Autistic Emotions and Interoceptive Awareness

Neurotypical people tend to have different interoceptive awareness than autistic people. This means that neurotypical people are better at isolating specific internal cues. These cues include happiness, sadness, anger, hunger, thirst, feeling full, feeling tired, needing to go to the bathroom, and even the need to breathe.

After neurotypical people identify these cues, they can label them individually, and address each individually- Much like single gummi bears.

In contrast, Autistic people have hyperconnected brains, and EVERYTHING is more intense, which results in internal cues becoming all bunched together which then results in dealing with all internal cues as a single unidentifiable ambiguous sensation, like the melted bag of gummi bears. Because of this, autistic people alternate between ignoring internal cues, and being overwhelmed by them.

While neurotypical people "feel" emotions, and they feel internal cues and label them as emotional responses, autistic people have difficulty with this. Autistic people, while sorting through the ambiguous internal cues, tend to cognitively process emotions. We feel *something* but have difficulty with specifics.

This means that traditional therapy modalities, like CBT, are largely ineffective for us, and we need an approach that honors and respects our interoception.