, we’re always at odds with our internal weather.
I tend to opt for #2 the most (struggle against). I think it has had a lot to do with masking my autism for decades and not allowing myself to be authentic in many circumstances. I’d often have to hide my struggles with anxiety and sensory overwhelm in the work place. Or I’d push past my social limits at a party. Mostly, I got very used to noticing a feeling arise in my body and I’d go nope, not you - not now.
Did it come back to bite me in the ass later? You betcha. Sometimes with hurricane force. And since I was so ill-prepared to handle the much more humble bluster, of course I was absolutely devastated by the gale-force winds. It would shatter me and make me feel even more afraid of my emotions to go through such intense periods of emotional energy suddenly pouring forth. And herein was the vicious cycle: repress feelings until they come exploding out, feel scared of the explosion, worry that all emotions are out to get me, repress feelings.
For trauma survivors, getting into these vicious cycles is pretty easy and more or less par for the course. Trauma blows our circuitry and can make us afraid of being in our bodies. It’s a totally natural reaction - but left unattended can certainly fester. This is why the only place we should seek to return to is our bodies time and again. Not to obey, not to struggle against, but to let it be - whatever it is.
I can’t remember which article I shared The Guest House poem by Rumi, but here it is again because I love the reminder:
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
It really lovingly draws the line between an emotion being a messenger and the message being attached to a grander story that needs to be told time and again. The latter is what I’m learning we should be very careful about. Again, it is good to know the ‘why’ of the emotion (if there is one) but if we tell ourselves a story about the emotion each and every time it visits us we not only miss the opportunity to be with the energetic charge as it is, but we also run the risk of imprinting patterns on our psyche and body related to the emotion. As an example: if I told myself that I am feeling angry because I developed an anger problem as a result of working at the checkout line at that one grocery store ten years ago where the customers were always very rude, and anger runs in my family so that’s why I always feel it - then there’s a story that will carve a strong neural highway and be played out every time I feel angry. I won’t actually be connected to the current emotion at all - which may actually discharge quite quickly without my narration.
So there’s a fine balance to be achieved. We can acknowledge the sources of our emotions (even if they run deep, and have traumatic memory attached) but we must be careful to not put too much energy into bringing the story of the past too much into the present moment. We must seek to be here now.
Dropping into your body
Here’s my very simple checklist that I’ve been going through. I’ve been calling it “Dropping Into My Body” (kinda the antithesis to ejecting into my brain). Feel free to use this as a template or go through the steps as-is. By no means do I own these steps, but I have been finding them helpful.
Know that your brain, no matter what it’s saying to you, is trying to protect you like an overly helpful friend or parent. Even when it’s saying things that seem like they’re working against you, or sabotaging you, or rapidly firing off anxious messages. Your brain has been designed to protect you and this is all it is doing. Acknowledge this, and thank your brain for its concern.
Welcome the emotion, or the thoughts, or both. Either / or will hold an energetic charge.
Welcome the resistance to the energetic charge. Even when you don’t want to feel it, welcome that voice that’s saying I don’t want to feel this.
Welcome it all without judgement. Say, “I am not here to rush you.”
Spend as much time feeling / being in your body as is comfortable, then move on and do something else that is intentional and not mindlessly distracting.
Repeat as necessary.
We don’t have to rush into the deep end, especially when this is freaky territory.
We don’t even need to set aside a chunk of time every day where we squarely face this. In fact, it’s better not to - it’s more effective to just meet ourselves where we are as emotions organically arise throughout the day and night (and they will).
It takes practice, but I know we can get there.
I’ll update you on my progress from emotional noob to (fingers crossed) emotional master.
~~~~~
I also wanted to mention once more that my STOREWIDE SALE ends TODAY at midnight EST! 33% off everything (all decks and ebooks) with the code SPRINGSALE at checkout. Thanks for the support, friends.
Until next time, love and wolves.
D xx
Just had a thought that connects this to your recent "Awe" post: As discussed, intellectualizing feelings can stop them from energetically moving through and out of us; this concept could also apply to awe and joy.
For example i have an amusing thought and intellectually i process that its clever. Im internally amused but i dont often let that move through me physically as a giggle, smile, or other physical expression (autistic masking? 🤔). Or with awe, we can say to ourselves "isnt that interesting" without actually feeling the amazement.
In both cases the feeling stops at the brain. So maybe the reclamation of awe comes from the unlearning of western "mind above all/ brain as ruler", ie the practice of feeling your feelings.
This might be an obvious connection but was a ⚡️ moment for me! Haha had to share 😅
Really resonate with the sentiment that the stories we tell about our emotions really can get cemented into our brains. I think about this a lot in terms of rigid thinking style that often accompanies autism.