On feelings you can’t name and true emotions that nobody understands
A significant person in my life asked me recently: are you happy?
And I responded – with what I’ve come to recognize as my particular brand of autistic blunt honesty – “I’m not sure what happy is supposed to feel like.” But I know that you are a big part of it.
They probably heard “I don’t know if I’m happy.” Which is not what I meant at all.
Calibrating emotional vocabulary
I don’t struggle to feel.
This is perhaps the most consistently misread feature of how autistic people communicate about emotion: that they somehow ‘don’t feel’.
If anything, I feel ‘too much’.
What I struggle with is calibrating the labels that other people use – matching the vocabulary to the internal experience in a way that translates.
Emotional vocabulary, for most people, gets built gradually through social mirroring. You feel something, someone reflects it back and names it, and over time the label and the feeling become linked. You learn that this state is called happiness partly because you express something and the people around you recognize it as happiness, confirm it, and respond to it accordingly.
That feedback loop didn’t work the same way for me. The calibration that neurotypical people acquire more or less automatically through ordinary social interaction required more effort from me. Often, it didn’t seem to work at all. The result is that my feelings arrive largely unlabeled. The emotional states are there – vivid, often intense – but the names are approximate, borrowed, sometimes slightly wrong in ways I can’t always identify.
There’s a well-known psychological trait called alexithymia – literally, without words for emotion – that affects roughly half of autistic people (compared to around 1 in 12 in the general population). But what I’m describing is subtly different from how alexithymia is usually characterized. It’s not that I can’t access my emotions. It’s that I have no reliable reference points for naming them. No calibration system built from the social feedback that was supposed to anchor the vocabulary to the experience.
No blame, just difference
The psychologist Damian Milton introduced a framework called the double empathy problem that I find useful here. His argument is that the communication difficulties autistic people experience in social interaction aren’t a product of autistic minds alone – they’re mutual. When autistic and neurotypical people interact, both parties misread the other. The failure runs in both directions.
This matters for what I’m describing. When I offer an accurate account of my emotional state and my listener hears something worrying or incomplete, the failure is not only mine. I’m transmitting on a frequency they’re not fully tuned to. They’re listening for the conventional emotional vocabulary – the expected markers that signal happiness, attachment, sadness, etc. – and receiving something that doesn’t match the pattern. The gap between what I transmit and what they receive is not evidence that my emotional life is impoverished.
The communication gap is evidence that we’re using different systems.
When I try to describe what I’m feeling – accurately, carefully – it usually doesn’t match any pattern people are familiar with. I describe the territory my emotions live in. Most people are listening for pointers to the map they have developed from experience. They notice a gap. They feel confused, sometimes concerned, often quietly certain that something is being withheld.
Nothing is being withheld. I’m describing the territory. The map most people use is just not something I have reliable access to.
Impossible to read
There is a second thing worth naming, because it operates differently from the general calibration problem. When I am emotionally involved in a situation – when it matters, when the stakes are high – my capacity to understand my own emotions collapses almost entirely. It’s as though the signal becomes so loud that the interpretive mechanism shuts down. I can observe, after the fact, that I was feeling something significant. In the moment, I have almost no access to what it is.
This is not the same as not feeling things. It’s closer to being overwhelmed by something you cannot identify. And it produces a specific relational difficulty: the moments when the people I care about most need me to be emotionally legible are precisely the moments when I’m least capable of it. I don’t say this looking for accommodation. I say it because the misreading goes both ways, and naming it is the first step toward something better.
If you’re neurotypical and have felt confused or shut out by someone who communicates this way, the confusion is real — but it isn’t the whole picture. And if you’re autistic and have watched someone interpret your accuracy as absence, your description as evasion, your territory as emptiness: the emotion was real. It was always real. It just didn’t arrive in the language the other person was listening for. That’s not a flaw in the emotion. That’s a gap in the translation. And gaps, unlike absences, can be crossed.
If you’ve ever felt like your emotional honesty was received as emotional absence – I see you. The emotion is there. The translation is just harder than it should be.
Sources
[1] Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C., & Tchanturia, K. (2019). “Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis”. European psychiatry: the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists, 55, 80–89.
[2] Milton, D. (2012). “On the Ontological Status of Autism: the ‘Double Empathy Problem’”. Disability and Society. Vol. 27(6): 883-887.
