Naming it: interoception, language and being understood

Most of us learned about five senses at school: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. All of them point outward. Interoception is the one that points in. It is the ongoing stream of information from inside the body: heart rate, breath, temperature, hunger, thirst, needing the toilet, muscle tension, the particular pressure that arrives behind the eyes about an hour before a headache does.

It is not a single ability. Researchers usually separate:

1. how accurately a person detects an internal signal,

2. how much they notice and attend to their body across ordinary life,

3. and how well their confidence in their own reading matches their actual accuracy.

A person can be strong in one of these and quite limited in another, which is why "just tune into your body" lands so badly for some people. It assumes all three are working together.

Emotion is built on top of this stream of signals and information coming from your body. A fast heart rate plus a looming meeting gets read as feeling anxious. The same fast heart rate walking up a hill on a good morning feeds into a story of feeling alive and fit. The sensation is raw material. The feeling is something we construct from that material, plus context, plus the words we happen to have available to create the story or narrative around what is happening.

That last part matters. A lot.

Why the word does work

If you cannot get from sensation to a name, what you are left with is that something is wrong or feels off. That is very hard to act on with any precision. It tends to get acted out instead: snapping at someone, cancelling the thing, scrolling for two hours, eating standing up at the bench, leaving the party without saying goodbye.

A more specific name gives the state edges. "I am at the end of my social capacity and I need forty minutes on my own" is something a person can act on and something the people around them can respond to.

People who can make finer distinctions between their emotional states tend to manage them better, not because naming is magic, but because a state with a name has a form, and a form suggests a response or next step on how to work with what is happening.

What is different for neurodivergent people

Two things, and they compound.

The first is well documented. Difficulty identifying and describing your own emotional states has a clinical name, alexithymia, and it turns up considerably more often among neurodivergent people than in the general population. It is not an absence of feeling and it is not a lack of caring. The feeling is there. What is missing is the step between having it and being able to say what it is.

The second thing is not measurable but I see it constantly, particularly in women who arrive at diagnosis in their late thirties and beyond. Masking is, among other things, a decades long training program in overriding internal signals. Not hungry yet. Don't need the toilet yet. It isn't too loud. Keep your face doing the right thing. Keep going. The instruction is always the same: the signal is the inconvenience, override it.

Do that for thirty years and the signal does not disappear, but it does get faint.

The trauma thread

There is a third strand that runs alongside these, and in my practice it is very often present in the same person. Trauma also teaches a body to stop reporting.

Where masking trains the override deliberately, trauma tends to do it protectively and without asking. If sensation carried danger, or if there was no safe way to act on what the body was signalling, attention moves away from the interior. That can look like numbness, or feeling some distance from yourself, or watching your own life from slightly outside it, or simply not registering hunger, pain, fear or exhaustion until well past the point where the information would have been useful. Dissociation sits on a spectrum and the milder end of it is far more common than people realise.

The clinical point is that a faint signal can have more than one cause, and the causes stack. Someone who is neurodivergent, diagnosed late, and carrying a history of complex trauma has usually been trained twice over: once by an environment that required the override, and once by a body that learned there was no safety in the interior.

This matters for how the work is paced. Turning attention inward is not neutral for everyone. For some people it is the most direct route to distress, and being told to sit with the body without any preparation is a genuinely unhelpful instruction. The work in that case is not to feel more, or faster. It is to build tolerance in small amounts, usually with support, and usually starting somewhere neutral, like the weight of your feet on the floor or the warmth of a cup, rather than with the sensation that frightens you.

Naming and being understood

The communication side of this is where it gets practical.

When you cannot name your state, other people name it for you. They do it from the outside, from their own frame of reference, and they are frequently wrong. Quiet gets read as sulking. Leaving early gets read as rude. Flat delivery gets read as not caring. This is part of what the double empathy problem describes: the gap in mutual understanding runs in both directions, and it is not the neurodivergent person's job to close it single-handedly.

Still, having accurate language gives you an opening to build on. "I've hit sensory overload and I need to be out of here" gives a partner something to work with. It also gives them something they can learn to recognise next time, which is how a shared vocabulary starts.

One addition I would make to how this is usually taught. Naming the state and naming what it is asking for are two separate jobs, and the second one is where the usefulness lives. "I'm overloaded" is information. "I'm overloaded and I need the lights off and no decisions for an hour" is information plus a next move.

Where standard feelings charts fall short

You have probably seen the classic feelings wheel. Six core emotions at the centre, branching outward into finer shades. It is a genuinely good tool and I still use it.

But it was built on some assumptions that do not hold for everyone.

It assumes the sensation already reads as an emotion. Sensory overload is not an emotion. Neither is inertia at the start of a task, or the specific exhaustion of a day spent masking, or being deep inside an interest with three hours gone.

It sorts by pleasant and unpleasant. That framing is not much help when an unpleasant state is doing a protective job, or when a state is genuinely both at once.

It leaves out most of what dominates a neurodivergent day. Wanting to stim. Being unable to switch tasks despite wanting to. Going non-speaking under stress. Being lit up by a special interest, which is one of the more reliable sources of joy in many people's lives.

And it offers no room for your own words. A lot of people already have precise private language for their states, usually better and more specific than anything printed on a chart. That language deserves a place on the page rather than a correction.

So I made one that does.

It is not an assessment and it does not diagnose anything. It is a vocabulary. Use it in a session, stick it on the fridge, or photograph the page and send it to someone at 6pm on a Thursday when saying it out loud is not going to happen.

Download the handout

Working out what a state is asking for is the first half of the job. The second half is asking someone else for it, which is a separate skill and usually a harder one. I have written about that in Asking for Accommodations as an Adult, which covers the six needs I see most often and how to get a request into words.

Feelings.pdf

Download PDF • 2.54MB

If any of this is familiar, this is a lot of what I do. I work with adults across Australia by telehealth, and in person at Martinsville near Lake Macquarie.

Sensory Processing in Adults covers the outward-facing half of the same picture.